Ken Lynch · Independent Operating Partner

Your company outgrew the way it's run. That's fixable.

If someone sent you this page, they think your company is at the moment this letter describes.

The board pack gets built the night before. The goals live on paper and nobody looks at them again. Exec hires get made by gut, and unmade expensively. The investor updates go quiet right when they matter most. None of it means you're failing. It outgrew how it's run.

I've been in the chair. I founded Reciprocity (ZenGRC), bootstrapped it for the first five years, and grew it to $20M ARR and 400+ customers, running it over a decade through the hard chapters, until it was acquired by Francisco Partners. I studied computer science at MIT.

What I do is three things. A weekly cadence that runs off a real scorecard, not a status meeting. A one-page map of the whole company, with one owner per row. And board and investor materials that render straight off that map, instead of being assembled at midnight.

The way I work: agents produce. I judge. You're not behind on AI, and I bring it with me. In 2023 I had an LLM drafting each person's quarterly objectives from their actual contracts, two years before the goal-software vendors shipped the same feature.

You do less and matter more. I peel off you what never needed your judgment, and I stop where stopping keeps you close enough to steer. This isn't about taking your company away from you. The systems make you harder to work around, not easier to replace.

I built the first version of this for my own shop in 2023 and graded my own quarter an F, in writing. Perfect cadence, starving pipeline. So I will tell you if what you need isn't me. If the teardown shows your real problem is the product or the selling, you'll hear that, and you'll keep the rest of your money.

I hold one deep engagement at a time. Every engagement carries written exit criteria from day one, and the system flags itself when it goes stale, so it cannot quietly die after I leave.

Forwarding this to a founder? The one-sentence version: I take a company from founder-run to institution-ready without taking it away from the founder.

Ken Lynch

Ken Lynch · MIT CS · LinkedIn →I don't advise from the sideline. I operate.

P.S. The first step

Don't hire me yet. Buy one week.

$3,500 fixed one week

Send me your operating map, your last board pack, or the quarter you'd rather not talk about. I rebuild one of them the way an institutional reader expects, and annotate what changed and why. Your execs keep owning their sections.

Past the teardown: installs and a retained seat, named and priced on The Practice. Bigger event-shaped work lives under Special Projects.

Tell me what's outgrowing you

Replies within one business day.

Or email directly: ken@foxheft.com