Nothing leaves the room
Complete discretion, no conflicts, no interest in your cap table. You can say the thing you would not say to your board, your team, or your investors.
Advisory for founders
Founders come to me to decide with confidence.
I advise founders, chief executives and creators through the decisions they cannot make alone — the ones with no obvious right answer, real consequences, and no one impartial to think them through with. You are inside the business. I can see the whole board: the opportunity, the distraction, the person you should know, the move worth making next.
The work is not only sharper thinking. It is the steadiness of knowing a decision has been properly examined before you commit to it.
The premise
Most founders are not short on effort. They are short on perspective.
My work has always been about seeing what other people cannot see from where they are standing. With individuals, that means patterns, timing, and potential. With businesses, it is the same instinct pointed at a different object: the shape of the market, the asset you are underusing, the relationship that changes the trajectory, the story you are telling badly.
I do not arrive with a framework and ask your business to fit inside it. I enter your world, take in the whole of it quickly, and connect the parts you have stopped connecting because you see them every day.
Why founders stay
Decisions made without second-guessing.
Most of the founders I advise are not looking for more information. They are looking for one person they can think out loud with, entirely off the record.
Pressure-tested, not rubber-stamped
I will argue the other side of your decision before you make it. Agreement is worth nothing to you; scrutiny is what makes a choice safe to commit to.
Continuity of context
I hold the whole arc of your business and your life alongside it, so you never start a conversation by explaining the last eighteen months.
Steady in the hard weeks
Fundraises that stall, co-founder ruptures, a hire that has to go. I am most useful when the stakes are personal, not only commercial.
From a client
“I first met Vana when she was advising the company I worked for. What I didn't expect was how quickly she would understand me on a human level. That combination of real professional relatability alongside a genuine feel for the person in front of her is a rare gift.
Her insight is next level. She asks the kind of questions that open doors you didn't know were there, and she has an ability to see patterns and articulate them in a way no one else has been able to do for me. That kind of insight is not woo-woo. It is her superpower and should not be underestimated.
— Jen Kim
Sightlines
What I tend to find.
Every engagement is particular. These are the places the answer usually hides.
The opportunity in plain sight
An offer, an audience, or an asset already inside the business that is being under-used because it has become ordinary to you.
A positioning problem
When the work is excellent and the story is wrong, growth feels harder than it should. Often the fix is a sentence, not a strategy deck.
Who you should know
Introductions, partnerships, and relationships that change what is possible. I think naturally about who belongs in a room together.
The distraction to abandon
The project that survives on sunk cost. Naming it clearly is often the single highest-leverage decision of a quarter.
The founder themselves
What you are unusually good at, what you keep delegating that you should not, and where your own patterns are shaping the company.
The next move
Not a five-year plan. The specific next decision, made with a clearer view of the board than you had last week.
Engagement
Three ways in.
Private, senior, and deliberately small in number. Terms are agreed in conversation.
One session
The Intensive
A deep half-day on your business, preceded by private preparation. You leave with what I see, where the opportunity sits, and the moves I would make.
Multi-month
Private Advisory
An ongoing thought partnership. Regular sessions, open access between them, and someone holding the whole picture alongside you.
By invitation
Standing Counsel
A long-horizon relationship for founders who want one person permanently oriented to their business, including introductions and opportunity work.
For companies
Leadership coaching.
Companies hire me to coach the people leading them.
Leadership is lonely by design. The higher someone rises inside a company, the fewer people they can think out loud with. I work with companies who want their leaders to have one person in their corner — senior, impartial, and entirely off the record.
One-to-one
Executive coaching
Private coaching for chief executives, founders, and senior leaders. Regular sessions focused on presence, decision-making, and the personal patterns that shape how they lead — because the company can only go where the person at the top can.
Small groups
Leadership team work
Working with a leadership team as a living system: how decisions actually get made, where trust has thinned, and what is not being said in the room. The aim is a team that can disagree well and commit fully.
Company-wide
Counsel to the company
An ongoing relationship with the company itself — coaching several leaders in parallel, advising the board or founder on succession, culture, and the human dynamics that strategy decks never capture.
Engagements begin with a conversation with the leader and, where relevant, the person sponsoring the work. Everything said in coaching remains private to the person being coached.
Discuss coaching for your companyThe other dimension
Alongside this work, I run a private practice built on astrology, numerology, and pattern reading — helping people understand themselves, their timing, and the way they are built.
You do not need to be interested in any of that to work with me. Most of what I do with founders reads as ordinary strategic thinking, because that is what it is. But it is worth saying plainly: reading people for a living is what makes me quick at reading businesses, and if you are open to that layer, it becomes part of the conversation.
Same instrument. Different object of attention.
Who this is for
Founders, chief executives, creators, coaches, and consultants building around technology, expertise, or an idea — usually people who already have something working and sense there is a larger version of it they cannot yet see.
It is not for anyone looking for a standard playbook, a course, or a weekly accountability call. I keep the number of advisory relationships small so that each one has my full attention.
Tell me what you are building.
A short, direct conversation to establish whether I can see something useful. I read every inquiry personally.