Hi, I’m Atom.

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And, I am grateful to meet you.

I help leadership teams grow their tech company revenue and improve cultures.

My background is software product strategy, revenue growth, and go to market launches. What makes me unique is that I use neuropsychology as a lens to change behaviors and get results.

Given what I’ve learned about stress—the hard way in business and in life—I also do a form of life or executive coaching. It is a very innovative program.

During a year-long sabbatical in 2021, I gained a tremendous clarity regarding my mission, passions, and superpowers. Every day, I wake up and march towards improving humanity.

Here is my short story:

At age 8, I designed my first product as a homework assignment in 3rd grade. The concept of innovation stuck.

14, my first passion was nerdy—studying HBR magazines and PMA books while in high school. Because of the interest, I then spent two years selling motivation, sales, and leadership training tools and learned to love people.

My college degree in industrial design (design thinking and innovation) became my second passion—loved all my classes—pitching new ideas in 12 quarters of labs, 3D modeling, manufacturing, UI design, entrepreneurship, art history, prototyping, graphic design, etc. With an undergrad thesis in human computer interaction, I began a 20+ year career in the software industry—working for some truly world-class companies and with world-class teams.

In 2010, a series of very difficult life events led me to an ongoing (currently 11-year study of) neuropsychology, gratitude, meditation, and cognitive decision-making. As the years go by, I use this insight more and more to help others overcome life and business challenges, which is a third passion.

As of 2020, the world of vaccinations has inspired me further—into studying spirituality, emotional connectedness, subtle energy measurement, neurolinguistics, and customer-employee-employer partnerships.

Over time, I have added these to a broad career in high-growth software product management, sales, customer success, consulting, strategy, and marketing. This has produced consistently strong business outcomes—often in areas where I had no prior experience. In my last five gigs, part of my job was pitching growth ideas to the CEO and pursuing them.

As of August 2021, I am launching Adam 4.7—the first integrated suite “designed from the bottom up and top down” to make a positive impact on the lives of others. LOL.

My Business Services for Startups, Companies, PEs, and VCs: The people who “know me at my best” consider me an expert at:

1. Product strategy, value pricing, and product management leadership in user interface, customer experience, CRM, and artificial intelligence areas.
2. Customer, sales, market, service, and partner leadership via trust, emotion, value, vision, behavior, meaning, challenge, and cognitive neuroscience.
3. Connecting with people—making friends everywhere I go and naturally finding common bonds at speed.
4. Reading emotions at an empath level to quickly understand people’s deepest fears, needs, and desires.
5. Helping people see the opportunities and rewards that come with motivation while leading them to good decision-making and action.
6. Product ideation, decision optimization design, and business model design (or redesign) based on real-time analytics and machine learning.
7. Strategic communications, brand, and go to market messaging, development, validation, refinement, application, measurement, and distribution across all customer touchpoints and departments.
8. Judging decisions with discernment and clarity about risk, reward, and adaptation in financial terms.

The people who “know me at my best” consider me an expert at:

1. Reading emotions at an empath level to quickly understand people’s deepest fears, needs, and desires—while understanding their top business priorities. AND, most clients like to dialogue about spiritual and artistic realms of Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Greek Philosophy, Christianity, (getting into Muslim soon!), and many other categories of spirituality.
2. Pulling gratitude into their life in every way possible—to be of better service to their customers, employees, partners, friends, and family.
3. Helping them 1) find the most neuropsychologically profound personal mission statement possible, 2) develop a deep, internal awareness of how to apply their deepest passions, and 3) turn their personal kryptonite into their greatest super-power—all with integrated design thinking and a priority for life balance—to help them lead and grow their business with heart.
4. Rewiring their neurons for personal growth and success using multiple modalities of neuropsychology—including emotional self-awareness, perception, decision-making, meditation, and breathwork.
5. Viewing themselves as a product or service, breaking themselves down into legos, and helping them redesign themselves as new and improved products (sometimes it takes a few important tweaks, sometimes it is an overhaul to get from V.1.0 to V.5.0).
6. Advising on business strategy and go to market planning—from starting 5 companies and working with or pitching over 40 CEOs at companies from $1M to $2B in revenue.
7. Advising on new product and service design—from a 25 years of crafting new things from of atoms or bits.
8. Advising on technology-driven growth opportunities—from 25 years in the software industry.

My Charitable, Personal, and C-Level Business Growth and Personal Coaching Services:

I specialize in three areas: 1) where CEOs and owners fundamentally want to change a key perspective in their life and organization, 2) where parent/child relationships impact business dynamics on the executive team, and 3) where executives are feeling burnt out and want to feel alive again. These are all based on personal, lifelong experiences.

Why Neuro-Psychology in Business?

1. In EVERY business, it is people who make decisions to drive business outcomes, communicate with the world around them, and build constructive customer, employee, partner, and investor relationships.

2. Yet, the investment in people is SIGNIFICANTLY lacking. For example, businesses spend trillions managing IT and roughly 10% of this on training and coaching. Aren’t brains more important than CPUs? Don’t we know how strong of a role emotions play in decision-making?

3. On top of this, COVID has put an exclamation point on historically poor employee-employer relations, and this is underscored by trends such as the Great Resignation. People are demanding that their work is a partnership. Brands need to move past culture to ethos and spiritually inspired platforms.

4. We are just starting an era where humans pervasively use sensors/software/data to more purposefully and effectively change their behaviors AND related neuron structures. This will only continue. Subtle energy sensors, like heartrate variability, are just coming online now in early mainstream hardware. Media is currently providing neurolinguistic shows.

5. Neuropsychology (or call it cognitive neuroscience) connects the study of functions like attention, perception, creativity, problem solving and reasoning with many biological aspects of the brain related to learning and behavior change (e.g. emotional connectedness or neurolinguistics).

6. In this and other contexts, the emerging “psychology-tech” market is a “blue ocean” and will reach over a trillion B2B dollars over the next decade. And, data-driven behavior change will provide a 10-100X ROI.

Other Interesting Stuff

When I am not working as a consultant, entrepreneur, or employee, I am soul coaching, trail running, paddle boarding, meditating, listening to music, playing instruments, hanging out on Roblox with my daughter and dancing, spending time with loved ones, and opening way to many books or web pages about eastern philosophy, holistic medicine, and spiritual energy.

With entrepreneurial DNA, I have started 5 companies who failed (well, one sold) and concepted products or written business plans for many more. There is a broad range of business designs I understand and love learning about.

In 2010, I began publishing 365 Days of Thankfulness to create a new perspective on life. After 1000s of posts, I paused the effort with tremendous lessons learned. The main one how much of a powerful force gratitude is for humanity.

In 2020, I began to experience many aspects of life as an empath, which is easy to question, hard to navigate, and requires serious spiritual work to develop.

In 2021, I invented a personal leadership and life coaching program to help people change perspective, overcome fear, heal their past, find inspiration, and achieve personal and spiritual growth. It applies to business and life.

Things People Say and Surprising FAQs

Full of ideas, energy, and enthusiasm with an amazing ability to work. Adam has the comprehensives knowledge, detailed experience, and the ground level skills essential to 21st century leadership. He is an asset to any forward-looking team that is driven by excellence & achievement.

Dave Ryan, Founder of 4 Exited Software Companies (Most Recent by Battery Ventures)

Work Experience with Unicorns and Magic Quadrant / G2 Leader Products?

• Unicorns: WebMD, Siebel Systems, and Pivotal Software
• MQ Product Suites: 1. Siebel CRM Suite, 2. Unica Marketing Automation Suite, 3. Pivotal PaaS and Big Data Suite, 4. Zoom Interntional WFO Suite, 5. SaaSOptics Financial Operations Suite

Adam is an excellent thinker. His curiosity and passion energize team discussions. His creativity pushes everyone to greater performance.

Murad Fatehali, Senior Director, Business Value Services at Salesforce.com

Proudest Moment in Business?

I wasn’t necessarily proud then…but looking back…it was whenever there was a hard decision, and I chose integrity over comfort. For example, my manager wanted me to fire someone on my team after the team member announced they had cancer. I said, “Absolutely not and no way in hell…you do it if you want but I won’t,” even though I knew it made me more of a target to be fired. Yes, of course I am proud of the metrics improvements and ROI, but the impact on people is much bigger and is a much richer ROI.

Hands down, Adam is the best marketer and strategic product marketer I’ve ever worked with in my 25 year software career. He has been instrumental in leading our company and product in new directions and towards growth markets.

Bill Devlin, CTO and Head of Product, Marketing, and Engineering at Elevēo

Biggest Failure in Business?

Lots of them, particularly as an entrepreneur and a human. I’d say my biggest failure was telling myself that I was worthless. It also turned into my biggest success. Lots of other examples too.

Anyone who has met Adam knows that he is an energetic, hard-working, professional who is passionate about innovative use of technology to drive real business results.

Edward Stone, VP of Sales and Chief Customer Officer, AutoQuotes

First Trip to the Hospital for Stress?

1997. As head of product for WebMD 1.0, I went to the ER because digestive tract contractions made me heave in moaning pain.

TBD next iteration

TBD next iteration

# of CEOs and Founders I have worked with directly or pitched to?

Wow. I don’t even believe it. Bert E, Jeff A, Blake P, Gary C, John C, Juan Pablo G, James B, Alston G, Tom S, Ron B, Adam C, Yuchun L, Tom M, David B, Larry B, Jags R, Abby K, Alexis R, Shay B, Salvatore S, Roman S, Ed S, Jay W, Brian S, Jake R, Lara H, John H, John D, Tom S, Dave R, Tim M, oh, can’t forget Barry. It is humbling to count this. Let’s see, 32 or more? Wow.

TBD next iteration

TBD next iteration

Favorite Business Quote?

There is no such thing. That is like asking who your favorite musician is.

1. Mike Tyson: Everyone has a strategy until they get punched in the face.

2. Attributed most often to Mahatma Gandhi: A Customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption on our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider on our business. He is a part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.