ResilienceVC's Integrative Coaching Initiative for our Founders

ResilienceVC is a venture firm investing in fintech startups that build resilience for users and deliver returns for investors. We invest in seed-stage startups where embedded fintech drives business growth and plays a key role in helping American consumers and small businesses thrive. As an investor, we’re constantly looking for promising startups with the potential for high growth and impact. However, for a business to succeed, it takes more than a robust business model and strong customer value proposition; founder resilience and well-being is critical to startup growth. Founders face relentless pressure, constant uncertainty, and inevitable setbacks. In this demanding environment, effective leadership is a survival skill. These challenges are intensified by the current macroeconomic climate, and are even more acute for founders from underrepresented backgrounds.?

We believe coaching has the potential to shift the trajectory of founders and their companies by?providing personalized guidance, support, and accountability to empower founders to reach their full potential, navigate challenges, and ultimately, increase their chances of achieving success. Coaching can help founders:

Develop Mental Fortitude

Founders are the backbone of their startups, and their well-being directly impacts the company's trajectory. Coaching equips them with the tools to navigate the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship. They develop mental resilience, the ability to bounce back from setbacks, learn from mistakes, and maintain the grit needed to persevere through long-term challenges.

Prioritize Self-Care and Avoid Burnout

The "hustle culture" often glorified in startups can be detrimental to both founders and their companies. Coaching fosters a healthy work-life balance by encouraging founders to prioritize self-care and well-being. This translates to increased focus, better decision-making, and a more sustainable leadership style that benefits both the founder and the company.

Build Strong Teams

A thriving team is essential for any startup's success. Coaching can help founders build the skills to build a positive, diverse, inclusive, and supportive work environment. They learn to communicate effectively, delegate tasks strategically, and foster trust within their teams. This creates a culture of resilience where team members support each other through challenges and celebrate shared successes.

Make Effective Decisions Under Pressure

The startup landscape is dynamic, and founders are constantly faced with critical choices with significant consequences. Coaching can equip them with the ability to analyze situations objectively, weigh different perspectives, and make well-informed decisions that align with the company's long-term goals. This reduces the risk of impulsive choices made under pressure and fosters a strategic approach to leadership.

Given the value of coaching, we want to ensure our founders have access to the support they need, making it critical for us to decrease the barriers to entry for coaching. One key barrier is cost, so we decided that as part of our investment in a startup, we would fund three months of coaching for the founders and negotiate affordable rates for founders who want to continue their coaching journeys beyond this time frame.?

However, even with us covering the costs, finding the right coach with the right expertise and experience working with entrepreneurs is not easy for a founder. To address this, we partnered with Pilea , a platform focused on integrative coaching for startup founders and leaders. Pilea is truly aligned with our vision to support and enable resilient leaders to tackle real problems facing our world. They have a vetted network of coaches tailored specifically to the startup environment and to the founder journey. Pilea believes that effective leadership requires interdisciplinary improvement across one’s mental, emotional, and physical health, and their coaches are equipped to help founders in all these areas.?

Through Pilea, our founders have access to a concierge who can help them surface what they want to work on and recommend the coaches within the Pilea network who will be the best fit for the founder’s goals. We also worked with Pilea to select a set of predefined coaching sprints that we thought would be relevant to founders covering topics such as Building Without Burnout, which helps founders identify patterns of stress to build a toolkit for resilience, and Leading from the Heart, which supports founders to activate their emotional resilience in a polarized world.?

In addition to the coaching support, Pilea offers a variety of wellness offerings to our founders. These yoga, meditation, and breathwork sessions draw on research-based methods for decreasing stress, improving physical and mental alignment, increasing emotional intelligence, tending to one’s nervous system, and expanding resilience over time.

By investing in integrative coaching for the founders we back, we aren’t just backing faceless businesses, we’re truly investing in people. We know that empowered, resilient founders are the key to building successful and sustainable startups that are best positioned for long-term impact and returns, and we believe that this partnership will set our founders up for success.?

We'd love thoughts and feedback on this initiative, especially from other investors and founders