About Dave

You clicked past the front page. Good! There's more here than fits up top. Start with what others say. Then keep reading, and go the rest of the way with me.

Want three full quotes from leaders?

"Couldn't recommend Dave more highly. Dave is an engineer by background, a leader by experience, and a coach by nature. Dave was able to understand my problems and help me both work through extremely difficult tactical situations and grow my broader understanding of my leadership and growth points. I and my team said my management style improved notably with Dave's help.

Some highlights:

• Most crucially, I trust Dave's judgement and character. His suggestions worked and helped me tremendously in improving my management style, making hard conversations productive, and crafting a leadership style that felt authentic and effective.
• He has the right mixture of warmth, humor, and zero bullshit. He'll give you hard feedback in a way that is genuine and helpful.
• He's got a number of systematic thought frameworks that I found helpful in reordering how I think about the world.
• He's just done it before. Dave doesn't talk in b-school generalities, he gets very specific on how things play out. I came away with much more useful abilities to apply beliefs and concepts I already had.

Extremely happy to have worked with Dave and can't wait to work with him again at my next company."

Dwight Crow, multiple-time CEO/Founder

"Most coaches are predictable. Dave isn't. Every session, he surprises me and takes me deeper than I expect with a sharp insight, a practical framework, or a way of cutting through my own rambling to real clarity about myself or the people I lead. He treats personal and professional goals as inseparable, which has made me both more effective as a leader and better as a person. This isn't fluffy work. I leave with concrete actions that unblock me, improve how I think and handle stress, and move the business forward. We set clear goals and we hit them. My only regret is not starting sooner. Don't make that mistake. Just start."

Ryan Eberhard, CPO/COO Swing Education (Series C)

"I am incredibly fortunate to have Dave as my executive coach, first at Glossier as I took on the role of CTO, and now again at Thrasio. Having been an operator himself, he brings a very unique perspective by sharing relevant examples from his own experiences, which I found very relatable. He introduced me to models and frameworks that I continue to use in building trust, applying decision styles, and more. Ultimately, he inspired me in bringing about transformational change in culture, people, and processes. What sets Dave apart is that he comes from a place of wanting to truly help make a difference to people; he sees it as his calling. He has been a powerful ally to me, especially being a woman in an executive leadership role. I have huge respect for Dave and highly recommend him to leaders looking to transform themselves and their organizations."

Pawan Uppuluri, CTO (Glossier, Thrasio), ex-Amazon

Want all 50+ recommendations?

Not gonna do that to you. Here's my summary.

The leaders I work with are usually scaling a company faster than they're scaling themselves, and they are ready to do the work to scale fast enough to not be outgrown. They tell me the same thing: I don't deal in b-school generalities, because I've sat in their chair. I've scaled an org from 300 to 1,000, delegated my way out of being the bottleneck, hired ahead of the curve, and walked into a board meeting needing and getting that crucial "yes." So when we work delegation, hiring, board dynamics, or the core challenge of scaling yourself, I bring frameworks that hold up under real fire — one leader listed 23 of them and keeps their coaching log open at all times.

What leaders value as much as my experience is how I coach. They describe the same mix: warmth, humor, and zero bullshit. I give hard feedback in a way you can actually use, and I insist you solve the biggest challenges, not the comfortable ones. They trust my discernment and character, which is what lets us name the things that usually go unsaid. And it isn't soft work: we set clear goals and hit them. Leaders report promotions, calmer boards, teams that move faster, and a real drop in their own burnout.

I'm proud they say they become both better leaders and better humans. I treat the professional and the personal as one system, because they are. And having been raised by a single mom, and watched my wife's career since we were nineteen, I've seen what women face at work — and so I strive to be a powerful ally to women. The leaders I coach often call the work transformative; many call me friend, and once I'm on your team, I'm on your team forever. This work is my mission.

Want this for yourself?

If we're a fit, all it takes is time together, a willingness to try new things, and opening up.

If you're going to open up with me, it's only fair I open up with you. Here goes.

Want to know me personally? Let's go deep.

My parents divorced when I was ten. I watched my mother work two jobs to get us off food assistance, and I knew my brain was my ticket out. I got perfect grades — until they stopped mattering. I loved the feeling of control I got from programming. I followed it to two degrees in Computer Science at MIT, minored in Creative Writing, and earned just enough as a poet to buy a round of drinks(!). I left the CS PhD track to build things for customers, not journals.

I was a top-rated engineer at SGI, but was asked to go into management and found out I was good at it… I won SGI's Exemplary Leadership Award, and started teaching leadership in order to learn faster. My first startup was Allegis, where I was VP of Engineering; we raised a $50M Series C and nearly went public while my partner and I were raising three kids under five.

I burned out. My partner sent me to a Zen monastery to learn to meditate. Zen Buddhism reset my life; twenty five years later, I'm in aspirancy to become a member of the Order of Interbeing in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition.

I carried that Zen (and my intense drive) into the roles that followed. At Intuit, I was the company's #2 CTO and "got my on-the-job MBA" from Lorrie Norrington, previously head of GE Medical. At Adobe, I was fortunate enough to reshape how Photoshop was built – look for my name in the credits. At Lucasfilm I became the first CTO across all the divisions — ILM, Animation, the games studio, R&D — and learned that a demoralized team is rebuilt one candid conversation at a time. At Tableau, I helped the founders scale from $100M to $1B, watched a company grow faster than its people could, and convinced them to fund Christy to build a Leadership Academy to fix that. My last startup was Orbital Insight, an AI company funded by Sequoia at a $250M valuation, acquired by Steve Wozniak's Privateer.

I ran my first marathon at fifty, and was in the best shape of my adult life when I found out I had Stage IV cancer. Over a thousand hours of chemo and eight surgeries to reschedule my death. I'm a cancer survivor, with an exquisite sense of my own mortality and of what matters.

Now my work is completely aligned with my life purpose: to bring out the best in those around me. One goal: on my 80th birthday, read cards from leaders telling me how our work together improved their lives. That will be a mark that I lived my life well.

What will mark a life well lived for you?
Shall we work towards it together?