Wai Poc
EXECUTIVE COACH AND LEADERSHIP CONSULTANT
San Francisco, CA
SUMMARY
Practical, deeply insightful, and strategic, Wai has for 10 years coached leaders and executives principally in three sectors: Biotech, High Tech, and Finance. In his last in-house role for +10 years at Genentech, Wai consulted SVPs and VPs on developing their senior teams, leading reorgs and xfn change initiatives, and facilitated succession planning. These days, Wai coaches Directors at both big tech like Google and Facebook and venture-funded CTO, CMO, and CEO clients. Through Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Wai has coached MBAs and global CFOs. Collaborating with MacArthur Fellow Patricia Wright, Wai has been co-writing a book on power and politics. Their expertise is in decoding the primate roots of human competition and collaboration. Across sectors, Wai provides both challenge and support to his clients to help them grow, scale, and build strategic relationships to get big things done.
His signature is helping leaders:
Building strategic alliances to get big things done
Exercising power to navigate political currents
Accessing executive presence when stakes are high
Facilitating executive decision-making with senior teams
Leading change including reorgs and scaling
Developing better habits of resilience
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE & BACKGROUND
Wai Poc is an Executive Coach with +25 years of leadership experience from Fortune 500 companies to C-levels at start-ups. For the last ~15 years of executive coaching, Wai has specialized in being a sounding board to help his clients build strategic relationships.
Wai’s sectors of expertise are high tech and biotech. He loves engineers, technologists (scientific, medical, and operational), and all those in G&A functions due to having coached out of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
In his last in-house role at Genentech for +10 years, Wai consulted – before, during, and after – reorgs with VP clients and their leadership teams in Engineering, Product, Research, Sales & Marketing, and G&A. Not only has Wai been ‘at the table’ on key business decisions, but also he got into coaching as a result of facilitating succession planning up to and including the SVP and CMO levels.
Innovation comes from the mixing of a wide range of ideas. Wai values diversity, having recruited at the National Black MBA Association and at Out and Equal. As the male co-lead for a gender diversity strategy for +2000, he presented on Gender Diversity at the National Institutes of Health.
Born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong and Miami, Wai identifies as Chino-Latino. Crossing cultural bridges from his earliest years, Wai has traveled to +60 countries. A sabbatical field expedition to Madagascar led Wai to MacArthur Fellow and primatologist Patricia C. Wright, with whom he is now writing a book on power and politics in the workplace. Their goal is to decode the primate roots of human competition and collaboration with Unleashed: A Field Guide to Power and Politics at Work.
CLIENT TESTIMONIALS
Wai is an excellent coach. He was instrumental in my own transformation. He has a unique perspective and brings both immense skill and heart to his coaching practice. I highly recommend him.
–Nina Khan, Global Director of Industry Sales at Intel
Wai was extremely helpful in coaching me to see a more complete picture of the people and technology we’re developing together. That’s helping me make better decisions and lead more creatively.
– Brian Strope, Sr. Staff Scientist in AI at Google
Wai makes visible the invisible ‘data’ of interpersonal relationships and organizational dynamics. Don’t let him fool you with his humility. Wai is thoughtful, innovative, and outstanding!
– Edith Perez, VP in Oncology at Genentech
RECENT CLIENTS
Google
Facebook
LinkedIn
Gilead Sciences
Oliver Wyman
Zentalis Therapeutics
Genentech
BioMarin
The Federal Reserve Bank
Vera Therapeutics
Juvena Therapeutics
X, Google’s Moonshot Factory
Nintendo
Mozilla
Stanford Grad School of Business
EDUCATION
MBA | Golden Gate University
BA | Stanford University
ASSESSMENTS & CERTIFICATIONS
Coaching from New Ventures West
OD from Columbia University
Myers-Briggs (MBTI)
TKI Conflict Mode
FIRO-B
Social Styles at Work / Insights
StrengthsFinder
Enneagram
Grove Strategic Visioning
Team – Grove and Five Dysfunctions
Korn Ferry 360
Lominger’s Career Architect from the Center for Creative Leadership
INSPIRATIONS
Cultural Adventurer
Martial Arts
Cats and Dogs