Meet Julia

My career started with equal parts experimentation and luck.

A San Francisco native, I grew up in a big mixed-race family with dreams of becoming a psychotherapist (seriously). Enthralled by the human experience, I was determined to know the truth about our existence. I was one of only a few in my family to go to college and always buried myself in psychological theory to better understand the chaos around me. But after earning my degree, and before committing myself to years of graduate school, I set out to explore the world of business. That's all I really knew at the time.

At the age of 21, I found myself working at Salesforce. I joined the company just under the 5,000 employee mark and on the ride of a lifetime. Over the next 5 years, I was running in lock-step with the Chief Revenue Officer and quarterbacking a 300 person global team mandated to create a new category that became the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. After two massive acquisitions, multiple re-orgs, blood, sweat, and definitely some tears, we eventually became the company’s first non-native $1B cloud in just 3 years.

It was such a high! I was young and surrounded by the best and brightest — true industry titans. Success felt inevitable and I was eager to squeeze every business and life lesson out of my first career experience. I also had daily front row seat to truly legendary (and some seriously questionable) leadership. My biggest learning? That business is a people’s game and success isn’t inevitable—it’s psychology.

Naturally, this was all the clarity I needed to return to the study of people, our behavior, and how to change it. I went on to pursue my master’s in counseling psychology but couldn’t help but see everything I was learning about people through my new lens of innovation and global impact. After graduate school, I went on to spend the next few years exploring just about every side of the conference table. Across a number of different industries and organizational sizes (and cities), I’ve been an executive assistant, an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, a Chief of Staff, an early-stage investor, and a CEO. My favorite? The unofficial “in-house executive coach” role I assumed during my time at a venture-backed enterprise AI company that often earned me the comparison to Wendy Rhoades from “Billions.”

I've worn many hats over the course of my career but what's clear to me is what I love working on the most — humans, their potential, and their obstacles, in pursuit of their evolving purpose. So in 2020,  I started a coaching practice and set out to offer startup CEOs and leaders a new way to operate. Today, with a new paradigm of leadership on the horizon, I’m so proud of how my work has grown and even more excited for how it will continue to take shape.

I still, on a daily basis, think about the point of it all--work, life, passion and purpose. I have come to believe that the point of life is to move toward the fullest expression of our purpose and make a contribution to that purpose that is uniquely and only ours to make. Congruent Leadership is mine.

This work gives me endless energy. I love exploring the person behind a title and the dynamics behind a business problem — distilling complex experiences into simple, tactical solutions. I strive to help leaders all over the world feel understood, motivated to pursue their purpose, and courageous enough to do the hard work that growth often requires.

What I know for sure is that I’ll always keep learning from the people and experiences around me. And even as my purpose evolves, I know I will forever be exploring with the things that unlock our limitless potential.