I believe the best coaches invest deeply in themselves through formal training & self-study, and bring a wealth of personal experience to the client engagement.
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I am not the right coach for everyone, and for those who are interested, here's a bit more about the experience and training I bring to my work:
​​​​​Certifications
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Professional Certified Coach, International Coaching Federation
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Certified Executive Coach, Hudson Institute of Coaching
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Certified Somatic Coach, Strozzi Institute for Somatics - In Process
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MBA & Siebel Scholar, MIT Sloan School of Management
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BA w/ Distinction, Yale University​​​
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Experience
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Former CEO, founder & entrepreneur
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Led at some of the most well-known companies in their sectors: Amazon, Sonder, Monitor Group, One Acre Fund
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Lived in seven countries on four continents
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Took year-long life sabbatical where I worked as a ceramics artist, studied vipassana meditation, and pursued other creative hobbies
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Meditator - regular participant at meditation retreats & workshops with the foremost teachers in the field
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Queer man
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Multi-cultural identity - Taiwanese-American
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10+ years of personal therapy + coaching
Professionally, I’ve spent the majority of my career incubating and building early to late-stage start-ups. Most recently, I was the CEO and co-founder of Circular Impact, a venture-backed start-up working to remove carbon emissions through organic waste management in sub-Saharan Africa.
For four years, I led global operations at Sonder, a hospitality start-up transforming the way people stay around the world. I helped scale it from a 30-person Series-B start-up to a mature company in over thirty-five cities across three continents and 15 countries. Sonder went public in 2022 with nearly 2,000 global employees and is now a part of Marriott Bonvoy.
I was one of the first General Managers of Prime Now, Amazon’s one-hour delivery start-up. I led and scaled markets in Northern California, Nevada, and Arizona, and helped lead Amazon’s sponsorship of the San Francisco 49ers, the company's first-ever sponsorship of a professional sports team.
I advised Fortune-50 companies and global governments as a consultant with the Monitor Group, a global strategy consulting firm. I was based globally in Cambridge, San Francisco, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
I was one of the first employees at the One Acre Fund, where I scaled climate change adaptation solutions with rural farmers in Kenya and Uganda. Today, the One Acre Fund serves millions of farmers across the world and is held as a gold standard for effective development intervention.
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Beyond my professional background and credentials, clients have told me that they deeply appreciate learning more about the challenges, perspectives, and experiences I have navigated in my own life and how that informs my coaching. Here’s a deeper look:
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My life has been shaped by my intersecting identities as an Asian American and queer man. Both have given me a deeper perspective on identity and the relationships we have with ourselves and others. I’ve navigated the complicated relationship of being from an immigrant family navigating cultural shifts in a new country. I also came out as a gay man in my late 20s and since then, my life has been a journey of self-discovery, re-invention, and learning to love the person I am.
I have an intense interest and curiosity in places, people, and things. I’ve traveled to over 80 countries, lived out of a backpack for a year, and have lived in seven countries across four continents. For seven years, I swapped life stories with over 900 humans from around the world as an Airbnb host. I feel lucky to get to be professionally curious in my work - listening deeply, asking powerful questions, and appreciating the unique lived experiences of each of my clients.
I have a distinct memory as a seven year old asking myself - what would be possible if we (humans) all loved each other and ourselves more? Yes, I was a deeply perceptive child! Since then, my favorite questions start with “what if”…what if we were bolder? What if we weren’t so afraid? What if we were more willing? I help clients see and believe in more possibilities for themselves and the world.
In 2021, I quit my job, and took a year off from paid work. Up to that point, my life had the markers of traditional success, yet for a long time, I did not feel deeply engaged with it. It was a year of experimentation & testing. I honed my ceramics craft, studied vipassana meditation, and learned to live life from energetic flow rather than a schedule. I learned to cultivate purpose, deeper joy, and engagement with life, themes that are often front and center for my clients.
I’ve always enjoyed connecting dots across systems as a generalist rather than focusing on a narrow function as a specialist. And, I’ve chosen roles - CEO, founder, general manager, strategy consultant - that have given me a broad view across life, people, and business. I work with clients to connect the dots across their work and life.
Think I might be the right coach for you?