In an era obsessed with growth metrics, viral features, and quarterly returns, a handful of leaders are proving that the most sustainable path to building exceptional companies requires something radical: saying no to short-term wins that compromise long-term vision.
I sat down with five C-suite leaders – David Ko (CEO of Calm), Sam Hodges (Co-founder & CEO of Vouch), Hilary Aylesworth (Chief Product & Technology Officer at CoachHub), Amit Zavery (President & COO of ServiceNow), and Marcelo Modica (Chief People Officer at Coursera) — to understand how they’ve scaled their companies while maintaining the cultural values and product integrity that made them special in the first place.
What emerged wasn’t a conventional playbook, but five principles that these leaders discovered by choosing the difficult path over the obvious one.
1. Say No To Short-Termism
David Ko’s story begins with a decision that would make most VCs wince. When Calm’s team suggested adding social features — likes, sharing, leaderboards — the data was compelling. User engagement would spike. Revenue would grow. It’s what competitors were doing.
Ko said no.
“We could make more money, we could probably even get more downloads,” Ko tells me at UC Berkeley Forum on Corporate Governance, “but I think it would cause us to maybe not have it so focused on yourself.” He pauses, then continues: “This product is built for you. And I think that’s a pretty core component of who we are today.”
To the skeptics amongst us, this isn’t philosophical posturing. Calm has reached 180 million downloads across 190+ countries, serving 4,000+ enterprise clients with engagement rates of 20-30%+- dwarfing the industry standard of 3-5%. The counterintuitive bet paid off: in a world of constant comparison and social pressure, what people actually need is a space that’s entirely their own.
“When folks like myself and the team came in,” Ko explains, “we said let’s be with you every step of the way in your mental health journey. If we basically lose sight of that, I always go back to that.”
This philosophy extends beyond avoiding bad features — it shapes what they do build. Ko’s team recently launched a separate sleep tracking app because users asked for it, rather than bloating the core product. When I ask about the tension between quarterly metrics and long-term thinking, Ko is blunt: “I think there’s a lot of noise out there today. If you have a lens towards the long term and really listen about signals and things that can help you long term, then it can keep you on the right track.”
Sam Hodges at Vouch has learned a similar lesson about sustained mission focus. As his company scaled to 110 people serving 6,000 high-growth businesses, the temptation to chase short-term opportunities grew exponentially. But Hodges keeps pulling his team back to their core mission: “ensuring ambition.”
“People are much more motivated and successful and tend to perform at a higher level when they understand not only how their work fits into the broader picture, but they feel some purpose in what they’re doing,” Hodges explains. “This is not all rainbows and saving the world — it’s doing something that matters, solving a real problem for someone, and the work I’m doing actually ties to that.”
2. Master the Ability To Disconnect
Amit Zavery runs massive teams at ServiceNow, navigating what he describes as an “existential crisis” in tech. “Every customer conversation starts with AI, ends with AI. Every product discussion starts with AI and ends with AI,” he tells me. “It is top of mind for everyone.”
The anxiety is palpable. The pace is relentless. And yet, Zavery has developed a counterintuitive strategy: strategic disconnection.
“One of the biggest things for me is to not get any more information. That’s the biggest way to pause,” he explains. “Because otherwise you inundate it. Email, text messages, news. So my thing is disconnect.”
For Zavery, this means playing pickleball and volleyball — activities where there’s simply no way to be on any digital device. “Even though my mind might be still thinking about one or two things, I’m not getting any new data points. Which is good because that means I’m processing what I’ve heard so far without any external extra information.”
This isn’t just about taking breaks. It’s about creating the mental space to separate signal from noise. “Things get a little clearer when you pause,” Zavery notes. “You end up taking a few data points and say which ones matter. You’re trying to solve the problem versus react.”
But Zavery’s approach goes even deeper. He’s developed a mental framework that allows him to operate at high intensity without burning out: radical focus on controllables.
“I worry about the controllables,” he says simply. “Things I don’t control, even though I know if I can’t do anything about it, I don’t bother. A lot of times people I know would stress about things which they can’t control. Which is worthless. I reduce the amount of things I worry about.”
The result? “I rarely stress,” Zavery says matter-of-factly. In an industry where burnout is epidemic and anxiety is the default state, this is remarkable. And it’s not natural — it’s a discipline he developed over time. “I realized that worrying about things I couldn’t control didn’t solve anything anyway. So I just programmed myself to reducing things to worry about.”
Ko at Calm practices what he preaches, though he’s quick to admit it’s not always easy. “Are you a meditative CEO all day? I’ll be like, no, I’m pretty stressed out,” he laughs. “Because if every second of every day someone is using your product, you have to be able to be there in their moment of need.”
His solution? What he calls the “three W’s” — take a short walk, look out the window, grab some water. “You need these things to know yourself,” he says. “And then we incorporate them into the product.”
3. Stay Proximate to the Work
As Vouch grew from 10 people to 110, Sam Hodges discovered something that defied conventional organizational wisdom: senior leaders need to be closer to the work, not further from it.
“The world is changing very quickly,” Hodges notes. “There’s something particularly important right now about staying curious, willing to challenge how things used to work, and being very hands-on and proximate. The idea that you’re going to have very effective leaders who are just focused on
organizational scaling and building infrastructure in a reliable way — that model for leadership is in a lot of areas going to have to go away.”
This means being closer to the code, closer to the customer, closer to the technology than traditional organizational theory would suggest. “It is really easy to follow the trap of believing the person who is deeper in the org, who is a great presenter and really good at managing up, but not necessarily the person who’s going to be most effective in solving the problem,” Hodges warns.
Hilary Aylesworth at CoachHub has made this a core principle. “Drinking your own Kool-Aid,” as she puts it, is essential to understanding what actually works. “We’re striving to be our own best customer at CoachHub. That’s one of the big things that I put into place in my first couple months on the job: are we actually implementing this product in the way that we think people should be interacting with it?”
This led to a surprising discovery. When CoachHub built their AI coach, AIMY, they included a role-play feature. Aylesworth was skeptical. “As a person who’s from New York but has lived in London, I’m very used to English people being totally cringe about doing anything role play. I was like, knowing the corporate world in London, this is not going to go well.”
She was wrong. Role play became the most-used feature on the platform. “It revealed something very essential: where is the space and place that I get good at giving difficult feedback? Where’s the place that I get good at the hard things I have to do interpersonally? It’s such a simple thing, but where do you get good at it? You just have to practice it.”
She would never have known this without using the product herself and staying close to user behavior. Marcelo Modica at Coursera has built this proximity principle into his management structure. Every quarter, he runs manager forums where the executive team pre-briefs leaders on company changes. “We want them to feel that they know things before their employees do, so they have time to digest it, help us refine the message, understand the impact.”
“When leaders show up to a department once a quarter and then leave, they might say something great that day, but what happens the day after?” Modica explains. “Those leaders and managers have to carry those messages day in and day out and feel like they can come back to us and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t resonating’ or ‘Hey, we can move faster on this.””
4. Scale Impact, Not Just Headcount
“If our business doubles in size, we should see both economies of scale and efficiency,” Marcelo Modica tells me. “The more we can save in efficiency, the more we can reinvest in our current people, tech, and innovation. My goal is not to grow headcount, it’s to grow our impact in the company.”
This philosophy represents a fundamental shift in how scaling companies think about growth. At Coursera, the 70-person People team serves 1,400 employees — and Modica isn’t planning to scale that ratio linearly. Instead, he’s using AI to eliminate waste and reimagine what’s possible.
Coursera was also an early adopter of AI to improve the learning and teaching experiences on its platform, and the results are striking. Coursera’s Course Builder tool achieves 87% faster course development times. “Years ago, if an instructor got feedback that the training they’re providing needs to be updated, it could take them months or years to actually update that,” Modica explains. “Today with Course Builder, they’re able to create content and a curriculum in minutes.”
Coursera Coach goes even further. “The AI agent helps you role play out a problem in the moment,” Modica describes. “It’ll give you examples and say, ‘Show me what you would do.’ And then the agent works with the learner to make sure they understand the skill and can apply it.”
This creates verified learning at scale without adding thousands of instructors. And it enables something Modica sees as inevitable: “In the fullness of time, they’re definitely going to get smaller and get flatter,” he predicts. “Organizations are just going to get flatter and flatter.”
Aylesworth at CoachHub sees the same shift enabling role hybridization. “I think there’s a greater sense of role hybridization since we’ve seen these tools become more ubiquitous,” she notes. “It’s super acceptable to be trying things, doing things that are outside the realm of your quote unquote knowledge and expertise.”
Where teams once needed layers of specialists, they now need versatile leaders who can leverage AI to do work that previously required dedicated headcount.
5. Build for Transformation, Not Just Transactions
“How could we help build organizations that learn as fast as the world changes?” Hilary Aylesworth asks herself. It captures what separates these leaders from conventional operators: they’re not building products that complete transactions more efficiently- they’re building products that transform people.
For Ko at Calm, this started with a simple observation. “I think the conversation around mental health globally is probably the most approachable it’s ever been,” he notes. “But then when you go to work, the conversation stops. The whole premise behind it was like, why does a conversation have to stop around your mental health when you go to work?”
His solution was the “battery” metaphor. “At work, it’s much easier to say, how’s your battery? Then how’s your mental health?” This isn’t just clever messaging—it’s creating a framework that allows people to develop a different relationship with their own wellbeing. The result: “I can’t say how many employers that we go to that come back and say, you’re the number one benefit within our company.”
Hodges at Vouch discovered that insurance’s real power isn’t the financial payout when things go wrong —it’s how it changes entrepreneurial behavior when things are going right. “We want to be the insurance and risk management partner for the most ambitious, innovative leaders out there and help them succeed or at least not fail for the wrong reason,” he explains.
By handling risk management, Vouch frees entrepreneurs to take the kinds of calculated risks that build exceptional companies. The transformation isn’t in the insurance itself — it’s in what the entrepreneurs can now focus on.
For Aylesworth, transformation is the explicit mission. “The more self aware a person can be, the better off they are in general,” she argues. “But certainly in a workplace environment, the more collaborative, the more high performing and the more in tune they are with how they are ultimately achieving the responsibilities of the role.”
That’s why CoachHub’s most popular feature turned out to be role-play: people discovered a safe space to practice difficult conversations and develop skills that traditionally took years to build through trial and error.
Even Zavery at ServiceNow, operating at massive enterprise scale, frames his work through transformation. His focus on controllables and strategic disconnection isn’t just about personal wellbeing – it’s about modeling a different way of leading. “Unknown is more stressful than known,” he notes. “If you don’t have any idea what’s going on, you’ll be more stressed than having an idea that this is manageable, it’s okay.”
Modica at Coursera feels this mission personally. “Some of the learner stories at Coursera bring tears to your eyes,” he says. “Folks that would never have had access to education, whether it’s someone in Africa or in the US – anywhere in the world.”
As a first-generation American who grew up in Argentina, the mission resonates deeply. “Democratizing education for all – these are real things that first-generation immigrants worry a lot about because you’re not following a traditional path.”
The Future of Leadership
As we enter 2026, the playbook for building great companies is being rewritten.
“We’re in a really interesting moment to think about how you can unlock human potential in a lot of different domains,” Hodges reflects. “And I think that’s really exciting.”
Modica agrees: “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. The ability to actually have an impact and not have to have all the heavy lifting to have that impact and move much faster is something that a lot of us have been waiting for.”
What’s striking is how these leaders from vastly different sectors arrived at remarkably similar conclusions. Ko refused conventional growth tactics. Hodges built three companies from startup to scale. Aylesworth brought neuroscience principles to product development. Zavery developed mental frameworks for operating in chaos. Modica reimagined what’s possible when AI eliminates the “heavy lifting.
Yet they all landed on the same five principles: prioritize long-term mission over short-term metrics, create space for strategic thinking, stay close to the actual work, scale impact rather than headcount, and build products that transform people rather than complete transactions.
These leaders are proving you don’t have to choose between building a successful business and building something meaningful — they’re the same goal, approached with the courage to say no to convention.