Who We Are
Dr. Dominique Samuels, PsyD
Founder & CEO
With a background in business in New York City and over 20 years as a therapist in the Bay Area, Dominique (Kiki) brings a rare combination of business experience and psychological expertise to executive and leadership coaching. Her doctoral training in Clinical Psychology gives her deep expertise in behavior change, communication, and decision-making under pressure - skills that are critical for leadership but rarely formally taught.
Dominique’s approach to coaching is based on the belief that leadership is a combination of personality, behavior, and systems. Personality shapes how a person naturally leads: how they make decisions, communicate, handle risk, and respond under pressure. But effective leadership also requires learning specific skills, behaviors, and processes that allow a company and team to function well. Her work focuses on helping founders and executives understand their natural leadership style, identify where it helps and where it creates problems, and then build the behaviors, communication structures, and operating systems needed to lead effectively at their current stage of growth. The goal is not to change someone’s personality, but to help them become a more effective version of the leader they already are.
Dominique is trained in evidence-based behavioral therapies that help individuals break unproductive patterns and build systems that support focus, accountability, and follow-through. She also has advanced training in relational and communication skills, helping leaders navigate conflict, give and receive feedback, and lead with clarity and emotional intelligence. Her training in multicultural psychology allows her to work effectively across different personalities, cultures, and leadership styles.
Prior to attending graduate school, Dominique worked in startups, public companies, and non-profits. She is a small business owner and advisor to tech start-ups in the self-development space. She has worked with senior executives and leaders from companies including Uber, OpenDoor, FitBod, unspun, and Gap. This range of experience allows her to understand both the internal psychology of leadership and the external realities of running a company.
She works with founders, executives. and teams who want to clarify their values, build effective operating systems, improve decision-making, and grow into the kind of leader their company needs at each stage of growth.
Melissa Teitel, M.Ed., M.A., APCC
Leadership Coach
Melissa spent fifteen years in executive leadership across corporate fashion houses like Giorgio Armani and founder-led brands like Zac Posen. She was the person brought in to read what other people missed including friction between teams, unhealthy and ineffective communication and problems that looked like one thing but were something else entirely. She found the pattern, built the road map, and executed it. After leaving New York for the Bay Area, she completed a master’s in clinical counseling from Alliant International University. She also holds an MA in Education from Johns Hopkins, a BS in Applied Psychology from NYU, and is a registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor. She is also a professional abstract painter and an entrepreneur.
Each of these experiences helped to sharpen the lens through which Melissa sees organizations, people, and problems and they helped to hone her unique coaching methodology. It is not therapy and it is not soft skills training. This is performance infrastructure. Melissa integrates emotional intelligence, nervous system regulation, somatic awareness and skills training with values and goal mapping to create a disciplined framework that leaders and teams can utilize immediately and for the long term. The principle is simple: your internal state drives your external results. When you learn to pause, identify, interpret and regulate emotions, you reduce chaos, minimize friction, limit reactivity, and make better decisions. Clients leave with an understanding of what is happening, why, and what to do next.
Melissa works with founders, CEOs, investors, and family offices. Every engagement is confidential, direct, and scaffolded around the client’s actual circumstances, goals, and timeline.
