Why I Started Wisdom Partners

Most people think building the company is the hard part. It’s not. The hard part is building yourself.

TL;DR: I didn’t set out to start a leadership company. Wisdom Partners grew out of a lifetime standing with one foot in two worlds—faith and business, soul and strategy—and realizing the same thing holds true in both: real growth begins with personal ownership.

For a lot of people who’ve known me over the years, starting Wisdom Partners looked like a move out of left field. The first half of my professional life has mostly been in the church or in the classroom—as a pastor, professor, or both. From the outside, launching a company that works with startup founders can look like a complete pivot. But the truth is, I’ve always had a foot in both worlds.

Even back in undergrad, I double-majored in religion and business. That was partly by accident because I had a scholarship to study business. But I quickly realized something surprising: I was learning as much about pastoring from my business classes as I was about business from my theology courses.

That tension, that integration, became the pattern of my career. Whether I was teaching, leading a church, or consulting for a company, I was always chasing the same question: How do we help people grow into the kind of leaders who make the world better?

The Two Halves of My Early Career

Throughout the first half of my working life, I straddled both ministry and entrepreneurship. When I wasn’t preaching, I was supporting survivors of human trafficking who were starting their own small businesses. When I wasn’t grading papers, I was consulting local business owners on strategy and leadership.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I decided to pursue a PhD in organizational leadership—not ministry leadership specifically, but the broader, cross-sector kind. I focused on adaptive leadership, the kind that forces us to grow as people when the challenges around us outgrow our current capacity. (That’s the essence of every startup founder’s journey, by the way.)

Eventually, I took a district-level leadership role in my denomination—part strategist, part leadership developer. It was incredibly meaningful work, but, without getting into the weeds, it ended painfully. At that point, I needed to heal, to find a new context for the work I was called to do.

The Corporate Chapter That Rebuilt Me

That healing season led me, surprisingly, to Kaiser Permanente. It was one of those divine setups you only recognize in hindsight. My first boss there had previously donated to the same anti-trafficking nonprofit I’d worked with, so she saw something transferable in my leadership background.

At Kaiser, I worked in consulting, HR strategy, and IT operations—three roles that taught me how leadership, systems, and culture intersect at scale. I saw what healthy organizations do right and what broken systems cost people.

As the world was recovering from COVID, everything changed. A third of our department was laid off, and I was one of them. It stung, but it also forced me into the kind of deep soul-searching I’d been guiding other leaders through for years.

During that time at Kaiser and afterward, I revisited a book I used to teach—Discover Your True North by Bill George—and asked myself the same questions I’d been asking others:

What am I really called to do?
What is the purpose that ties every chapter of my life together?

Two themes kept surfacing:

1. Developing leaders

2. Innovating for complex challenges.

That’s when it clicked:

My purpose is to develop leaders who solve hard problems to make the world better.

The Reconnection That Sparked the Company

After my time at Kaiser Permanente, I reconnected with an old friend: Charles Jolley, one of my accountability partners back in college. We’d met when he was already a startup founder. His first customer, as a college student, was the Department of Defense! Since then, he’d built products for Apple, founded multiple startups, and even sold two companies to Facebook.

Despite taking very different career paths, Charles and I had arrived at the same conclusion about leadership:

Success isn’t just about building products—it’s about building people who take ownership in their own lives and work.

Even many years ago, when starting a business was far from my thinking, I remember thinking, I wish I could work with Charles on leader development someday. When I got laid off, that thought turned into action. No job I wanted existed, so we decided to create one.

The Real Hard Part of Building Something

Most people think starting a business or building the technology is the hard part. In some ways, that’s the easy part.

Building something that works is hard—but scaling that thing, building a system that delivers value to more and more people, that’s a different game entirely. It’s not just about skills; it’s about character.

That’s the deep work I did my PhD on, and it’s what Charles learned through the school of hard knocks. It’s the heart of ownership culture.

At Wisdom Partners, we define ownership culture as:

A set of systems and mindsets that empower every individual in the organization to take decisive action within their area of responsibility, in alignment with the mission.

And the foundation of ownership culture is authenticity. Owning yourself – your issues, your growth, your leadership – taking authentic responsibility for your own life and work.

Why Founders — and Why Now

Charles and I started working with startup founders because they’re the ones living in the tension between building and scaling, between vision and capacity.

Founders graduate from accelerators full of adrenaline and ambition, and then suddenly, they’re on their own. They’ve built something that works—but scaling it requires a whole new level of leadership maturity.

Today, Wisdom Partners has four founding partners: Charles, Ty Walrod, Chu Shin, and me. We also have:

• Over 50 clients,

• Partnerships with four accelerators, and

• A growing network of a dozen leadership coaches (and more waiting to join).

But this isn’t really the story of how we built Wisdom Partners—it’s the story of why.

From Nonprofits to Self-Sustaining Movements

For the first half of my life, I worked mostly in nonprofits. I still love them, but I also saw their biggest limitation: you never stop fundraising. You’re always dependent on someone else’s resources.

Startups are different. You’re building something that sustains itself—a solution so valuable that people want to pay for it, a solution that funds its own growth and impact.

That difference is what has shaped my “second-half-of-life” mission:

To help founders who are making the world better build sustainable, market-based solutions that can scale.

Today, our clients are solving some of humanity’s biggest challenges: improving care for children with chronic conditions, bringing clean energy to underserved communities, lessening the power of digital addiction, and on and on.

Every founder we serve is trying to make the world better—and we get to help them build the kind of leadership culture that makes that possible.

Full Circle

When I look back, I realize I’ve been doing the same work all along.

The first church I worked with, in South Korea, had a simple mission:

“To be a loving community that changes our world.”

Now, as the CEO of Wisdom Partners, I often feel like I’m a pastor to founders. And honestly, even though we use different words to describe our mission as a company (to help founders succeed), it’s still about building a loving community that changes our world.

That’s why I started Wisdom Partners. That’s why I keep building it.

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