Alisa Cohn, Executive Coach on Scaling Leaders from Startup to CEO

**Grace Gong** (0:02)
We are live. Hi, Alisa. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Alisa Cohn** (0:06)
Grace, it's so great to see you.

**Grace Gong** (0:08)
I feel like you're such an icon in the startup land, and you have coached many iconic CEOs. I want to start the conversation. Before we start, before we start our conversation, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, the ultimate cloud for AI innovators. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count down, combining reliability and speed with flexibility, and engineering support unmatched by hyperscalers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify, and Higgsfield already partner with Nebius to run their AI workloads. Plus, venture-backed startup can save up to 150K on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startup to learn more. Okay.
Now, I want to start with Alisa.
You were originally a CPA and then you were a CFO before you jump in and become a coach. Maybe we could start from the beginning on how do you get yourself into the realm of coaching and we can dive into the book as well.

**Alisa Cohn** (1:08)
Sure. Okay. Well, thanks for having me.
I guess I would say I was at PricewaterhouseCoopers. I was on the so-called Fast Track to Partner and PwC is a fantastic firm and I woke up one day and thought, this is not for me. I hope I get the flu zone to go to work tomorrow. I got the flu, so I didn't have to go into work tomorrow. I was down for the account for two weeks and I thought I got to figure something else out.
The problem was it was so big, such a big firm that I just did not feel the work of my hands matter. That was something that I really thought about, the work of my hands matters. I was seeking, seeking, seeking a whole bunch of different things. I went to a conference and I met a coach at the conference. I was like, oh, that's what I want to do, like violence played. I was super young and so I followed her around and took coach training. But I was super young and at the same time, the 1998 startup boom was happening. I joined a startup and I was a CFO of one startup, the head of strategy of another startup. In the meantime, on the side, I was coaching all my friends. I got a lot of leadership experience, very young as a startup executive. I also began to do coach training and get experience and reps with my friends and other people who let me coach them for free mostly.
Then the startup world collapsed and I thought, okay, I'm going to become a coach now. That's pretty much a nutshell of a very long torture journey to becoming a coach. It's been one foot in front and the front of the other ever since then.

**Grace Gong** (2:38)
For sure. Now you've been a coach for over 26 years. I want to start with, maybe we could talk about the business of coaching. I think we will definitely dive into all the lessons that you teach startup founders, but because this is such a fascinating career journey, because I think not many people pursue it full-time, especially when they're young.
What exactly is a coaching business? So I guess obviously people pay coaches or pay advisors as well. So what's the difference between a coach and an advisor? In terms of coaching, how do you establish yourself in the coaching space as well?

**Alisa Cohn** (3:24)
Yeah.

**Grace Gong** (3:24)
So I just want to shout out to the people who will start liking this post on Facebook. So whenever we know that a person who is actually liking something from Facebook, you know, you made it to the algorithm.

**Alisa Cohn** (3:33)
So we love it. Welcome to Facebook and welcome to the algorithm, everybody. Here we are.
So it's a great question.
I'm actually writing my second book right now. It's going to come out next year and it's called The Definitive Guide to Becoming a Coach. So I know this is something that everybody wonders. And I guess I have so much in your question. But one thing to say is that a coaching practice is just like any other professional services practice, right? One way or the other, you do the service, in this case, coach, advise, counsel, whatever you want to call it. And of course, companies or individuals pay you. And then there's a bunch of different things around that. Like, for example, what I do as a coach is of course, I do coaching and then I also do off sites and facilitation. And I also do speaking and those are my sources of income, as well as of course, my book and podcasts and that kind of stuff. And the difference between coaching and consulting can sometimes be bled, it kind of bleeds. Coaching is a notion of conveyance. It's helping someone assess where are they, where are they going and how are they gonna get there? It's very much individualistic and it has to do with excising your assumptions, your thoughts, your feelings and turning them into a coherent, productive, effective leadership strategy. So that's for you, the individual being coached. For the leadership team or the company being coached, it's the same kind of thing, helping understand the dynamics of what's going on inside the company and then helping make those explicit and then helping everybody be more productive in what they're doing in service of the business. Now, if you think about consulting, consulting is more of a process of assessing the organization or assessing the person and making specific recommendations typically around strategy or operations.