My Story

Hi, I’m Andy. I’m a life coach, spiritual guide, writer, contemplative, and relaxer.

For most of my adult life, I was driven, capable, and successful, and I felt at home in the relentless pursuit of more.

I spent nearly two decades building a career in the tech industry, most of it based in Silicon Valley. I was an early employee at Facebook, Twitter, and Quora, working across product, marketing, and growth during the formative years of those companies. I went on to hold senior leadership roles at one of the most recognizable names in financial technology, eventually serving as President of Wealthfront, which is now a publicly traded company on a US stock exchange.

As a founding partner of a venture capital firm, I backed companies such as Robinhood and Webflow. I was also an advisor to Blue Bottle Coffee, Poshmark, Opendoor, and several other companies and spent time as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Greylock Partners, a top-tier venture capital firm led by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.

From the outside, it looked like exactly the kind of life a person builds toward. The proximity to power, professional recognition, and the potential for great wealth are what others in the tech industry and I worked relentlessly toward. What I didn't know then was that the identity driving all of it had been built a long time before Silicon Valley.

I was conditioned into that identity by a variety of factors:

• Being the youngest of three competitive boys —> Do anything you can to compete

• The death of my mom from mental illness when I was 10 —> A deep wound I carried throughout

• A handful of rocky years before and after her passing —> A destabilizing nervous system

• Narrowly surviving my chaotic birth —> Birth experiences leave imprints

• A strict, demanding, yet loving father —> High expectations, perfectionism, work ethic

• A culture and time in history that placed individual excellence as a core value —> Culture is collective psychological and behavioral programming

• Biological and psychological predispositions —> Deeply ingrained programming across all dimensions of life

• The list goes on…

And for those with an openness to alternative, ancient, and contemplative approaches:

• Divine interventions, aka spiritually transformative experiences

• Ancestral and archetypal patterns

• The alignment of the cosmos with grand universal cycles

I was having a hard time emotionally and relationally, but succeeding made me feel good. So, without realizing it, achievement became my purpose.

For decades, it worked remarkably well!

But somewhere around forty, something shifted. The professional achievements kept coming, yet they felt less and less resonant and meaningful each time. I tried taking on greater responsibilities to counter the waning enthusiasm for the life and career I was living.

What I know now is that I was in the early stages of an identity transformation. The kind that doesn't announce itself cleanly, that looks from the inside like confusion or burnout. I left Silicon Valley not because I had a plan, but because something in me refused to stay. It was one of the most disorienting and frightening decisions of my life. I was walking away from everything I had built, everything I knew how to be, and a large amount of wealth I was on the verge of obtaining.

And that’s when everything fell apart. I fell into depression and deeper into numbing out, eventually leading to my decision to spend 45 days in an addiction recovery center. My career was over, my old friendships were drifting apart, I was lonely, and a deluge of childhood pain was coming to the surface. So, I committed to doing the work to repair myself.

Then, in early 2021, something opened. A spontaneous spiritual awakening, unexpected and undeniable, that irreversibly reorganized how I understood myself and the world. It was followed by a series of extraordinary experiences, including some of the most difficult of my life, that continued to dismantle my old identity, making way for a new sense of self to emerge. The sort of experiences commonly described as a Kundalini Awakening in Hindu traditions. It goes by other names among other traditions and systems.

A proper death and rebirth.

I've spent the years since learning to understand what happened, experiencing the alchemy of transformation, and finding language for it. I trained as a coach and a spiritual guide. I deepened my knowledge of the contemplative traditions that understood how to guide each other through life’s major transitions. And I spent several years researching tools and methods for healing mind, body, and spirit.

I began writing about my experiences and supporting nonprofits working at the intersection of mental health and spirituality. And I started working with others who were standing at the same threshold I once stood at: successful on the outside, undone on the inside, trying to find their footing in unfamiliar terrain.

I know this territory from direct lived experience.

If you're in the middle of it, the uncertainty of leaving behind who you've been and the slow and disorienting emergence of who you're becoming, I'm here to help.