The chief executive, the counsel, the rule-maker, and the kingmaker. One person.
For founders and executives carrying more than their team was built for. You can hand me the whole problem.
Where you are
It usually starts with good news. A round closes. A big customer signs. A company buys yours, or you buy one. The board gets its first outside seats.
Then the work arrives, and your people handle it. The contract gets read. The plan goes to the investors. The new hires start on Monday. Nobody drops anything.
What nobody handles is the people.
The two funds that led your round want different things from the same board. The founder you bought still makes the calls he used to make, and your team still takes them to him. The senior hire you fought for is three weeks in, and your CTO has stopped talking to him. Your co-founder moved to the board, kept his equity, and remembers the deal differently than you do.
None of this is anyone’s job. Each person around you holds one piece of it, and each of them also has a side. Your directors also answer to their funds. Your lawyer works for the company. Your executives want the call to go their way. So it comes back to you, and there is nobody to think it through with.
It looks different at each size. Just after a first round, every big call lands on one desk. The first senior hire. The first real board meeting. What the investors think they were promised. Everyone around you either works for you or put money in, and none of them sits where you sit. A little later, the company has outgrown its structure, and the arguments are about who decides. Later still, you have strong people and a real board, and still no one who sees the whole of it.
I have watched this from most of the chairs in the room. I have run public and private companies and answered to their boards. I have chaired a company with the chief executive answering to me. I have been a general counsel.
I have no side in it. That is usually the week people call me.
What happens then
I take the whole thing.
There is no package and no menu. The work takes the shape of your problem, because no two of these are the same. A founder three months past his first round needs a different hand than a chief executive with a full board and a bought company to fold in.
Most often it starts with a first senior hire, or a board taking shape. Sometimes it is the months before the next raise, a sale, a partner who has turned, or a company now spread across three countries.
What I bring changes with it. Some weeks it is the chief executive’s view. Often it is the read a general counsel would give, or the one a fund partner would, from someone trained in both and working for neither.
I work with a few founders and executives at a time. That is what lets it be built around you.
You get a decision, and someone to carry it with you.
Fixed fee.
What I would tell you before you paid me anything
A company moves as slowly as the number of people who have to agree.
I have run companies where three people could decide and one where far more had to. The work was the same in the second case. It took longer, and the delay was the approvals. When something is taking months, count the people who have to say yes before you blame the process.
Your lawyer can be confidently wrong.
Conviction is not evidence. Whatever you were told sits on some specific authority. Ask which one, then read it yourself. I caught senior counsel misreading the controlling authority once. I was right.
Most decisions are made before the meeting.
I chaired an international standards delegation. Almost nothing was settled by the vote itself. It was settled by whoever wrote the first draft and whoever had already agreed before the room sat down. Your board is the same. If you are making your case for the first time in the meeting, you are making it too late.
The one who says yes fastest is usually the wrong one.
Senior people worth having are not answering postings. You have to move them, and that takes months. If a hire at that level feels easy, find out why.
What I have done
Run companies.
Private and public. I took a listed company through a rebrand, a first investment and a US uplisting in about eleven weeks. That seat was short, and I say so. Before most people had heard of LLMs, I founded an AI startup that wrote sales emails. I have also taken a private company through a sale, first conversation to close.
Built the bench, and kept it together.
At a billion-dollar company going through hypergrowth, I built the executive bench and closed the senior contracts behind it. Then I sat between those executives and made the hires work after they arrived. The problem is the same at forty people. There are just fewer places to hide it. When the hard part is finding the person, I run the search myself.
Been the lawyer inside.
California-admitted, active. Berkeley Law. I have been a general counsel, and I drafted and managed the USPTO filings. In that seat the first rule is that nobody sues you, and nobody did. From 2022 to 2025 I sat on the Quality and Ethics advisory table at BC Children’s Hospital, advising on patient safety and ethics.
Written the rules.
Former Chair of Canada's delegation to the body that writes international blockchain standards. In those rooms I was the whip.
I have started several companies and seen most of the ways one ends. Sold. Closed. And the one where I stood in front of the room and said the money was gone, then made sure the staff were paid before anyone else.
Most people you meet have only done the good version. Ask what happened when it went wrong.
If a letter brought you here, this is the reply.
One conversation, direct with me. No intake, no funnel, no proposal.
Not ready to talk? Send me two lines about the situation. I will tell you whether it is worth a conversation, and if it is not, I will say so.
I answer personally, usually within a business day. I will not follow up unless you ask me to.