I'm a solo founder with deep expertise in creativity, writing, leadership, systems thinking, and human-centered strategy. I've worked at the executive level in high-pressure creative industries and spent a formative year inside an HR-focused SaaS startup. That year shaped the foundation for everything I've built since.
The Lichen Protocol is an AI super-powered, modular operating system designed for what makes or breaks a startup: the people inside it. It delivers emotional, strategic, and operational wisdom at the right time, in the right way. It learns fast, offering real-time insights and longitudinal data on founder behavior, alignment, and decision quality. The analog version has been validated. Now it's ready to scale.
My journey here started long before the product.
In my advertising career, I encountered a powerful SaaS-based leadership tool that transformed me from a manager into a leader. Years later, I joined that same startup to help bring it to market. But the team collapsed. We weren't using the very system we were selling. That experience didn't just teach me what fails and why, it turned me into a founder.
Over the past four years, I've been designing, testing, and refining a system that can actually hold the intensity and rhythm of startup life:
- Inside an eco-retreat and a community development board
- With people navigating deep mental and physical health challenges
- With a disruptive startup in the international aid space
- And now with a national business network preparing for pilot integration
The Lichen Protocol brought me here—into clarity. Now it's ready to guide others through the chaos of startup life, turning breakdown into rhythm, vision into guidance, alignment into momentum.
The problem:
Over half of all startups fail because of team dynamics.
The Solution:
The Lichen Protocol is an AI-powered OS for startups - solo, small teams, big teams - that super-powers internal rhythm, alignment, and coherence—making the human engine more aligned and the company more likely to succeed.
What Lichen isn't and is:
It's not just another dashboard. It's an intelligent field, built on best practices in psychology, leadership, and resilience—part HR strategist, part life coach, part organisational mirror.
A learning living system:
Lichen adapts by learning from behavioral data across teams. It uncovers so many important signals, including:
Break Signals — signs of misalignment and risk
- When does a founder stop trusting their own judgment—and what happens next?
- What patterns of avoidance show up right before a co-founder break?
- Which startups are making decisions from conviction—and which from collapse?
- Who is quietly burning out while hitting their KPIs?
- Where does urgency turn from momentum into misalignment—and can we catch it in time?
- Which founders recalibrate after failure—and which repeat the same fracture?
- What signals show a team has moved from clarity to chaos—before churn or CAC reveals it?
- Who's making clean decisions post-pivot—and who's pretending they are?
- When does "hustle" start to cost more than it creates—and who notices?
- What does co-founder trust actually look like under pressure—and when does it start to fray?
- Which teams are scaling coherence—and which are scaling a mess?
Build Signals — indicators of strength and alignment
- Which founders return stronger after every setback—and how do they do it?
- Where is clarity deepening across the team, not just at the top?
- Who is making the cleanest decisions under pressure—and leaving signal in their wake?
- Which teams are building momentum without burning themselves out?
- What does healthy co-founder trust actually look like in motion?
- Who is evolving faster than their market—and still staying grounded?
- Where are pivots unlocking deeper product-market alignment—not just survival?
- Which startups are scaling with rhythm, not just speed?
- Who is holding the long arc vision *and* executing week by week?
- Which leaders are creating space for their teams to thrive—not just survive?
- Who's building a culture where clarity compounds?
Modular Protocol Library:
A toolkit for co-founder drift, burnout, decision drag, impostor energy, and strategic confusion.
These protocols aren't reactive—they're rhythm-based. Lichen detects tension and suggests timely interventions.
Team Behaviour:
The system builds a living map of team behavior:
- How confidence fluctuates after a pivot
- Where leadership gaps emerge
- Which disruptions precede inflection points
This is not just software. It's the AI-powered nervous system of a growing startup.
Lichen supports solo-founders, founders, co-founders, teams, and the startup as a whole. It runs alongside daily operations and adapts to the most critical moments in a startup's lifecycle.
How it works:
Onboarding & Initial Diagnostic
Each founder completes a short diagnostic (5 minutes) that measures clarity, alignment, decision-making rhythm, and leadership signals. This sets a baseline.
Protocol Delivery
The system recommends a set of short, focused protocols based on the current data. These are targeted tools that address specific challenges—such as co-founder misalignment, role confusion, burnout signals, or post-pivot uncertainty.
Ongoing Diagnostics
Diagnostics are run weekly and also triggered at key moments—after launches, team changes, investor meetings, or major decisions. This keeps the system responsive and relevant.
Role-Based Operating Stacks
Lichen delivers targeted support through pre-configured Operating Stacks for different roles and relationships:
- CEO Stack: Vision holding, strategic clarity, internal pacing
- CTO Stack: Technical leadership, overwhelm risk, rhythm reset
- Co-Founder Stack: Relational repair, shared decision-making
- Team Stack: Role clarity, priority realignment, monthly rhythm
- Team Member Stack: Autonomy, focus, and individual contribution
System-Wide Visibility for Thriving
Startups benefit from layered visibility: founder clarity, co-founder alignment, team cohesion, and strategic pacing. This system not only helps avoid failure, it enables sustainable growth, stronger decisions, and healthier execution across the board.
What's been built:
- 112 protocols across 17 structured protocol series
- Role-specific Operating Stacks for CEOs, CTOs, teams, solo founders, and more
- AI-ready structure with mapped diagnostic logic and rhythm-based delivery model
- A fully functioning beta version now live on the Lichen Protocol microsite
Where it's been used:
- Inside an eco-retreat and a community development board
- With individuals navigating significant mental and physical health challenges
- With a disruptive startup in the international aid sector
- In early scoping with a national business network preparing for pilot use
What users are experiencing:
- Increased clarity in high-stakes decisions
- Reconnection to personal rhythm and leadership pacing
- Insight into energy patterns, overwhelm cycles, and misaligned urgency
- Ability to name, reflect on, and engage with internal friction before it leads to burnout or rupture
What's underway:
- Public beta launched on Netlify: live protocol access and Solo Founder GPT integration
- Preparing for pilot partnerships with early-stage teams and accelerators
- Exploring AI integrations for adaptive reflection, protocol recommendation, and founder behavior insights
What existing tools offer:
- BetterUp / Torch / Sounding Board — individual coaching for leaders, not integrated into team systems
- CultureAmp / Lattice — engagement metrics, not real-time repair or clarity tools
- Notion / Custom AI workflows — flexible tools, but no structured or rhythm-based protocols
- FounderNest / Harmonic — external metrics, investor readiness—not internal health
What Lichen offers (and no one else does):
- A structured system of over 100 tested protocols—modular, adaptive, and role-specific
- An AI-powered rhythm engine that mirrors back founder and team behavior in real time
- A multi-level operating system that scales from individual founder to team to startup
- Longitudinal behavioral data that generates actionable, predictive insight for founders and accelerators
- Alignment with actual startup pace and pressure with specific tools made for weekly sprints, pivots, or emotional friction
Startups don't fail because they lack data. They fail because they move too fast to reflect, don't know how to course-correct, or burn out before they can execute clearly.
The long-term vision is threefold:
1. Embed Lichen in the DNA of early-stage companies
The goal is for every serious early-stage founder to run on Lichen—either through an accelerator partnership or by entering directly. Weekly diagnostics and rhythm-based protocols become part of how teams operate, reflect, and grow.
2. Become the behavioral intelligence layer for venture
As founders use the system, Lichen collects anonymized, structured data about leadership patterns, decision rhythms, co-founder dynamics, and startup recovery arcs. This becomes a predictive layer for identifying overlooked talent, surfacing second-look founders post-rejection, and supporting investment decisions with behaviorally grounded signal.
3. Help more startups thrive, not just survive
Lichen's protocols don't just prevent failure—they build clarity, rhythm, and long-range alignment. When the people in the startup grow, the startup grows with them.
What YC enables:
Access to world-class technical talent, a rigorous build environment, and aligned early adopters. Lichen is ready. The structure is built. What's needed now is the right team and support to make the AI-powered product real.
We all wear masks. The startup environment is no different. In fact, we put on more masks—stronger, smarter, more convincing ones.
- The founder who performs certainty but quietly fears they've already lost the thread< >
- The team member who seems disengaged, but is actually grieving a rupture no one else noticed
- And perhaps most of all—the mask we wear to ourselves:
- "I'm fine."
- "This is just a phase."
- "I'll rest when I launch."
- "Everyone else looks like they've got it together—I just need to catch up."
The Lichen Protocol doesn't tear the mask away. It sees through it. And then it reveals the person who's always been there—who they truly are.
Someone who has already walked further, held more, and led with more courage than they've ever allowed themselves to believe.
It reawakens what's already alive: Self-belief. Rhythm. Clarity. Quiet power.
And the mask begins to dissolve—not out of shame, but because it's no longer needed.
- No longer needed when making the hard decisions
- No longer needed when speaking with co-founders
- No longer needed when sitting with investors
- No longer needed when sharing with mentors
- And most importantly—no longer needed when looking in the mirror