VP, Software and Services, GoPro
(Founder & CEO, General Things, acquired by GoPro)
Hiring Dale is one of the single best decisions I have made on both a personal and professional level. His ability to help me see problems from multiple angles is nothing short of amazing. He provides fantastic support and encouragement. He is wise and warm and funny. I cannot recommend Dale highly enough.
Michael E. Driscoll
Founder and CEO, Metamarkets;
Founder/Chariman, Dataspora;
VC Partner, Data Collective Fund
Dale has a deep reservoir of wisdom that calms the turbulence that every start-up founder must contend with. I am a more self-aware and effective leader as a result of working with Dale.
Tom Shields
Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Yieldex
(former VC Partner and Managing Director, Woodside Fund;
founder/CTO of NetGravity, IPO 1998, later acquisition by DoubleClick)
Dale is a creative and talented guide for helping you unlock the barriers that may be preventing you from achieving your potential. He has helped me a great deal, and I highly recommend him.
Brian Leonard
Technical Co-Founder and Chief Architect at TaskRabbit
Dale became my coach at a critical time. We were growing quickly and I had some difficult choices to make and skills to learn. Dale’s methods led to much self-improvement and ultimately, great results. I am happier and more effective from having Dale as my executive coach.
Jeff Robbins
co-founder and CEO, Lullabot
Working with Dale helped us overcome a lot of our presumptions and hang-ups around growth, culture, creative direction, and business success for the company. He challenged us on many of the things that had us stuck and helped us to get clearer about if/how we wanted to grow. He helped us define our core values and get clear on the culture that we didn’t want to lose through the growth and change of the company.[Now] we feel much more stable and clear about the present and future of Lullabot. We’ve got 35 happy employees, we’re growing quickly, and we feel both prepared-for and excited-about the future!
Leah Busque
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, TaskRabbit, Inc
I brought Dale in as an executive coach to work with TaskRabbit’s management team. He did a great job leading group sessions and working 1:1 with key team members. We saw tremendous results in a very short period of time. I would highly recommend.
Ted Barnett
COO, Byliner Inc. (serial entrepreneur: multiple CEO/Founder)
Dale is a pleasure to work with. He is able to quickly understand what matters most and get me focused on finding the best solution. The combination of his real-world startup experience and empathetic listening skills make him a truly unique executive coach.
Brian Rothenberg
Co-Head of Marketing & GM of Deliver Now
Dale worked with the leadership team at TaskRabbit to help us more effectively work together as a team, and to help us excel as individual leaders/managers. He was good at quickly assessing our key strengths/weaknesses then helping us to understand and improve upon them. He had a way of facilitating very high-quality discussions and getting people to say the ‘hard things’ that are so easy to ignore, but which impede high performance. While always a work in progress, I grew as a leader, manager, employee, colleague, friend and husband with Dale’s help. I recommend him enthusiastically
Cassie Phillipps
Founder, FailCon; Game Design Associate at Pocket Gems
Dale is highly professional, caring, educated, and patient in every session we have. We began meeting when I decided to make a pretty massive career change. I was faced with a lot of uncertainty not only about my work, but also about myself, my own abilities, and how to approach the people around me. I wanted to keep FailCon growing and succeeding, while reducing the amount of time I was spending on it. Dale came with a multitude of techniques for me to use to address fears and challenges from a new perspective, provided constructive advice, and helped me work through this transition from full-time company management to full-time job, while keeping my first business scalable.
Brian Chaikelson
Founder, SnapShop; Sr Product Manager, Badgeville
Dale has been my executive coach since summer of 2011. With dozens of both company and personal decisions that needed to be made at my startup (I was a co-founder), Dale served as an excellent sound board and coach. A veteran of the tech industry himself, he challenges you to think about issues critically and come up with creative solutions. Most importantly, he helps you better understand your priorities and base decisions on them through a lens of empowerment. I highly recommend Dale as an executive coach for both new and seasoned entrepreneurs who aren’t afraid to keep learning–and hopefully that applies to everyone.
Sam Shepler
Founder and CEO, Skyscope Creative
Dale provided invaluable insights from extensive time spent in the entrepreneurship world. Working with him accelerated the development of my startup, but even more so my personal development as an entrepreneur. The benefit of the time we spent working together will extend far past the individual sessions as they effectively impacted my perspective at a high level
Lynee Luque
Senior HR Business Partner, Mozilla Corporation (now at Twitter)
Dale is a fun and engaging coach that pushes you to question your limiting beliefs and then do something about it. I had one of my most courageous professional conversations with a key business partner after a coaching session with Dale. I directly attribute the success of that conversation to the coaching session we had just hours before. If you want a personable coach who encourages you to create the life, career, business… you want, then Dale’s a great match.
Lorrie Hess
Franchise Owner, Ameriprise Financial Services, Inc.
Dale has great natural intuition and the ability to zero in on what’s critical. His guidance and insight are valuable and people need it.
Sach Chaudhari
Founder, VideoWalkIn
Dale was my executive coach in 2011. He helped me get through very difficult strategic decisions and work-life balance issues. He made sure I stayed focused on the really important issues and not just the urgent stuff which appears to be important. Great value for your money and time. I highly recommend him. I will hire him again.
Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, Twitter
When I was thinking about founding a startup, Dale provided invaluable advice on how to set things up and how to think about the business. Later, when I was deciding whether to join Twitter, he was again a great source of input on what I should expect there. He definitely helped me make the best decision possible. Dale has great, broad knowledge into the world of startups and technology, and would be a valuable advisor.
Noreen Kelly
CEO, Trust Matters Group
Dale is an outstanding coach with deep insights and perspectives. He listens well and asks powerful questions, getting to the core issues quickly. He motivated me to keep taking action and challenged me by taking me out of my comfort zone. Dale helped me to stay focused on my goals while reminding me that it’s ok to fail and far better to take the leap and fail than to stay stuck. I highly recommend Dale’s coaching services to any entrepreneur who is looking to move forward with their business goals.
Christopher Padgett
CEO, Growth Revolution
Dale Larson is an amazing coach! Dale knows how to efficiently get to the heart of what’s impeding growth. He asks powerful and meaningful questions that cause you to stop and rethink what’s possible. I’d highly recommend Dale to any CEO interested in moving their business to the next level and actualizing powerful growth and profit.
John Assalian
Founder & CEO, Viewstream.com
Dale is an expert in strategic marketing and business operations management. He turns ideas into tangible business practices with successful outcomes.
Dale is focused, analytical, and intelligent. Passionate, dedicated, and with high integrity, he is an out of the box thinker who grasps the subtleties of business problems. He is aware of the latest trends, but can separate the hype from the real with a forward looking perspective.
Highly Recommended.
Christel van der Boom
VP Marketing, The Ellerdale Project (acquired by Flipboard)
When I was considering joining a start-up, Dale helped me go through the decision making process. He asked me all the right questions that helped me figure if the job and the company were a right fit for me. He made me aware if possible future scenarios that I needed to weigh in my decision. He also gave practical advice about things to include in my contract, how to negotiate for some of those things and what the watch out for. Finally, he connected me with a great legal advisor. I’m much better off now than I would have been if I’d gone through this process without Dale.
Vlad Gyster
CEO, H Engage
How to deploy limited resources while launching a company is a difficult decision. As such, I had reservations about spending money on executive coaching because I hadn’t done it before and didn’t understand how it translated into business value. I’m incredibly glad I overcame these reservations and became Dale’s client.
Dale does an amazing job at identifying how barriers in a person’s psyche impacts the business. Based on these barriers, he facilitates creation of strategies to overcome them. Most importantly to me, he does all this in a skillful unobtrusive way and very quickly.
In short, I’ve found Dale’s ear a valuable investment that I believe will improve the outcomes of my business.
Joshua Kerievsky
CEO, Industrial Logic
Author: “Factoring to Patterns,”
XP, Agile and Lean Expert
Every entrepreneur would do well to work with a great executive coach like Dale Larson. He has really helped me discover ways to improve myself and my business.
Cesar Castro
CEO, DiscoveryCast
Dale has been an amazing coach who has helped me organize and prioritize my professional (and even my personal) life. He’s a great listener and one thing I really like about Dale is the kinds of questions he asks me, questions that inevitably lead to some great insight that I can immediately put into action! Working with Dale has been a great experience.
Harry McCracken
Founder and Editor at Technologizer.com;
Columnist at Time Magazine;
Contributing Editor at CNet;
(former VP and Editor in Chief, PC World)
Dale understands what makes startups successful–above all that it’s all about human beings and their goals, skills, perspectives, and needs. He’s also the kind of person who’s able to see things about businesses that the businesses themselves may be unable to see.
Ashwin Gulati
President, Match Point Ventures
Dale has been fantastic to work with. He has a unique way of getting to the heart of the matter and has served as a valuable sounding board for both strategic and tactical issues. I highly recommend his services.
Kim Kelley
Director Organizational Effectiveness, Advantage IQ
I found Dale to be a courageous and insightful coach, who could see through the fluff and focus on the real, underlying issues. His passion for helping others to achieve their personal and professional goals was evident in his interactions and his approach.
Greg Tseng
CEO, Tagged
As we approached 100 employees, I started looking for an executive coach but no one felt quite right until I met Marcy. When we met, I immediately felt a strong personal connection and now I consider Marcy not only a coach but also a confidant.
As a coach, Marcy helps me find solutions to current tasks and issues which generalize into useful new skills for future challenges. As a confidant, Marcy helps me embrace my internal motivations and succeed in a way that is authentic to me. I have really enjoyed working together and the benefits extend to my entire company. We are now approaching 200 employees and I look forward to continuing the entrepreneurial journey with Marcy by my side.
Ben Rubin
CTO, Zeo
I found Marcy through her blog – Startup Happiness. She had amazingly articulated exactly what I was feeling at the time (almost uncanny). The more my startup began to really succeed the less engaged I started to feel.
I worked with Marcy on determining the root cause of this and then tackling an action plan to fix the problem. The plan involved everything from organizational structure changes to changing how my thinking process works.
Marcy really understands startup environments and the unique challenges that founders face. That enabled her to help me find both personal fulfillment AND help my company succeed. A huge win – and I’ve since recommended Marcy broadly and highly endorse her work. I look forward to continuing to work with her on this and future endeavors!
Jeffrey Veen
Co-Founder, Typekit
Marcy was instrumental in helping us take a set of company-wide goals and turn them into a story and presentation we could give at a variety of events in the coming months. It was a little outside of her normal offering, but she was adaptable, a joy to work with, and totally focused.
Alon Salant
Owner, Carbon Five
Marcy has been fantastic to work with. In the time we have worked together she has helped me better understand my talents and motivations. I am taking immediate action that is producing valuable results today while also steering toward longer term goals. She is energetic and encouraging, and has advice when I want it. I wholeheartedly recommend Marcy to any technical leader looking to find balance among their skills, responsibilities and ambitions.
Michal Migurski
Partner & CTO, Stamen.com
Marcy has been a tremendous help to me in my position as CTO at Stamen. In moving from a role focused on design and development to one dealing more broadly with people and management, Marcy has been an invaluable sounding board and advisor. She’s helped me handle issues of morale, motivation, planning, and growth with a clear vision and personal warmth, and I’ve been happier and more effective thanks to her advice.
Paul Abramson, M.D.
Owner, mydoctorsf.com
Marcy is great at the 10,000 foot level, and just as good at helping fight the immediate fires. But she also has a kind and insightful way of weaving in a discussion about personal priorities and life goals that has made the process a lot more fruitful for me, without taking anything away from the tasks at hand. Give her a call, I’m glad I did.
Laine Campbell
Owner, PalominoDB.com
Marcy made a huge difference in the direction of my company very rapidly. We set initial goals, and in a period of months had made visible and quantifiable progress on all of them. Marcy went out of her way to assist me, utilized her extensive network and knowledge, and was always able to focus on immediate results as well as things I may not have thought of. I look forward to utilizing her services again soon.
Mike Kuniavsky
Owner, ThingM.com
I asked Marcy to help me stick to my plan of writing a book on schedule. That, of course, means much more than scheduling, it means analyzing my work life, and helping me prioritize goals, so that I can make the time to write the book. Marcy has been invaluable in helping me understand the larger context in which I’m working and in creating innovative approaches that help me get (most) everything I’d like to do done. In other words, I’ve kept the book is roughly on schedule, gotten the rest of my work done, and not killed myself in the process. And I have to thank Marcy for that.
Zach Larson
Chief Product Officer, Sidereel.com
Marcy worked with me as I took on a new position. She helped me identify then make huge strides towards my career goals. I heartily endorse her and look forward to working with her again.
Brian Behlendorf
Advisory Board Member, CPTH
Founder: Apache.org, Organic.com, Collab.net
Marcy is fantastic at leading technical teams into a zone where they can be highly productive, in great spirits, and pushing their own envelopes. She’s a great motivator, backing up her challenges to her reports with words of confidence in their ability to meet them. She can translate the business requirements into technical direction in a way that empowers her reports to play a role in defining that bridge, rather than mandating from above. When interacting with her as an advisory board member, I found she had a command of the technical details, and the importance of the tradeoff decisions made, that is rare for senior management of even a startup. The personal interactions I’ve had with her since have only reinforced my sense that these skills come from a deep well of empathy and understanding matched by her knowledge, energy, and passion for doing what’s right.
Joe Duncan
CIO, CPTH
I was brought into Critical Path by the CEO and co-founders, to run the expansion of global hosted services and the platform to support that business. Critical Path was named by Forbes magazine the fastest-growing high-tech company in the world for 1999, during the peak of the dot.com frenzy. Marcy, as co-founder, worked for me, and ran global R & D. During times of highest stress, Marcy showed unusual insight, technical skill, ability to manage through crises, and ability to manage hard-to-manage technical staff. Marcy also demonstrated a level of maturity sometimes not even shared by the company’s own senior management. I recommend Marcy most highly, and would welcome a chance to work with her again!
startuphappiness.com 