About me 👋🏼

My name full is Rafael Jara Simkin, but most people call me Rafa (yes, like the tennis player).

I bring 10 years of sales leadership, coaching, & advising experience to help you create momentum past your most perplexing challenges.

💼 My relevant professional experience includes:

  • leadership in e-commerce tech
  • building a b2b tech startup’s sales org from <$5M to $100M+
  • assisting with a merger into a large corporation post-acquisition
  • building enterprise field teams at another b2b tech startup
  • hired and led teams of managers and individual contributors, across US and Europe
  • advising & coaching for numerous founders and leaders at other tech startups
  • completed training through UC Berkeley’s Executive Coaching Institute (non-directive coaching) and Third Wave’s Psychedelic Coaching Institute (prep & integration)

🌤️ My relevant personal experience includes:

  • various relationships and their complications
  • losing many friends (to death) early in life
  • burning out at work, at least twice
  • managing debilitating anxiety
  • struggling with a hidden chronic illness
  • supporting a partner battling cancer
  • traditional & alternative therapies, including psychedelics
  • spiritual awakenings
  • learning to accept everything exactly as it is vs. how I want it to be

As a coach, I’m a listener who accepts you exactly as you are.

I am a challenger who asks questions that reframe your thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

I am a supporter for you in all the ways you want to best show up at work and in life.

Aside from coaching, I work part time at my friend’s VC firm where I help advise for portfolio companies and connect with technology executives for their perspectives on the market.

In my free time, I enjoy spending time with my wife, cycling around town, jiu jitsu, surfing, group meditation, group breath work, reading / audiobooks, and making up guitar songs for my wife and cat.

what coaching with me is like

I work with you, whether you’re at a career crossroads or you’re a manager or a founder with complex needs, using a framework focused on helping you determine what you value, what your intent is, what the current reality actually is, and then asking questions to help you unlock answers hidden inside yourself to create actions and experiments to learn and grow from.

I act as a gentle mirror, replaying both what I hear you say aloud and what I hear you say between the words.

I’ll also provide mental models and frameworks that help you organize your thoughts and feelings.

Over time, I make connections to past conversations, helping you understand the habits and thought patterns that interweave through your stories.

In addition, I act as an accountability partner, a resource provider (articles, books, podcasts, etc.), and a consistent advocate to help nurture and cultivate those seeds planted within our sessions.

Sessions end with a new or continued experiment to action on, which you devise and decide is best to continue developing your path.

The impact is more clarity, confidence, calmness, energy, and motivation in your work & life.