Adam Dexter
5.0
(3)
Studied at American University
Works at TheStartupFounderCoach.com
Available Monday at 4:00 PM UTC
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About Adam
I'm an executive coach for startup founders, CEOs, and executive teams. I specialize in the operator-to-CEO transition, cofounder relationships and conflict repair, and the leadership and team-building challenges of scaling early-stage companies. I've coached 100+ founders from pre-seed through Series C. My clients include founders from Y Combinator and Techstars, and teams backed by Lightspeed, Highland Capital, Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Insight Partners, Precursor Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Material Impact, 8VC, Flybridge, AME Cloud Ventures, Ripple, and Bolt VC. I coach from lived experience. I cofounded Omni, a VC-backed storage and logistics company, raised $35M+, scaled from 3 to 80+ employees through Series B, and exited to Coinbase in 2019. I've also served as the first VP of Product at a Series A construction technology company and Head of Brand and Design at a Series C hospitality company. Earlier in my career I built the internal creative agency inside Summit Series as the 7th employee. My approach is what I call Mentorship Coaching: a blend of ICF-style coaching and hands-on operator advisory, calibrated to what each client actually needs. I go especially deep on cofounder relationships and trust repair. Underneath the tactical work, I believe you need to understand yourself as much as you do your business. Self-awareness, groundedness, and the inner work of leadership are not separate tracks from operating skill. They reinforce each other, and the founders who do both scale further and stay healthier doing it. I'm an active mentor with Techstars and StartOut. Learn more at TheStartupFounderCoach.com.
Why do I coach?
I cofounded Omni in 2014. Over the next four years, my cofounders and I raised over $35M, scaled the team to 80+ people, and exited to Coinbase. From the outside, that reads like a clean success story. From the inside, it was the hardest stretch of my life. I learned that the cofounder relationship is the single most important and most fragile thing in an early-stage company. I learned that the skills that get you to product-market fit are not the skills that scale a company past it. I learned that the inner state of the founder shapes the company more than any framework or playbook. And I learned that most founders, including me at the time, don't have anyone they can actually talk to about any of it. When I started coaching in 2018, it was because I wanted to be the person I had needed earlier in my own founder journey. Someone who had actually built and operated. Someone who could hold the strategic and the personal in the same conversation. Someone who would tell me the truth instead of just agreeing with me. Eight years and 100+ founders later, I'm still doing this for the same reason. The cofounder relationships that get repaired stay built. The leaders who do the inner work alongside the tactical work scale further and stay healthier doing it.
Work Experience
Mentor
StartOut
June 2025 - Present
Donating my time, knowledge, and expertise to the LGBTQ+ startup community via StartOut's Mentor program. Leadership Development, Executive Coaching and +3 skills
Mentor
Techstars
October 2023 - Present
Executive Coaching, Startups and +2 skills
Mentor
Mission Bit
April 2021 - Present
I donate my time as a mentor, coach, hack-a-thon judge, and general volunteer with Mission Bit mentoring high school students and young adults (ages 18-26) about careers in tech, STEM, and startups. "Mission Bit empowers young innovators who reflect our diversity to become leaders of the global technology revolution, developing solutions that serve our whole community." Founder Coach, Mentoring and +1 skill
Executive Coach
TheStartupFounderCoach.com
October 2018 - Present
Adam is an executive coach for startup founders, CEOs, and executive teams, specializing in the operator-to-CEO transition, cofounder relationships and conflict repair, and the leadership and team-building challenges of scaling early-stage companies. He has coached 100+ founders from pre-seed through Series B, including founders from Y Combinator and Techstars, and teams backed by Lightspeed, Highland Capital, Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Insight Partners, Precursor Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Material Impact, 8VC, Flybridge, AME Cloud Ventures, Ripple, and Bolt VC. Adam works at the intersection of two practices most coaches keep separate. On one side, the hard skills: operator-informed, field-tested advisory on the transition from scrappy do-everything founder to scalable CEO; executive presence and communication; fundraising, pitching, storytelling, and company positioning; VC relationships; product strategy, product management, and product design; hiring, performance management, and the people leadership work of running effective one-on-ones, managing direct reports, organizational design, and team culture. On the other side, the inner work: somatic practice, mindfulness, reflection, self-awareness, and the slow development of self-mastery that determines whether a leader can hold the weight of the role over time. He believes founders need to understand themselves as much as they do their business, and that bridging personal growth and business strategy is critical to both a healthy life and a successful venture. In his experience, the operator skills and the inner work are not separate tracks. They reinforce each other. The founders who build the tactical muscle and the inner muscle scale further and stay healthier doing it. The ones who only build one tend to plateau, burn out, or fracture the company around them. This integrated approach is what he calls Mentorship Coaching, a blend of ICF-style coaching inquiry and hands-on operator advisory, calibrated session by session to what each client actually needs in the moment. He also goes deep on cofounder relationships and trust repair, working with founding teams through tension, role renegotiation, and rebuilding. In several documented cases, his cofounder mediation work has saved VC-backed companies from dissolution. Adam draws on 15+ years of operating experience, including cofounding Omni (acquired by Coinbase, 2019), serving as the first VP of Product at Series A Clearstory, Head of Brand and Design at Series C Kasa, and as the 7th employee and first in-house creative hire at Summit Series. His practice is tool and modality agnostic, drawing from the Mochary Method, Process Communication Model, the Trust Equation, Conscious Leadership, Crucial Conversations, Nonviolent Communication, Tactical Empathy, and ICF coaching lineages including Co-Active, New Ventures West, and Symbiosis. Beyond 1:1 coaching, Adam facilitates executive team coaching and workshops, founder cohort programs, founder and VC community dinners, and sponsored coaching partnerships with VC firms for their portfolio founders. He is an active mentor at Techstars and StartOut. Learn more at TheStartupFounderCoach.com
Co-founder and Chief Product Officer
Omni
August 2014 - March 2018
Grew company from 3 founders to 80+ employees, raising over $35MM in capital through Series B. Lead all product, physical infrastructure, R&D, brand, design, and experience. Omni exited to Coinbase in 2019. --- Omni helped people live lighter by providing on-demand access to physical storage and centralized peer to peer item rentals—Adam defined and led Omni’s brand, design, digital product, strategy, and facilities/real-estate operations. His roles included Product Manager for the iOS consumer app, Product Manager and designer of the internal ops support software suite; and Head of Physical Infrastructure, including procurement, operations, industrial design, and build-out of warehouse facilities; He also invented and built the proprietary item processing hardware station and authored Omni's Item processing, storage and handling Standard Operation Procedures.
Head of Production, Art, and Design; Creative Director; Product
Summit Series
November 2010 - March 2014
Summit, called the "TED meets Burning Man" by WIRED and "the hipper Davos," by Forbes, began as an event series with a mission to unite world leaders through events designed to catalyze positive personal and collective growth. Today, Summit is an events and media company, and a community of leaders across many disciplines and backgrounds. Summit invests in it's community and was also an early investor in Uber and Warby Parker. -- Adam was the Lead Producer and Creative Director of the Summit Series events from 2011-2014. As the 7th employee and first in-house creative hire, Adam is responsible for forming key parts of the "Summit experience" DNA. He conceived and directed the creative, technical, and experience production of Summit's annual gala and weekend events, including the first-ever Summit at Sea (2011), Summit Basecamp (2012), Summit Roadtrip Series (2012), Summit Outside (2013), and over 40 Summit Series Mountain Series weekend retreats in Eden, Utah (2012-2014). Beyond producing the gatherings themselves, Adam was an active curator and connector inside the Summit community, introducing and building relationships between the founders, CEOs, artists, creatives, and musicians who made Summit what it was. Adam also led end-to-end digital product for early iterations of Summit's community platform "The Collective." Adam was responsible for the initial concept and ux design, product management, selecting and managing the project with an outside development shop. Adam founded the ProCo Design Lab—an internal full-service creative / design-build agency—within Summit. Adam hired and managed the creative team that developed and built Summit and Summit Powder Mountain’s architectural direction, environments, graphic identities, and digital products. His passion for craft, interactive engagement, and community building informed the unique experience design and physical aesthetic of the Summit products, environments, and events.
Education
American University
BS / New Media Business and Digital Technology", Business Management, Computer Science, Graphic Design, Marketing, Audio Technology, Communications, Business
2006 - 2010
Activities and societies: Double in Photography; Photography Lab Assistant and TA; Design Club, Sailing Team, Student Union Board: Events, Entertainment and Production, WVAU Radio DJ, XM Satellite Radio XMU DJ, Founded AU's Rock Climbing Club, Elected Media Board Chair: oversaw board budget and operations (https://www.austudentmedia.org/) Entrepreneurship and Startups
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