Testimonials

  • “Working with Kevin has been transformative. Kevin's coaching process, advice, and guidance goes beyond any other advisor or executive coach I've worked with. He started by gathering 360 feedback from Ownwell's investors, executive team, and my direct reports to help me focus and grow as a leader and executive in the highest leverage way. The results of this process were the most useful and helpful feedback I've received in my career.

    As a venture-backed startup CEO, my job changes every 6 months, and working with Kevin has helped me adapt, learn, and grow to continue to operate at the highest level. I started working with Kevin, following our Seed round from First Round Capital, since then, our company has found product market fit, the team has 4xed, and we continue to grow exponentially.”

    — Colton Pace, Founder and CEO, Ownwell

  • “As a startup founder and CTO, my job changes drastically as my company grows. I’m constantly stretching my comfort zone and taking on brand new challenges. My journey with Kevin as my coach was intense and incredible. He helped me set up goals from the get go and pushed me hard to achieve them. While working with Kevin, not only was I able to achieve my goals, I was able to discover my own best way of learning and overcome lifelong anxieties that were setting back my work life. I highly recommend Kevin to anyone who is looking for a very rewarding brain triathlon.”

    — Amy Zaoshi Yuan, Co-founder and CTO, PROVEN Skincare

  • I read a self-review I did before I worked with Kevin, and I couldn’t believe I had written it only 6 short months ago. Kevin has been instrumental in my growth in coaching and managing my team, being effective at the executive level, and he has shifted the way I view my role. I now have tools that I use daily to help me both professionally and personally to stay motivated and keep me focused. I truly don’t believe I would be operating at anywhere near the level I currently am without Kevin.”

    — Lindsey DeFalco, VP of Product, Crossbeam

  • Working with Kevin has unlocked enormous possibilities and growth for me that I had little idea was possible when I started.

    His methods are straightforward, organic, personal, and very effective. Kevin regularly guides me to confront and resolve the most challenging, sticky, important problems I face in my role as CEO of a VC-backed cleantech startup. I've also worked in other top engineering organizations (including Apple Special Projects), and I would recommend Kevin's coaching to anyone who seeks meaningful, lasting growth.”

    — Joe Miler, Founder and CEO, Jaro Fleet Technologies

  • What makes Kevin special and excellent is that he helps to cut through biases, emotions, and other distractions in order to understand business challenges and growth opportunities at their most fundamental levels. It’s hard work, but once the root of the problem is identified, Kevin helps to figure out what the business really needs, why we need it, and how to fix it. Going through this process results in clarity, personal growth, and confidence. I would recommend Kevin to any start-up executive willing to put in work to overcome their business challenges by facing them head-on and grow immensely as a leader in a short period of time.

    — Noam Yaffe, Founder and CEO, RenewaFi

  • “When I first met with Kevin, I was looking to find someone to help guide my own development to keep up with the evolving requirements of being a startup founder and CTO.

    Before our first meeting, I expected most of the work we’d do together to be tactical, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the work we did went much deeper into the ‘why’ behind my actions and how to get out of my own way to unlock unrealized potential. He helped me set clear goals, guided me toward the patterns in my own thinking that created obstacles, and created clear paths to overcome them.

    I feel much happier and more capable as a leader and highly recommend Kevin to anyone looking to do the work to get to next level of growth as a leader.”

    — Nikhil Mathew, Co-founder and CTO, Mutiny

  • “Kevin's background as a technical leader at Airbnb immediately caught my attention, and his hands-on experience navigating the complexities of a high-growth company provided invaluable personal insights into the challenges I was encountering as an executive.

    Kevin's approach stood out when he conducted a highly effective and insightful interview-based 360 review for me. With precision, he highlighted my strengths and skillfully guided me in identifying focal points for our work together. On a tactical level, Kevin played a pivotal role in restructuring and refining my goals, and helped redesign my habit patterns to optimally support achieving them.

    What sets Kevin apart is his willingness to delve deep into understanding the underlying factors shaping my perception and interpretation of events. This profound exploration not only enhanced my communication skills but also elevated my leadership effectiveness. Working with Kevin Rice as my executive coach has proven to be a strategic investment in my professional growth and success.”

    — Mike Ross, Senior Director of Product, Skydio

  • “Kevin enabled me to see where changes in approach were needed in a number of key areas, and how to drive effective changes. Working with Kevin, I was able to significantly improve several key aspects of how our engineering team works including velocity and consistency as well as how our work is perceived by other functions.

    We achieved all this in a short period of time, at the end of which I was promoted from Senior Director to VP of Engineering. I highly recommend Kevin's coaching -- and also his body of articles, which capture key topics that come up in his coaching, such as How to Bring Tenured Employees Along With Change.”

    — Marc Siegel, VP of Engineering, Panorama Education

  • “Kevin’s coaching has helped me grow as a leader and taught me the tools to navigate challenging situations that a fast growing startup creates. Thanks to Kevin’s guidance, I’ve become a more confident, self-aware, and effective leader. I highly recommend Kevin’s executive coaching.”

    — Cagri Aksay, VP of Engineering, Crusoe Energy

  • “When I first started working with Kevin, I was struggling to keep up with the growing responsibilities at work and was close to burnout. Over the course of 6 months working with Kevin, I’ve felt a shift to being in control and on top of my responsibilities.

    Kevin cultivated a safe environment where I could get vulnerable and dig deep into my emotions and tendencies in order to fundamentally change my perspective, mindset, and habits. These deep shifts in thinking have improved my abilities as a leader and invigorated me to continue on this growth trajectory.

    Kevin has helped me go from feeling overwhelmed with the pace of growth of our startup to being excited about growing just as fast alongside it.

    — Kevin Ho, Co-founder, Optimism PBC

  • “I started working with Kevin because I felt overwhelmed by the amount of change my startup was going through, growing from 15 to 70 people in a short period of time. It felt challenging trying to balance my individual, team, and executive level responsibilities all at once with everything constantly in flux.

    Kevin helped guide deep self-reflection and self-experimentation over a period of six months to help me identify how I could be my most effective work self. I've experienced more growth than I ever imagined was possible through a coaching engagement and I would wholeheartedly recommend working with Kevin to any founder or engineering leader in a similar circumstance.“

    — Hong Kim, Co-founder and CTO, Bitwise Asset Management

  • “Before working with Kevin, I had done my fair share of leadership training through bootcamps and classes. While they were all insightful, I never felt that my day-to-day behavior or mindset shifted in significant ways.

    Working with Kevin changed that. With him I had so many visceral ‘aha!’ moments that have stuck with me, even a year later. He helped me reach a whole new level of self-awareness, and gave me tools to magnify my own strengths and solve problems in my own authentic ways. Kevin’s coaching has made me a more confident and flexible leader and human overall.

    — Cecilia Yang, Design Leader, Airbnb

  • Kevin helped me clarify and sharpen my intuitions around how to solve ambiguous problems -- mostly by asking probing questions, and also by sharing his own experiences when relevant. He also guided me in reflecting on emotional and psychological tendencies that prevent me from being a more effective leader. He prompted me to devise actionable plans and held me accountable to them. Thanks to Kevin, I've become a more confident, self-aware, and effective leader.”

    — Amy Shen, Co-founder and CTO, Fanhouse

  • Kevin is a superb coach. He helped me discover my personal mission and delve deeper into what was holding me back from becoming the best version of myself. Kevin has been fantastic in helping me discover my blind spots, and how to fix them. He also helped me discover that I'm a much more visual person than I thought, which has been an incredible unlock for me.

    I can vouch for Kevin's ability to quickly focus on what's important, to help me understand and implement it in my own way. I find myself reaching for the tools we developed together almost daily, and they have become a part of my life. I would highly recommend working with Kevin.”

    — Satyajeet Pal, Engineering Leader, Bitwise Asset Management

  • “As a solo founder and CEO of a growing startup, it feels impossible to stop my workflow, ignore the many high priority, flailing projects, and dedicate a whole weekend to the unknown outcomes of a coaching retreat. Having done it, I now know how crazy valuable it is. Underneath years of my hard work and struggle I found deep lessons about who I am, what animates me, and what junk I’ve been carrying around that I don’t need. There’s an incredible release of subterranean energy when you face the bullshit and see it for what it is, with compassion and honesty. An intensive coaching retreat with Kevin provided me that opportunity in a container I knew I could trust. I highly recommend it.”

    — Joe Miler, Founder and CEO, Jaro Fleet Technologies

  • Working with Kevin unlocked a new perspective towards life and leadership for me that could not be covered in any book or course. In just six months, he’s been instrumental in facilitating a paradigm-shifting breakthrough in how I communicate and operate with my team and peers. Each session with Kevin generates insights that I am immediately able to put into practice with extraordinary results. For example, as a direct result of our very first session together I implemented a change that is saving my company $1.4 million yearly. Kevin’s unique blend of insightful analogies, humor, and anecdotes drawn from his own journey in the tech sphere, transcends the coaching experience. Kevin doesn't just coach you to become a better leader, he inspires transformative personal and professional evolution.

    — Chris D'Annunzio, Vice President, D'Annunzio & Sons, Inc. Engineers & Contractors

  • “I have had years of professional coaching and have invested six figures multiple times to support my own development. Having a deep coaching session with Kevin was truly surprising because of how much we were able to accomplish in just two hours with ease in a comfortable way.

    The power of what I experienced during the deep coaching session with Kevin shifted me and allowed me to release a significant block that’s affected me my entire life. Now, I’m able to access a new kind of vibrant aliveness at the times when I need it most.

    People invest in therapy for a decade or in high level coaching for years and still won’t experience the level of change I was able to have with Kevin in two hours.

    — Sarah Fruehling, Founder, CEO, and Master Certified Coach at Fruehling Coaching & Facilitation