Susanne Goldstein is a Transformation & Success Coach, Social Entrepreneur and Filmmaker.
She is an empathic leader and problem solver with a unique ability to dive inside her client’s DNA to quickly help determine the levers (emotional intelligence, mindset, personal power, strategy, leadership, executive presence) that may need to be shifted to create the kind of happiness, satisfaction and break-through solutions they desire. Her methodology comes from a deep understanding of how people behave under pressure, team dynamics, and implicit bias.
Before her coaching career, she spent a decade in the film industry in London and Hollywood (Madame Sousatska, Gross Anatomy, Captain Ron, Honey I Blew Up the Kids) before she moved to Silicon Valley at the beginning of the Internet Age.
Susanne consulted and coached more than 50 venture-backed startups (Evite, OpenTable, Women.com, InnoCentive) and established players who at the time were looking to figure out the Web (Microsoft, Pottery Barn, Standard & Poor’s, IBM.) She held a variety of consulting, creative, technical, marketing and executive roles during Web 1.0 and 2.0.
Susanne advocates for using business principles to build for-profit, mission-based companies, She has architected programs and built initiatives with the UCSF Center for the Health Professions, the U.S. Marine Corps, The Center for Public Leadership at Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital.
In 2000, Susanne added Interim C-Level Executive work to her service offerings, going in-house to gap-fill, lead and support companies as they go through the inflection points of growth, serving in a variety of interim positions as a CEO, COO, Chief Product Officer, VP of Production, VP of Digital Marketing, Chief Strategist, or Chief of Staff.
From 2013 to 2017 she served as CEO of The Vernā Myers Company, a diversity and inclusion consultancy focused on eradicating the barriers of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in the workplace. Under her leadership, revenues grew by 250% and Verna became a highly regarded thought leader and TED Talk-er. The company was acquired by Netflix.
Motivated by the divisiveness of the 2016 election Susanne crowdfunded $35k, hired a film crew and headed to the reddest county in Alabama. Over the next two years, she built inroads into the community, eventually hosting and filming an “adult exchange program” where people from opposite sides of the urban/rural divide (Boston, MA/Lawrence County, AL) visit each other’s communities to find out what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. The program was a big success and became the pilot for a program of healing and the basis of a documentary TV series. In March of 2019, Susanne came back to Los Angeles to work on getting The Exchange: Walk in Someone Else Shoes set up. Footage from the program can be found at www.exchangenation.tv.
Susanne holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and an A.B. in Theatre & Film Studies from Cornell, and a Master’s in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. During the jobs crisis following the 2008 crash, Susanne gave workshops and talks around the country based on her book Carry a Paintbrush: How to Be the Artistic Director of Your Own Career helping thousands of people take control of their job prospects and get back to work.