Harvard in Tech Spotlight: Will Guillaume Foussier, CEO and co-founder of AceUp
I spoke with Will Guillaume Foussier, CEO and co-founder of AceUp, a talent management platform that provides personalized executive coaching with highly-curated experts through a tech-enabled framework that is impactful, scalable, and measurable.
After college graduation, Will spent several years working in large corporations in traditional industries, including retail and investment banking. He soon realized that he found little meaning in pursuing such a conventional career, so he subsequently joined the Clinton Foundation, where he focused on evaluating and making social impact oriented investments.
Through his time at the Clinton Foundation and specifically the mentors he met through his work at the organization, Will realized, first hand, how truly valuable professional coaching could be in charting his career path in a more meaningful and intentional way. Reflecting on this pivotal experience, Will notes that in working with the right expert in the right environment at the proper time, you can really develop an entirely new set of skills that propels you in the ideal professional direction.
From speaking further with peers across industries, he found that impactful coaching was quite sparse. Coaches that were truly invested and a strong fit for individuals were few and far between and difficult to find. Moreover, coaching was incredibly expensive, and there was little way to measure its impact.
Will decided to dedicate himself fully to solving this problem and empowering people globally with the type of life changing coaching he had experienced. He started AceUp at the Harvard Innovation Lab, where he found his co-founders and was really able to get the organization off the ground through building his team and experimenting with different ideas, structures, and products.
When asked how Harvard has played a role in his entrepreneurial journey, Will underscores the power of the Harvard brand name and network that has allowed him and his team to brand AceUp on the high end of the executive coaching spectrum.
Since their founding, AceUp has been deployed in more than 50 organizations. Their clients include large enterprises and rapidly growing startups, such as BCG, General Electric, Sanofi, Rapid 7, Localytics, LovePop, Ginkgo Bioworks.
Their approach to providing scalable, accessible coaching with quantifiable impact centers around focusing on competence and behavior, the true roots of an individual’s character, rather than more fungible, transient external credentials. Will believes such evaluation metrics are forming the foundation of the future of work, including building better talent pipelines and organizational structures.
When asked for his best advice, Will highlights the importance of making decisions based on your own values rather than the appearance on a resume. In many ways, Will notes, the bigger risk is staying in a role you don’t find meaning in rather than taking the leap to do work you truly value.
