Welcome to uploading the podcast, where we take you behind the wheel with the world's best creators, marketers, and professionals who have cracked the code on how to profit through content. You'll learn the ins and outs of content, strategy, creation, production, distribution, growth platforms, tools and more. If you haven't already, be sure to join Cas Magic, the all in one content workspace for professionals. We'll be sending out tips from our shows in our weekly newsletter, and we've also got a slack community of over a thousand creators, so make sure to drop in and say hello. And now get ready for the show. Welcome to today's episode of Uploading. Today we have the pleasure of being joined by Alyssa Cohn, who is a coach and works with startup CEO's, co founders, and other executives and board members all over the world. Alyssa has been named the number one startup coach by global Gurus and has worked with executives in Venmo, Etsy, Dell and the New York Times.

She's got a book called from startup to grown up, which is a guidebook for anyone who wants to grow as a leader. And she also has a podcast by the same name for startup to grown up, where she's interviewed multiple execs, coaches, everyone from the co founder of Loom to many other really successful leaders. In this episode, we're going to talk about how she became one of the top startup coaches in the world, how she's leveraged social media to grow her coaching business, and how she applies her coaching frameworks and content to her own life. So, Alyssa, I'm not sure if I covered everything, but I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more, you know, about your background and what got you started on the path to being such an amazing coach.

I love it. Thank you guys so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. And I guess I would say that my epiphany around becoming a coach, it started with my epiphany about wanting to leave the corporate world. So I was in the corporate world. I was at Price Warner House Coopers, which is a fantastic firm and also not a good fit for me. So I thought to myself, I hope I get the flu so I don't have to go to work tomorrow. And indeed, I got the flu.

And so I was rushed to the emergency room and I just thought, this is not for me. I gotta figure out what it is and the reason, you know, I think it's important for all of us to sort of listen to ourselves because I think a lot of the Joseph Campbell quote, which is if you see your path all the way through to the end, you are following someone else's path. Your path only becomes clear moment by moment as each foot hits the ground. And that was definitely my career at PwC. I was like, I'm all set. This is going to be the thing. But, like, ultimately it just did not nourish me. So I set out down the path to figure out what nourishes me.

And I had to look at a lot of different things and it was really challenging. But ultimately I went to this conference as a volunteer, and then the people said, okay, now this coach is going to speak to the volunteers. And I'm like, do I have to be here for this? Like, what is this? And then it turns out that this coach spoke to the volunteers and I was completely mesmerized. I was like, what's that? I want to do that. It was like violence played and I could see that is the thing that I want to do. And then I followed her around the conference, and at some point she did this talk with 500 people and she said, who wants to stand up right now and get live coaching? And I thought, what's going to happen now? Someone stood up. She did live coaching for like 20 minutes with that person. And I thought, oh, my God, I could never do that.

But at the same time, I thought I could do that. I really saw myself in her and in coaching because fundamentally, coaching is about making a difference. And I really knew that the, my essence at my core, I wanted to make a difference and have an impact. And that's how coaching was sort of fit into the whole thing. And I just sort of said, okay, I'm going to get started on this path.

So what, what did it look like in the early days? Like, what was, so you have this experience, you realize you're like, this is something that resonates with me. Like, what came next? You still had a job, presumably, like, so what, what did that transition look like? What did the first, you're dipping your toes into the coaching world look like for the first time.

Yeah. So I still had a job. And also I was super young. So I'm thinking, how can I be the executive coach? So young? So I took coach trading, I hired my own coach, and actually I got a job in the startup world. So I was a CFO of one startup and then I was the head of strategy of another startup, and that was all in the two thousands. And meanwhile I was pursuing coach training and coaching all my friends for free. And, you know, the startup world imploded, as you may know, in those days. And then I thought, okay, great, I'm going to become a coach now.