About

Sara Jeruss is an ADHD, career, and executive coach based in Philadelphia, PA. As a Yale Law School graduate and former start-up executive, she often works with attorneys and tech professionals.

Helping people and companies grow.

People. Sara has managed in different capacities throughout her career as an attorney, program manager at Meta, and start-up vice president and COO.

Sara’s favorite part of being a manager was working with people 1:1 and doing career conversations with her team members. Specifically, it’s rewarding for her to listen and find the right questions that lead someone to find a solution to a problem, realize something new about their job search, or put in place a plan to move closer to their dreams. 

Companies. In addition to managing people and helping them grow, Sara also has a proven track record of helping companies grow. Again, it comes down to listening and asking the right follow-up questions to unlock new paths and find solutions to the problems companies face.  

Two things that stuck with Sara from her as a manager are 1) How rare it was for people to have had another manager who actually listened to them and asked their opinions and 2) how many work challenges are improved once people learn to hear each other. This knowledge guides her practice as a coach.

Sara’s Experience

At Quill, the team was 8 people when Sara joined. Morale was low and she was tasked with “professionalizing” the company. She cut the turnover rate from 78% to 15%, and changed it from a culture where advisors frequently commented on the company’s “somber” atmosphere to one that averaged over 4 out of 5 on a weekly survey asking “How happy were you last week?”, where employees frequently praised the culture for being collaborative and supportive, and, at weekly wrap-ups, said things like “I was worried about coming here after being remote for 10 years, but I’m genuinely excited to come to work in the morning.” Sara also oversaw a period of rapid growth, as the team grew to 22 people, and the user base increased from 700,000 to over 2 million. During this time, Quill received grants from major technology philanthropists such as Google AI for Social Good and the Chan Zuckerberg Institute, and entered into a multimillion-dollar deal with a major publisher.

Sara’s role at Climb actually started as a role at their parent venture-capital firm, 1/0 Capital. At 1/0, Sara was given the task of consulting with Climb in an effort to improve company performance. This led to a full-time role where Sara led product, analytics and marketing for Climb. Sara developed strong systems to support future growth, such as centralizing company analytics, performing the first market segmentation and product market-fit analysis, developing a lead qualification system and implementing the first company project management software. This foundational work led to a $9.8 million series A in 2019.

At Meta, Sara was tasked with solving the privacy team’s problem of documenting and implementing privacy decisions for each feature launched. The privacy team grew out of an FTC consent decree, and the team quickly realized that with Meta growing they couldn’t keep track of every product launch using only a spreadsheet. So Sara product managed a launch-calendering tool that came to be used company wide. Sara also developed processes for systemically ensuring that privacy decisions were implemented as intended, and did this with enough time left-over to also advise the Messenger team on product privacy.

At Lex Machina Inc., Sara started as a consultant tasked with running a study for the Government Accountability office. This led to a full-time role thinking about how to automate this work, three published papers, and a patent application for a system Sara developed with Lex Machina’s Chief Scientist.

At Lex Machina, Facebook, Climb and Quill, Sara found that listening with empathy was the key to overcoming barriers and helping teams find success. Sara found a passion for this kind of work. Now, she uses those skills to help even more people and companies grow and thrive.

If you’re interested in working together, please send Sara an email at tltcoaches@gmail.com or give her a call at 415-609-7712. She looks forward to hearing from you.