I’ve stood where you’re standing.

I’m Elin Hart. I spent nine years running operations at two startups before I coached anyone. Since 2018 I’ve worked with about sixty founders and executives in the first year of a bigger job.

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Elin Hart

Coaching since 2018

The longer version

I joined my first startup as employee eleven and left as COO of two hundred people. Nobody told me the job had changed underneath me. I found out one missed quarter at a time.

At the second company I did it on purpose. I hired a coach in my first month, wrote down the decisions I’d stop making, and handed most of them over within a year. We were acquired in 2017, and I spent the handover year helping the new owners keep the team together.

I trained as a coach in 2018 because I kept getting the same phone call from friends who’d just been promoted: “Is it normal to feel this lost?” It is. It also doesn’t have to last as long as it usually does.

The work I’m proudest of is rarely dramatic. A founder who finally lets her COO run the Monday meeting. A new VP who stops rewriting every plan his team sends up. Small changes, made on purpose, that still hold after I’ve gone.

Keeping the practice small is deliberate. It means I remember what you said three sessions ago, I can take your call before a hard board meeting, and you never get handed to a junior coach.

Today I work with ten people at a time, mostly founders between Series A and C and executives in their first year of a new seat. I live in Brooklyn, walk to most of my in-person sessions, and do the rest on video.