Hi, I'm Jason Shen.
Immigrant, founder, husband, coach, gymnast, product person, author, Crossfitter, ADHD, speaker, Brooklyn dweller, cat lover, Citibiker.
It's nice to meet you.
I help ambitious outliers build clear-eyed conviction in the next chapter of their business and master pivotal moments so they can release vital work that puts a dent in the universe.
About Jason
Jason Shen is a writer and executive coach. As the CEO of Refactor Labs, he works with outlier founders and senior leaders to build conviction in their next chapter. The author of The Path to Pivot and weirdly brilliant, he writes and speaks widely on cultivating resilience, leading through hard pivots, and succeeding as an unconventional achiever.
Jason previously founded three venture-backed startups & led product teams at Etsy and Facebook. He is a two-time Stanford graduate, Y Combinator alum (S11), and NCAA mens gymnastics national champion. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Amanda, a multidisciplinary artist, and serves on the board of Lunar Accel, an AAPI leadership development nonprofit.
On this site you'll find articles and resources I've created, blog posts, book notes, contributed pieces, and my weekly newsletter called The Outlier Advantage.
My Story
"How did you become an executive coach?" is a question I get asked a lot.
The short answer is that after 15 years of building products and companies, I wanted to empower the next generation. The long answer is that it's in my DNA and is the culmination of my life and career to date—which means I need to go back some.
I was always a troublemaker. After leaving behind the upheaval of Mao-era China, my parents took the leap of faith and brought us to America when I was three. We settled in a well-educated, privileged Boston suburb, but as new immigrants, our family often felt like scrappy outsiders. While my parents worked multiple jobs to make ends meet, I was a bundle of uncontainable energy who talked too much, moved too much, and questioned everything. That didn’t always mesh with my teachers’ expectations, and soon enough, I was on the radar of school administrators.
Gymnastics grounded me. I found the physical intensity regulated to my nervous system and taught me courage, focus, and a commitment to excellence—especially after I started working with my coach Levon. His fierce commitment to excellence helped me earn a place on the U.S. junior national team and later an athletic scholarship to Stanford. I studied biology and philosophy alongside 20+ hours a week of training as a Division 1 athlete. Despite a devastating knee injury, I returned to compete and helped lead our team to an NCAA championship in my final season. That victory was the culmination of years of resilience and the relentless drive that gymnastics instilled in me.
I caught the startup bug. It seemed like everyone in Silicon Valley was inventing new products and building companies that could change the world for the better. Despite arriving with a love for computing and the early web, I had no sense of how entrepreneurship or the high tech industry worked. My Dad was an educator and community builder—I had to figure it out on my own. After working at a 7 person company out of school, I was accepted into Y Combinator to build a long distance ridesharing platform in a parallel effort to Lyft and Uber. Our team's story was captured in the first chapter of The Launchpad and our eventual failure taught me many hard lessons.
I spent the next decade building and learning—as an innovation fellow at the Smithsonian, a marketer at a Sequoia-backed B2B SaaS company, and a product manager at Etsy. I gave a TED talk and was sued by a copyright troll. I founded new companies: a tech hiring platform that we hard pivoted into an AI tools company for gaming. We were acquired by Meta where I worked on Facebook Groups and led resilience training programs for hundreds of employees.
I (re)discovered the power of coaching. In my twenties I did some work with a life coach, and later worked with several executive coaches as a founder and PM. Like my gymnastics coaches, these trusted partnerships allowed me to unpack difficult decisions, recover faster from setbacks, and build towards a bigger vision of my work and life. While I valued my time at Meta, I knew the place was not designed for weirdos like me. I continued to feel constrained by its rules and restrictions: 38 year old Jason wasn't much different from the 8 year old one.
More and more I found myself excited to support the people behind the next generation of innovators. After years of informal coaching and mentorship, I took on my first paid client in 2020. One client turned to two, turned to ten. A few years and a dozen reorgs later, I walked out of Meta to coach full time and never looked back.
Coaching
I've coached more than 100 founders, builders, rebels, and misfits—and I'm just getting started. Coaching feels like my life's work. It brings together my parents' love for education, training, and human development, with everything I've learned about building the future with insanely talented people from all over the world.
Today, I serve as an executive coach to a small roster of ~15 ambitious outliers.
My sweet spot are open-minded individuals who have struggled to find belonging along one or more dimension—BIPOC, immigrant, lower-income, neurodiverse—and are trying to find greater purpose, progress, or power in their work.
Jason Shen
Find me elsewhere on the web
- in/jasonshen on Linkedin
- @jasonshen on Twitter/X
- @coachjason on YouTube
The Outlier Advantage
To stay in touch, sign up for my free weekly newsletter where distill breakthroughs from my coaching practice into actionable guidance.
Every weekend, I write and send a 5 minute read about topics that come up in my coaching practice inlcuding:
- how to hold yourself and your team accountable to results
- how to play big when the odds are stacked against you
- how to lead with emotional resilience when others are counting on you
- how to stay creative in the face of doubt and stagnation
- how to tell your story so people will listen, pay attention, and get involved
The Outlier Advantage is read by more than 2,800 founders, leaders, and outliers at Google, Facebook, Brex, top Y Combinator-backed startups, and leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms.