Daniel PaoBook intro

About

I build things, and I've bought a lot that didn't work.

Both are why the coaching is useful.

01The record

~4 yrs
CTO, VC-backed AI startup
Integration-heavy stack, small team, every technical call
Same years
Agency buyer
Recruiting, marketing, and others — all the same failure model
Now
Founder
Building an agent platform for go-to-market teams
Ongoing
Coach
1:1 with engineers, founders, and engineering leaders

02Long version

For about four years I was CTO of a VC-backed AI startup. Small team, wide surface area, integration-heavy — the kind of role where you own the architecture, the hiring, the on-call rotation, and the answer when a customer asks why something broke.

To cover the work my team couldn't, I bought agencies: recruiting, marketing, a few others. Every one ran the same play. A retainer. An account manager. A junior doing the actual work. A monthly deck. Nobody accountable for the outcome.

So I left to build the replacement. Today I'm building an AI agent platform for go-to-market teams, where most of the code is written by AI agents inside a review pipeline I designed — because I wanted agency-scale output on software economics, and nobody was selling that.

Along the way people started asking how. First engineers wanting to get real work out of coding agents. Then founders stuck between prototype and product. Then GTM people who'd been burned by a vendor. That's the coaching. It's not a side hustle I invented for a landing page — the landing page exists because the DMs outgrew my inbox.

I'll tell you when your plan is wrong. That's most of the value. If you want someone to agree with you, this is an expensive way to get it.

What I'm actually good at

  • Getting real, reviewable work out of AI coding agents
  • Turning a prototype into something someone pays for
  • Designing outbound that doesn't torch your domain
  • Saying the thing everyone in the room is avoiding

What I'm not

Not a certified executive coach, not a life coach, and not an agency. If you need therapy, a recruiter, or someone to run your ads, I'll point you elsewhere.

Next step

Start with a free 20-minute intro call

No pitch. We work out whether I can actually help, and I'll say so if I can't.