Derrick Mar (Pathrise Co-Founder & CTO):

Kelly was an employee #3 at Pathrise that has scaled to a Series B startup. She was instrumental in working closely with my co-founder and I to find PMF to a 20M+ ARR business today.

I like to leverage Sheryas Doshi’s three personas in product leaders. The Operator who is strong at scaling teams, unblocking execution, and communication. The Craftsperson who’s excellent at defining products & strategy. And the Visionary who is excellent at big picture thinking, inventing what’s next, and seeing what other people can’t.

Kelly is one of the rare people that can have the characteristics of 3 personas. Pre-PMF Kelly was able to collaborate with us to iterate quickly to find the right product and business model. We found PMF in less than a year. As Chief of Staff, when we’re scaling from 15 to 80+ Kelly was pivotal in helping scale all of our teams and working with the rest of department heads to define clear strategies, roadmaps, and deliver on KPIs. During her time at Pathrise, she also lead our product team as a Senior PM shipping our job search extension that finds recruiters and automates sending personalized outreach that over the course of a few weeks achieved 40%+ DAU and 60% WAU of our user base. 

I’d highly recommend Kelly as a thought partner if you’re a founder. She’s been on the frontlines at the founder, leadership, team, and IC level.

CEO Testimonial (Advising Client):

“Kelly was an absolute pleasure to work with. She has deep knowledge and expertise in the workforce development industry and has been instrumental in helping us improve our processes and identifying key gaps in our business and approach. From the outset, Kelly took the time to deeply understand our team, our vision and our business processes to identify gaps and areas for improvement. Her structured methodology helped us gain a clearer understanding of our company and provided us with actionable direction that significantly enhanced our operations.

One standout example was when Kelly led the planning and execution of our offsite meeting. Her meticulous attention to detail ensured that every element of our offsite meeting was planned out and tailored to gain the most impact possible, resulting in a seamless and highly successful experience for our entire team. Kelly was able to navigate ambiguity and gaps in our business calmly and professionally and provided us with a reassuring presence that everything could be figured out and worked through.

Kelly is deeply empathetic and understanding of the founder journey and is an invaluable coach and mentor. She has a deeply people-oriented approach and has real world experience that informs her knowledge of our industry. I can't say enough good things about working with Kelly. ”

Co-Founder Testimonial (Advising Client):

“Kelly has been great to work with as we spin up our latest startup venture.  Her background in recruiting, coaching and mentoring, has been helpful as we look to build a disruptive new business.  She was able to fully understand the startup lifecycle we were in, and despite having few documented processes, has helped us to better understand our own business and optimize processes to support and accelerate our growth.

As an early stage startup mentor myself, I see the value she can provide not just our startup, but many other startups. Specifically her calm demeanor and intellectual curiosity will go a long way to supporting founders who wish to evolve their business quickly and efficiently. I will continue to recommend Kelly to work with other startup founders in similar and adjacent industries.”

CEO Testimonial (Advising Client):

"Kelly proved to be an invaluable resource during a crucial time for our startup. Not only did she sound out our proposed pivot by leveraging her keen product instincts and industry knowledge, but she also helped us anticipate and troubleshoot potential issues that could arise down the road. Working with her clarified our thinking and gave us confidence in pursuing a new direction." 

Co-Founder Testimonial (Advising Client):

“Kelly led productive and exciting brainstorming sessions with me and my co-founders around product-market-fit. Each week, we'd bring a new problem to solve and by the end of the meeting, we'd have a clear path to follow and feature to build and test. So grateful for Kelly's mentorship.”