Startup Lessons From Y Combinator’s Most Sought-after Executive Coach

When Dr. Gena Gorlin told me that she’d interviewed the in-house coach at Y Combinator for the podcast that she co-hosts with Alice Bentick, I knew that their conversation was going to be gold. In her position as the first—and only—person to serve as the accelerator’s founder coach, Amy Buechler advised thousands of founders through the rollercoaster of emotions that comes with entrepreneurship. For this piece, Gena and Alice Lemée distilled Amy’s best advice for founders as they grapple with fear, anxiety, and doubt. —Kate Lee

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People would pay thousands of dollars to be a fly on the wall in some of Amy Buechler’s conversations. As a licensed psychotherapist and the first (and only) in-house founder coach at famed startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC), Buechler has mentored countless of its batches, the cohorts of startup founders who made it past YC’s razor-thin 1.5–2 percent acceptance rate.

But her onboarding as Silicon Valley’s top startup coach was no tiptoe through the tulips. When YC first hired Buechler in 2015 as a “batch director,” her job description was comically ambiguous (“look over founders” was the gist). There were no previous directors she could consult with, no set parameters, and no blueprint. “It was sheer and utter panic,” Buechler tells me (Gena) and my co-host Alice Bentick in this episode of our podcast, The Founder’s Mindset.