Why Are Silicon Valley Therapists Becoming Tech Coaches?

Last spring, I told my therapist I wanted to become a therapist. He suggested I become a coach instead, like him. Now, to be clear, my therapist, whose name is Peter Carnochan, is indeed a therapist. He has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, trained as a psychoanalyst in the tradition of Freud and commands high fees from clients in San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge at his own magnificent home under the redwoods.

Carnochan has been my therapist for over a decade, a privilege for which I am grateful on two accounts. First, the surging national demand for therapy has so outstripped supply that it can be hard to find a good therapist anywhere, but especially in San Francisco. Second, working with Carnochan has been so healing that I have come to see psychotherapy as a beautiful profession and Carnochan as its beau idéal — deeply learned, emotionally present and capable of moving in a single conversation from D. W. Winnicott’s theory of the false self to Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” from infinity in the Lotus Sutra to the ecstasies of backcountry skiing.

I knew Carnochan did some other form of talking to people one on one — coaching, that is — because I once told him that I worried about money and career. Carnochan responded by mentioning that he sometimes helped company executives on professional matters and could work with me in the same spirit.

I recall this feeling odd, as if I’d confessed to my priest that I wished to marry and he counterconfessed to moonlighting as a matchmaker and might know someone. Still, a not-insignificant part of me very much wanted a life like that of a tech executive. So I said, in effect, “Yes, please, do not ever hold back on career advice.”

That’s the context in which Carnochan informed me that becoming a therapist in today’s regulatory environment would be too costly in money and time, especially given my age (I am 56): years of expensive graduate school typically followed by many more years of interning under licensed therapists for a pittance or nothing at all.

“It goes without saying that you’d be a wonderful therapist,” Carnochan said. The way he saw it, though, life experience and my decades of therapy had already taught me enough to start coaching. He was all in favor of training, especially in psychoanalysis, but considered the standard professional pathway too cluttered with bureaucratic hoops. The main reason to go through all that, Carnochan said, would be to get licensed. The main reason to get licensed would be to accept payment through medical insurance, which he thought I would be unlikely to do anyway because of the hassle and low pay. If I was determined to help people, I should declare myself a coach. No credential required.

My unease was obvious. Carnochan added: “Yes, in some ways it’s weird. Coaches are radically undertrained and self-anointed, so why would someone who spent 10 years becoming an analyst” — he meant himself — “want to do the crass, shallow, manic coaching gig? I’m going to help you crush it!”

Carnochan described his own coaching as more psychoanalytic in nature and style, helping executives thrive at work through deeper self-understanding. He said he had a different style of coaching in mind for me, rooted in my peculiar life as a serial self-actualizer — teaching myself, over the years, to climb, surf, cook, meditate, remodel houses and write. I couldn’t quite see it, so Carnochan suggested I speak with a friend of his who was among the first local therapists he knew to move into coaching.

This friend, Cameron Yarbrough, a licensed marriage and family therapist, was a founder of a company called Torch — which seeks to democratize coaching by making it affordable for people “at all levels,” not just C-suite executives. He did this with investment capital from Y Combinator, the famous startup incubator that helped create Dropbox, Reddit and Airbnb. Yarbrough was also instrumental in encouraging other therapists to make the change, including Carnochan, to whom Yarbrough sent as an early coaching client Alexis Ohanian, a founder of Reddit and the husband of Serena Williams.

Yarbrough had invited Carnochan, just recently, to an upcoming men’s weekend on the coast to camp out and roast a pig. Carnochan asked if I might want the job of master pig roaster as a way of meeting Yarbrough — a terrific connection for an aspiring coach.

“Are we doing coaching now?” I asked.

“You mean am I coaching you? Yes.”

If Carnochan had been the only therapist I knew, I might have dismissed this as a story about Carnochan and me. But I count several other San Francisco therapists among my friends. One, Michael Litter, surprised me by saying that his practice now also included coaching. Another, Kiernan Warble, intended to remain a therapist, but the issue was on her mind. She said: “Oh, yeah, this is totally a thing. It’s so bad. I feel like every therapist I know is becoming a coach.” Warble mentioned a psychiatrist — someone with an M.D. — who now works almost exclusively as a coach and makes far more money that way. The high-end hourly rate for a therapist, after all, even in a pricey city like San Francisco, is about $350. A successful coach can charge four times that much, partly because coaching fees typically come out of a company budget, not a client’s own bank account, and partly because the stakes are so high — personal growth can support profit growth.

No wonder it’s impossible to find a therapist around here, I thought. Then: What, exactly, is happening? Silicon Valley does have a history of disrupting legacy industries (see: taxis), but maybe something more interesting was going on, too. Maybe tech was reinventing psychotherapy in its own image — calling forth a new form of counseling tailor-made for contemporary fears and dreams.

There is no easy way to define coaching because no government agency or professional organization regulates or controls the word. Anybody can identify as a coach, and countless people do, offering help and guidance with almost any aspect of life, from sobriety and fitness to spirituality, sex and, especially in Silicon Valley, business leadership.

Leadership coaching can look a lot like therapy — two people talking about the challenges and aspirations of one of them — but it differs in important ways. By clinical tradition, therapy should occur in private treatment rooms decorated with sun-faded posters from major museum art exhibits of the 1980s. The pandemic loosened that up a bit, by hastening a transition to videoconference therapy, but coaches have always been free to practice anywhere — over dinner, drinks, even random text messages and phone calls.

David Morelli, a Florida coach who wrote a doctoral thesis on the subject, told me another commonly cited distinction is that therapy mines the past to improve the present while coaching tweaks the present toward a brighter future. Morelli points out that this distinction is imperfect: Therapists and their clients can hardly avoid talking about the future; coaches, and especially those like Carnochan with psychoanalytic training, invariably discuss the past. Still, the basic idea has enduring currency, at least among coaches: People seek therapy because they suffer and wish to heal. People seek coaching because they wish to succeed — at, say, growing a startup, or being promoted, or taking on new responsibilities at work.

Traditional business coaching follows a mentorship model: I’ve run Fortune 500 companies, and I can teach you to do the same. The emergent tech coaching, by contrast, sleuths out and targets whatever emotional and personal growth will help a client thrive right now, in whatever role he or she happens to play inside an organization. This approach is particularly attractive in the world of venture-capital-funded tech startups, where chief executives tend to be very young and nearly all startups fail. Because of those long odds, and also because a few startups do hit it big, venture capitalists tend to invest by placing small numbers of huge bets on a few moonshot startups and demanding that they all grow at an unsustainable rate. A venture capitalist with $500 million to invest might put $50 million into each of 10 startups, count on nine to fail and one to hit a jackpot so gigantic it returns his entire $500 million several times over. For the founder, landing one of these initial venture bets is less like winning the lottery than hearing the starting gun of a yearslong race that he will almost certainly lose.

To have any prayer of winning, that founder must somehow make annual revenue skyrocket to $100 million from zero in five years and then, within another five years, make an initial public offering of stock. That will happen only if the founder somehow makes sales triple in the first year, triple again in the second year and double every year for the next three straight. This, in turn, will happen only if, from the moment the founder cashes that first investment check, he begs for constant meetings with still more venture capitalists. Day in and day out, even as the founder orders his employees to do whatever might bring stratospheric expansion, he must stand in front of extremely wealthy strangers and pitch them on the long-shot idea upon which all his self-esteem and optimism now depends. Then, upon facing rejection — by far the most common result — he must pivot right back to managing and inspiring all the other smart-but-frightened people now working for him, the total number of whom has already ballooned.

This is an impossible, and inescapable, predicament. Venture-backed startups simply must scale faster than all but the rarest of human beings can acquire emotional intelligence. As a result, startup founders and chief executives, many of whom are trained not in management but in software engineering, face extraordinary risk of coming unglued in ways that vaporize immense amounts of capital invested by people who dislike losing capital. No surprise, then, that tech investors and executives now hire people with expertise in psychology or that they prefer to do this under the label of coaching instead of therapy.

In therapy, people expect to burn hours — weeks, months, years — exploring childhood trauma. If they intend to bill health insurance, they will almost certainly end up with a psychiatric diagnosis. Psychotherapy is heavily regulated, too, by confidentiality laws and professional codes that discourage therapists from telling clients much about themselves, communicating with clients outside regularly scheduled treatment hours or talking to anyone else in the client’s life. This all makes therapy too slow for startup founders in a dead sprint.

Startup founders also tend to be uninterested in legacy approaches to self-improvement. They want high-impact fixes for whatever aspects of their personalities need perfecting right now. Coaching, in essence, has become that hack for both the self and therapy. It has become so prized that corporate boards routinely tell chief executives to get coaches of their own. And coaches can bill those clients’ companies directly, which is a major convenience. Coaching startups like Yarbrough’s, by promising affordable coaching for everyone (not just C-suite executives), have drawn enough venture capital to expand at the same explosive rate as the startups those executives run.

In certain tech circles, in fact, not having a coach is the aberration. Reddit’s Ohanian, in 2019, proudly told a reporter that his “personal board of directors” included Garry Tan, the president and chief executive of Y Combinator; Serena Williams; and Carnochan. Ohanian then added that any executive who thinks he doesn’t need coaching must think he is not just the Tom Brady of his industry, or the LeBron James or the Serena Williams, but that he’s better than that.

One way of looking at tech coaches is that they promise executives responsible for inspiring others an accelerated path to self-understanding, even if that means collecting data about clients from many sources. A coach, for example, might have a client do a self-assessment on various personality traits and leadership qualities and then put the client through a profiling test like the Hogan Development Survey, which is designed to expose problematic “dark side” qualities likely to emerge through complacency or under stress. (Most of us, according to one playful way of thinking, have what amounts to a subclinical personality disorder — like narcissistic, antisocial, borderline — that can take over in challenging circumstances.) Unlike therapy, which depends upon strictly private conversation between therapist and client, coaching also may include modified versions of the 360 reviews so common to corporate performance evaluation. In other words, instead of getting only the client’s side of every story, a coach might go to the client’s co-workers, have them all assess the client on the same personality traits for which the client did a self-assessment and look for discrepancies.

Jerry Colonna, a coach and the author of “Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up,” describes this process as offering a “mirrored-surface bowl” in which coach and client see the client’s personality and relationships from multiple angles. Our deeply rooted self-image rarely matches the way others perceive us, so that mirrored bowl provides unique ways to view our hidden strengths. And our many weaknesses.

Garry Tan has been through all of these coaching processes — starting 15 years ago, when Tan was running his own first startup. Tan says he and his co-founder fought fiercely — dangerous for a small leadership team — until Tan felt overwhelmed. “I needed to be a different person,” Tan says. “Like, I needed to progress. I needed to grow at a faster rate. I wasn’t going to be able to do it on my own.”

Tan hired Yarbrough. Back then, Yarbrough specialized in couples counseling for startup founders. He helped Tan see that he craved harmony at work, but when he couldn’t get it, he blew up at people. Yarbrough also helped him identify a pattern of what Tan calls “rage-quitting jobs.” The strain of running that first startup, Tan says, became intolerable. “I couldn’t eat or sleep, I had a fever,” Tan told me. “In the end, I couldn’t work there anymore. And it wasn’t because I lacked willpower. It was because I had too much willpower. Like, my prefrontal cortex could override other parts that knew in my heart, Hey, this isn’t working for me.”

Tan quit — that startup was later acquired by Twitter — but stayed in touch with Yarbrough. Over the decade that followed, Yarbrough and another coach, Marcie Elias, who practiced law before getting a master’s in organizational psychology, made it possible for Tan to confront what he calls “just incredible amounts of multigenerational trauma,” including his father’s struggle with addiction and difficulty in holding onto jobs. Yarbrough and Elias helped Tan see that he was at risk of repeating that cycle. With their help, Tan stabilized his behavior and mood enough to start Initialized Capital, a wildly successful venture fund that currently manages $3.5 billion in equity assets, and also to become the head of Y Combinator, a role previously held by Sam Altman. This has made Tan one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley.

Tan has become a coaching evangelist, too. He was the original seed investor for Yarbrough’s coaching company and constantly tells startup founders to get coaches of their own. “A lot of startups die not because of technical or engineering reasons but purely people reasons,” Tan says. “So when people look at a coach and say, ‘Oh, this is very expensive,’ guess what is a thousand times more expensive? Failure.” Tan blames most of those people problems on how deeply a startup “penetrates the self,” as he puts it. “Sometimes it’s not clear where the startup ends and the individual begins.”

Colonna sees that conflation of self and startup as producing a kind of existential fear: “‘If my company fails, am I failure? If my company fails, should I even be alive?’” People often cope with existential fear, Colonna says, in one of two ways: by becoming aggressive or avoiding conflict — being either too mean or too nice, in essence. As Colonna puts it, “Both create toxic situations.”

Elias describes a case of toxic aggression, involving a chief executive who was “easily provoked and not well regulated emotionally,” she says. “He would get very angry, or he had a bit of, like, the smartest-guy-in-the-room thing, where he just had to assert his intelligence. He didn’t understand the effect that he had. It’s an obligation of a leader to be aware of how they hurt people.”

In Elias’s view, we all learn certain behaviors in early childhood that help us survive in our families. “It could be a child with alcoholic parents who has to become hyperresponsible and hypervigilant, sort of a parentified child,” Elias says. “Or, I once had a client who was deeply uncomfortable embodying his own leadership role, and it turned out it was because he’d always been so much more successful than his brothers and father, and he’d always felt like he had to hide that.”

Later in life, those same behaviors can prevent us from becoming the adults we would like to be. “That’s when executives run into trouble,” Elias says. “There’s something about their personality that served them early on. Now they need more in their repertoire, and they never downloaded that program.” Elias’s work with chief executives, she says, involves asking: “What were those adaptations you made early on that are now the essence of who you are? And why are they not working anymore? What do you need to replace it with? What would be at stake for you if you did?’’

As for the other common way executives deal with unbearable stress — avoiding conflict by being too nice — that can be even worse from a business standpoint. According to Yarbrough, “People will be concerned about coming to work for you because they’ll think: This guy’s too nice. People on this team are going to be allowed to continue working here even if they’re not hitting their goals, and the company is going to fail. V.C.s can sniff it, and they won’t invest.” Venture capitalists, Yarbrough explains, are not looking for nice people. “They’d much rather invest in a Travis Kalanick or Elon Musk and get rich than invest in kindhearted people and lose their money.” Coaching is about teaching people, quickly, when to show up with what part of their psychology. “If you have deficiencies, whether you’re too nice or too aggressive,” Yarbrough says, “you’ve got a very short timeline to close that gap.”

Collin Galster, co-founder and chief operating officer of Nova Credit, sought coaching from Carnochan while taking on increased leadership responsibilities during the pandemic. Galster says he prepared for coaching sessions by reflecting on his relationships at work, including by asking himself: “Which relationships are giving me energy? Which are now draining my energy? What’s the next conversation I’m dreading with somebody?”

Galster shared the answers with Carnochan, who then led discussions that roamed from Karl Marx and Michel Foucault to Buddhist thought before shedding light on what Galster came to see as his core problem: narcissistic attachment to his own extraordinary journey of striving — from modest beginnings in Missouri through Harvard, Stanford and the founding of Nova Credit. That attachment, and the role it played in Galster’s self-esteem, had seduced Galster into seeking in potential employees the virtues of striving and ambition that he valued most in himself. This turned out to be exactly the wrong instinct, Galster says. What he should have been seeking was evidence of deep sales experience. Also, hiring — and then firing — people with traits like his own felt to Galster like personal failure.

Yarbrough claims to see beauty in this aspect of coaching, the way it forces people into sincere self-examination. Clients may hire coaches largely for what he calls “vanity metrics” — succeeding at work, making more money, becoming more powerful — but if they stick with the process, Yarbrough believes, they get taken through places of genuine vulnerability. “It’s like what draws a lot of people to yoga is being around beautiful people and having a more sexy body,” Yarbrough says. “But you know what happens? A lot of those people get exposed to meditation and the broader concept of yoga in the philosophical sense and then actually become better human beings.”

This may be true with many clients most of the time. Still, it’s hard to escape the feeling that self-actualization, in these terms, means acquiring the sang-froid of the perfect capitalist subject — acting always in the interests of shareholders, never of the human being right in front of you. Colonna acknowledges the moral risk inherent in the irresponsible use of self-development techniques — “like when a meditation instructor can make a sniper a better sniper,” he says. “‘Breathe. Be present. Now pull the trigger.’”

I flip-flopped on roasting a pig for Yarbrough’s men’s weekend. I flip-flopped partly because it would formalize something I had felt for a long time but wished to delay — namely, the end of Carnochan’s and my long relationship as analyst and analysand and its transition into something new. But I flip-flopped also because I still felt unsure about coaching. I loved the idea of helping people thrive and appreciated Carnochan’s vote of confidence, but I worried about that better-sniper business. Many therapists themselves, Warble told me, are deeply conflicted about coaching. A big objection is that therapy depends upon a unique relationship between therapist and client.

Clinical practices like meeting clients in the same private place at the same time and never talking to clients’ co-workers or billing their companies or saying much about oneself — that’s all meant to create a secure emotional container. Inside such a container, when it works, the client feels safe enough to explore his or her most difficult thoughts and feelings. Coaches, by encouraging intimacy but ignoring all those clinical guidelines, risk harming people, especially if the coach gets paid by, and is therefore answerable to, someone other than the client. Patrick Bosworth, a founder of several startups, says he once worked with a coach hired by a company’s board of directors. Bosworth knew going in that this coach might tell investors some of what was discussed, but he felt surprised when it turned out to be a regular report to the board. This radically changed Bosworth’s ability to work with that coach, he says, to the degree that he soon stopped working with him.

But therapy’s shibboleths have also been breaking down on their own. After decades of certainty that therapy works only in anonymous treatment rooms, the entire profession embraced Zoom during the pandemic and never looked back. Then there’s the matter of therapists’ disclosing little about themselves to clients, long considered a cornerstone of psychoanalytic technique: According to George Silberschatz, president of the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group and a clinical professor of psychiatry, there is no consistent evidence supporting strict anonymity, whereas therapist self-disclosure has been shown to be very useful for some clients. The main thing research suggests about therapy, in fact — beyond that it works — is that it doesn’t matter whether your therapist is a Freudian, Jungian or Buddhist. The strongest signal in the data, in terms of what does matter, is the therapeutic alliance — a felt sense of deep connection between therapist and client.

Many of these regulations and practices grew out of concern for clients but have long since turned into the standard foibles of a legacy guild ripe for disruption: gatekeeping, squeezing supply to boost demand and exploitation of apprentices. The rise of coaching in Silicon Valley, in that sense, looks like the free market doing what it does: recognizing unmet demand and calling forth supply. Put another way, therapy regulated itself into a walled garden. Coaching then blossomed outside, and therapists opened the gate to join them. Sarah Sarkis, a Boston-based psychologist and leadership coach, told me that observing coaching clients at their own offices “felt like I was Jane Goodall, getting to watch primates in their natural habitats. And there was something so liberating about that.”

Carnochan, reflecting on the pleasure he finds in coaching, told me it reminds him of the odd psychoanalyst he has always been — more prone than most to self-disclosure, good at healing and even happier to help people thrive. Carnochan remembers an art project he did at Burning Man, one that involved riding a bicycle and towing a lawn chair (as a stand-in for a psychoanalyst’s couch) with a sign that read, in what sounds like a summary of the work he does now, “Help with memories, dreams and reimagining a life.”

I like the sound of that. I am very much reimagining my own life these days. Currently, that means following Carnochan’s example by enrolling in graduate school to become a therapist. I want the credential, but I also want to know what Carnochan knows about easing the suffering of others. I still live in San Francisco, though, so I will doubtless follow Carnochan’s advice, too, by coaching on the side.

I say this partly because the tech industry makes life expensive here and partly because money and work, in Silicon Valley as in the rest of America, play a role not unlike the gods in earlier times — that of mysterious and capricious forces coursing through every aspect of earthly existence. So when a startup founder hires a coach to hack his personality, in hopes of a great I.P.O., he is just doing what we all must in our own way. He is trying to bring his inner and outer selves in alignment with whatever contemporary powers determine who thrives and who withers. I’m not saying that’s wonderful. I’m saying it’s maybe in the nature of all counseling professions in all ages and civilizations, from the Delphic oracle to the Catholic priest-confessor — helping people adapt to the world as we find it.