Tech & Transformation
The change is technical.
The work is human.
We are a technology and AI consultancy that spends as much time on the people as on the systems. We have been founders, CEOs, COOs, and CTOs through every major technology shift since dial-up, and we build with AI ourselves. When a company faces a hard call, it’s usually one we’ve had to make too: what to build, who should lead it, how fast to move, and what it does to the people who have to live with it.
What we do
Six ways companies bring us in.
Scope and lead AI work
We sit between leadership and engineering to figure out what’s worth building, then make sure the company has what it takes to ship it: the people, the data, the budget, and executive support.
Run the transformation
When a company needs more than advice, we embed as a fractional CTO, CxO, or product leader and run the change ourselves: the technology, the team, and the way the organization makes decisions. Anywhere from six to twenty-four months, and often longer than anyone budgeted.
Write the AI policy
Before a company can adopt AI, it has to decide what it will and won’t do with it: customer data, privacy, what employees may use, and who is accountable. We wrote Goop’s first AI policy, and we help boards and executive teams write theirs.
Adoption and change management
New tools fail when the people meant to use them don’t. Teams work around the tool, managers worry about being replaced, and departments that were never consulted dig in. We plan the rollout, train the teams, align the incentives, and deal with the worry out loud.
Oversee outside firms
When you bring in a consulting firm or vendor, we work from your side of the table: scoping the brief, then holding the firm to what it promised.
Coach the leaders through it
Every technology change lands on a few leaders who have to make the calls. We coach the founders, CEOs, and CTOs in that seat, including on the newer questions, like what it means to manage a team when half the work is being done by agents.
Who we work with
Two kinds of companies.
Some of the companies we work with were built before AI and now have to fold it into how they already run, without breaking the business that pays the bills. That work is mostly judgment and sequencing: what to adopt, what to ignore, what to change first, and how to bring along a workforce that didn’t ask for any of this.
Others are AI-native from the first day, where the old playbook doesn’t apply and the operating model is being invented in real time. That work is faster and stranger: small teams, new roles, and decisions with no precedent to lean on.
We spend time on both sides, and the line between them is disappearing quickly.
Track record
We’ve done this work.
As Co-CTOs of Goop, we led the migration to Shopify and the harder job underneath it: the people. We restructured the team and kept a nervous organization productive through twelve months of change. We also wrote the company’s first AI policy.
At The MAZE Group, a digital agency working with LVMH, Dior, Veronica Beard, Ledger, and HelloFresh, Nick was President and JT was COO. We modernized the agency’s own HR, IT, and operating processes as it grew into a much larger firm and launched a private equity arm. We also worked on the transformations it delivered for clients.
Before that, between us: founder, CEO, COO, and CTO across digital agencies, software and hardware companies, ecommerce, and media. Our consultancy General Things ran digital transformation work for Nike, National Geographic, Cisco, SETI, TED, and GoPro, and sold to GoPro in 2013, where Nick became VP of Software and Services and JT a Senior Director. Together we grew the software team from 60 people to 250, launched GoPro Plus, ran ecommerce, and started GoPro’s first AI work with members of the original Siri team from SRI International. GoPro went public in 2014.
Today we coach the founders, CxOs, and leadership teams of AI-native companies, including an AI marketing platform, an AI legal software company, and an AI card trading platform.
CoachClaw
We build with AI ourselves.
We’re building CoachClaw, a private, persistent extension of your human coach that’s there in the 167 hours a week you’re not in session, in beta with our own clients now.
And a lot of the leaders we coach are building AI products themselves. Between their work and ours, we’re rarely talking about any of this in the abstract.