Silicon Valley · San Francisco Bay Area · Remote Worldwide
Co-Founder Coaching
For Partnerships Under Pressure
The relationship between founders decides how everything else goes. I help co-founders and business partners work through conflict and build ways of operating that hold up when the stakes are high.
Free 20-minute consultation. For founding teams and the companies that back them
If the partnership that was supposed to make everything stronger has become the thing you work around, you're not the first founding team to reach this point, and it's more fixable than it feels right now.
CO-FOUNDER COACHING FOR THREE MOMENTS
Whatever Stage Your
Partnership Is In
You keep having the same argument with different content. Decisions stall because neither of you wants to reopen the fight. Co-founders and business partners come to this work for different reasons. The starting point shapes what we do first.
BEFORE CONFLICT BREAKS
Prepare for pressure
The company is entering a new stage and you want the partnership to be ready for it. Co-founder coaching builds decision protocols and shared ways of handling disagreements before the next raise or the next hard quarter forces them.
WHEN CONFLICT REPEATS
Partnership repair
You’re stuck in repeating conflicts, trust has thinned, or you’re quietly wondering whether the partnership is going to survive. Co-Founder coaching gives you a structured way to understand what’s driving conflicts and what to do about it.
WHEN SEPARATION IS NEEDED
A conscious parting
Sometimes the healthiest answer is a well-managed separation. Parting in a way that protects the company and the relationships that survive the split. Most teams who arrive at this question find more options than they expected.
65%
of high-potential startups fail because of people problems within the founding team.
Noam Wasserman, The Founder's Dilemmas, Harvard Business School
In Wasserman’s research, founding teams of friends and family failed most often. They avoided the hard conversations to protect the relationship.
The work here is learning to have those conversations well.
What Is Co-Founder Coaching?
Co-founder coaching is structured work with business partners on how they make decisions together and handle conflict under pressure. It treats the founding relationship as a working system that can be examined and rebuilt, the way relationship specialists treat a marriage.
Executive coaching develops one leader while co-founder coaching works on the relationship between leaders, which is where most startup failures begin. Both partners are in the room, and the partnership itself is the client.
THE WORK
I've Sat on Both Sides of This Work
YOUR COACH
Hi, I’m Giulia.
I spent 15 years in management consulting, working with Fortune 500 companies and managing teams across three continents. I became an equity partner at a consulting firm and later founded my own consultancy. Between consulting and the work I do now, I directed a program at Stanford University. I know from the inside what it costs when the two people at the top of something can’t operate together.
I later trained extensively in relationship systems, became a licensed therapist, and built a clinical practice working with couples, founders and senior leaders from Silicon Valley’s largest companies.
The combination matters. An executive coach can sharpen how each of you leads and miss the resentment running between you. A relationship specialist can name the resentment and miss what’s driving it: the equity, the control, what a board deadline does to a partnership.
The work needs both, which is where my background in management consulting, clinical training, and coaching comes together.
The Mycelia Method
See the Pattern
We map the conflict cycle: what triggers it, what each of you does, where it breaks down.
Repattern the System
You learn to catch the escalation in real time and change course before it runs again.
Build Structure
We update early agreements to fit who does what now, and how you make decisions under pressure.
Sustain Change
You practice under real pressure until the new patterns become your default response over time.
WHAT CHANGES
The Partnership Stops Being the Bottleneck
Decisions get made and stay made
Disagreements end in a call you both stand behind, instead of the same fight returning two weeks later.
Conflict surfaces early
Tension becomes a signal you read together while it’s still useful information, before it becomes structural.
Expectations become agreements
The decisions you keep relitigating get named, agreed to, and settled once, so they stop coming back.
Personal and company goals reconnect
You each get clear on what you want from the company and from each other, and whether those answers still fit together.
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
Programs for Founding Teams and the Firms Behind Them
Engagements are built around concentrated work on the relationship between founders, which ultimately decides how the company goes. Whether you’re strengthening the partnership or bringing it to a close, I work on the dynamics between you, the thing you can’t fully see from inside it. Founders can engage me directly, or a company can engage me on their behalf.
STARTING AT $25,000
Partnership Intensive
Two days of concentrated work where we find the pattern driving the conflict and change it in the room, then 90 days of follow-up while the new way of operating becomes your default.
BY APPLICATION
Annual Partnership Program
A year-long relationship for founding teams who want to strengthen the partnership as the company scales. Quarterly intensive work sessions with standing access between them.
BY PROPOSAL
For Firms & Funds
A partnership resource for your portfolio. Intensives for the founding teams you back, assessments for the ones you flag early, and a direct line for the moments that decide a company’s fate.
THE WORK
Who This Is For / Not For
Who this work is for
Founding teams and business partners at any stage, from the first signs of friction after a seed round to the pressure of a Series B or a pre-IPO stretch. Executive partnerships inside companies, where the relationship between two leaders has become the thing slowing everything down.
The conversations that bring people here are usually the ones they've been avoiding. Who holds real authority when the org chart says something different. How to give honest feedback to someone you also depend on. What to do when one person's contribution no longer matches their equity or title. How to disagree in front of a board without undercutting each other. What happens when the personal history between you is shaping every professional decision.
Who this work is not for
Teams looking for confirmation that the other person is the problem. Founders who aren't willing to look at their own role in what isn't working. Anyone expecting a years-old dynamic to resolve in a single session.
FOR COMPANIES AND INVESTORS
A Founding Team in Conflict Is a Company Risk
When the two people at the top stop operating together, the company feels it everywhere, from stalled decisions to the people who leave. If you back or employ a team that needs support, you can engage me on their behalf.
Investors, boards, and family offices bring me in for founding pairs, executive partnerships, and leadership teams where the working relationship has become the bottleneck.
HOW IT WORKS
From the First Call to a Working Partnership
The work is concentrated and immersive, designed to move fast on problems that can't wait.
STEP ONE
A free 20-minute consultation
We talk about what's happening and whether we are the right fit. Both partners are welcome on the call, and one is enough to start.
STEP TWO
Partnership assessment
I meet with each of you individually, then together. You leave with a clear picture of the pattern and a plan for the work.
STEP THREE
The
engagement
An intensive over one or two days, followed by integration work. Remote, in person in the Bay Area, or as a multi-day retreat.
BEFORE YOU BOOK
Your Questions, Answered
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The founding relationship is the single point of failure investors worry about most. Co-founder coaching gives the team a working structure for disagreement, so conflict produces decisions instead of gridlock. Companies that have gone through this work make hires faster, align on strategy with less friction, and stop losing weeks to the same unresolved tension.
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Faster decisions, fewer repeated conflicts, and explicit agreements about roles and responsibilities that replace the unstated assumptions most founding teams run on. Leadership instability also has operational costs: stalled hires, delayed fundraises, senior talent leaving.
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No. This is coaching: structured, forward-looking work on how you operate as partners. If I believe one of you would be better served by a different kind of support, I'll say so and help you find it.
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Yes. Many engagements begin with one partner. The first conversations often give you language to bring the other person in, and I can speak with them directly if that helps.
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Either. Founders engage me directly, and companies or investors can engage me on behalf of a team. When the company pays, the content of our sessions stays confidential to the participants. Engagement structure and fees are covered on the consultation call.
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I hold the same confidentiality standards in this work as I do in my clinical practice, at the level of HIPAA. When a company or fund engages me on behalf of a team, the organization knows the work is happening. The content stays with you.
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The Partnership Intensive starts at $25,000 and includes the work plus 90 days of integration. The annual program and firm engagements are scoped on the consultation call. If we get there and it's not the right fit, I'll tell you directly and help you find what is.
That's one question, one answer, three sentences. The cost is stated, the higher tiers stay flexible, and the guarantee closes it without needing its own entry. Takes you from seven questions back to six.
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Yes. The same dynamics show up in family offices navigating governance and succession, executive partnerships inside established companies, professional practices, and any organization where two or more people share authority and the relationship between them determines how well the company runs.
