At Founder’s CPA, we are privileged to work with a wide spectrum of highly impressive clients. Welcome to our Featured Founders, where we are highlighting a diverse set of “Founders” who may not fit the stereotypical “Founder” mold set by Silicon Valley, but they all bring a unique solution to their respective markets.
In this post, we showcase our Featured Founder, Pilea, a company dedicated to providing support to startup founders and leaders to ensure that they not only survive the intense startup environment but also thrive.
If you are interested in having your company featured, please contact us to get started.
Q) What does your company do?
Pilea is an integrative coaching solution for sustainable leadership.
Q) What is your mission?
To equip and empower members of the startup community to become leaders* so that work may become ecological — good for self, good for others, and good for the environment.
Q) What inspired you to start Pilea? What is your “why”?
The honest answer is that I didn’t mean to start a company. But what inspired me to lean into the opportunity was that as I learned more about founders and our natural impulse — to do really hard things, often alone, and commonly with the sense that we have to bring this thing into the world as if our lives depended on it — I realized that I am a founder. I believe I started this company to learn more about myself and (unconsciously) to surround myself with people who get me. My hope now is that we offer that type of community and support to our members.
Q) What differentiates your company from your competitors?
Our competitors tend to be agency-style coaching firms where a bunch of coaches get vetted and added to a referral list.
We are a community. Our coaches are founders and founder-types who not only know how to coach but also ‘get it’ at a personal level. Additionally, our members (founders and investors) join each other in community and rally around shifting the whole of startup culture to a type of company building that is ecological (good for self, good for others, and good for the environment).
Finally, our greatest differentiator is that we don’t just focus on leadership, we focus on the whole person. Each of our coaches is trained in integrative leadership, which is the concept that our physical, mental, emotional, and relational health are intimately linked to our company’s success. In support of this notion, we have integrative doctors, breath-workers, yoga teachers, physical trainers, and a partnership with Pillar (https://withpillar.com/) to offer custom health coach matches to every leader and investor in our community.
Q) What are some challenges your consumers are facing right now and how does your company help?
As entrepreneurs, we struggle most with getting out of our own way. What I mean by this is that most of us are high achievers who can’t help striving to ‘win at all costs.’ This causes our clients to be at high risk of burnout, isolation, mental health disorders, and sacrificing everything to make our companies successful. We love this about our clients and we know there’s a better way. When we see our clients sacrificing their health and even their lives, we offer ourselves up to provide expert support, community with other entrepreneurs, and ongoing coaching to increase resiliency.
Q) What’s your favorite part about being an entrepreneur?
The freedom! I think that’s what I most identified when I first started working with founders is that many of us are down to give up stability in favor of freedom, expression, passion, and huge impact. These are things I love about what we do.
