Katie Kirsch: from high pressure founder to intentional, confident leader
Company: Twenty
Founder: Katie Kirsch, Co-Founder
Stage: Pre-seed → Early Growth
Engagement: Professional and health coaching within lume’s Executive Lab
Before lume: a high-performance founder in a high-pressure moment
When Katie Kirsch began working with a coach, she was at one of the most pivotal inflection points of her life. She had just graduated from Harvard Business School, raised a 750k pre-seed round for Twenty, hired her first team member, and moved to New York to take the company full time.
On paper, everything looked like momentum. Internally, it felt more complex.
“I was taking the startup full time in a new city. It was my first real leap into building something from the ground up, and the expectations felt heavy.”
There was pressure from all sides. Pressure to succeed after HBS. Pressure to deliver on the confidence of investors and professors. Pressure to represent the founder she thought she should be.
“Being at a place like Harvard sets an incredibly high bar for what your startup should look like. The expectations were huge, and I felt all of them.”
The business was early and ambiguous, and she was navigating the psychological weight of leading for the first time.
Swimming in the dark
Katie had studied hundreds of case studies in business school, but quickly discovered that building her own company felt entirely different.
“In class, you study the protagonists. But when you become the protagonist of your own case, everything changes.”
She was moving fast but not always with clarity. The early stages of Twenty were filled with unknowns, rapid decisions, and the pressure to show traction quickly. She felt the stress of communicating to investors, reading signals from the market, and trying to determine whether they were moving in the right direction.
The question beneath the surface was one every founder faces: Is this working? And if it’s not, what does that say about me?
Choosing a coach who had walked the path
Katie did not just want support. She wanted someone who had lived what she was living. A founder who had raised money, built a company, experienced volatility, and navigated the early stages with clarity.
When she met her coach, everything clicked.
“She was the perfect coach for me. She had been exactly where I was a few years before. Same school, same founder journey, same stage. I saw the path she had walked, and it was the one I wanted to walk too.”
Her coach became part strategic partner, part emotional anchor, part accountability guide, and part mirror.
Inside the lab
Working with her coach helped Katie shift from reactive to intentional leadership. They explored how she made decisions, what she prioritized, and the mindset behind her day-to-day execution.
Katie learned to identify which challenges deserved attention, which required letting go, and how to hear her own judgment more clearly.
“She helped me clean the slate and focus on what mattered most. I showed up more intentionally, with more empathy and awareness.”
She became more thoughtful, more grounded, and more precise in how she led.
Leadership shifts that changed everything
Three themes shaped her transformation:
1. Clarity in decisions
Katie learned how to move confidently through ambiguity, making decisions from conviction rather than fear or pressure.
She navigated major calls with more calmness: when to pivot, when to hire, when to let go, when to take a risk, and when to slow down.
2. Emotional endurance
Instead of carrying the weight of every pressure alone, she developed tools to separate the noise from what actually mattered.
“She helped me balance the reality that the journey can be really hard and still approach it with gratitude, clarity, and calmness.”
3. Sustainable performance
Katie’s definition of performance shifted from short-term optics to long-term endurance.
“I think of performance as sustainability now. Not the flashy milestones or PR moments. It is how consistently you can show up over a decade.”
This mindset created the foundation for more healthy, grounded leadership.
Internal stability → external impact
The internal shifts showed up in the company’s direction and outcomes.
With her coach’s support, Katie clarified the business’s trajectory and made high-stakes decisions with confidence.
One of those decisions shaped the rest of her career: the evolution from Twenty into what eventually became lume.
“She helped us navigate the pivot and triple our ARR in less than a year.”
Katie also navigated team changes, growth decisions, and high-pressure transitions with more steadiness and self-trust.
A new kind of leader
Looking back, Katie describes the transformation simply:
“Working with a coach made me a calmer and more confident leader.”
She learned to trust her instincts, quiet the pressure, and lead from intention rather than expectation. The work gave her clarity not only on the company she was building, but the kind of founder she wanted to be.
The transformation
Katie’s experience reflects what many high-performing founders discover: the journey demands not just intelligence or strategy, but emotional endurance, clarity, and a stable internal system.
Through coaching, she built the confidence, mindset, and resiliency to lead through uncertainty with more ease and precision.
“Finding the right coach feels like finding a superpower. Your greatest confidant, your biggest supporter, your inner compass. It is one of the most valuable relationships a founder can have.”
