Silicon Valley Trust advises founders, executives, and boards on strategy, investor and board management, hiring, and the operating decisions which shape what your company becomes. Built by a four-time founder who has been in every seat, working with companies across the United States, Europe, Asia and MENA.
Most engagements begin between Series Seed and Series B. If you are earlier, say so when you write and you will get an honest view on whether it is worth starting yet.
Most advisors specialize. Founders don't get to. From your first board through the public markets, the work cuts across strategy, go-to-market, hiring, capital, cofounder dynamics, and the occasional crisis, and it is the layer in between most advisors can't go near. Silicon Valley Trust embeds with founders and boards across the full arc: operator judgment, strategy built from the inside, and a 4x founder's experience having sat in every chair.
Before founding Spotlite I worked on the investment and accelerator side, so I have watched a lot of people say they offer coaching and advisory to founders. We built the largest talent pool in Asia, and Leila pushed us to get precise about who our buyer actually is and why they buy, which reshaped both our product focus and our business model. She asks the questions that save you months, sometimes years, and she brings a discipline to founder coaching that I have not seen elsewhere.
Over a handful of sessions, Leila helped us narrow in on our ideal client profile and define exactly who our customer is. She helped us with the discipline needed to turn down customisation requests that had been pulling our company in different directions. She helped us differentiate an economic buyer from a junior stakeholder, and to build the pitch around the customer's own pain points and priorities rather than our product. Leila is also the only advisor we have worked with who moves from sales strategy to data architecture in the same conversation. For a wearable capturing data in public spaces across Hong Kong, China and the US, privacy decides whether a customer can say yes at all, and she advises us how to design for that from the start. Our enterprise conversations look different now, and for the better.
The core of the practice is strategy, growth, and the operating decisions which move a company forward: go-to-market, investors, boards, cofounders, and hiring. For international founders, the practice is a bridge to Silicon Valley: US market practices, US investors, and US governance, from an operator who has raised and built here. A second practice covers growth and go-to-market. A third treats privacy and AI governance as business strategy for startups: what your buyers, partners and investors expect, how to position the company on trust, which product and data decisions open enterprise revenue, and how to make the case to your board. Every engagement is contracted with Lexplique LLC, which operates Silicon Valley Trust.
The full work of building a company from your first raise through the public markets: strategy, go-to-market, capital, board, hiring, and the moments which define what your company becomes.
The revenue side of strategy: who you sell to, what you charge, and how the motion scales. Built with the founder rather than handed off, and tested against what investors will ask at the next raise.
For a startup, privacy and AI governance are not compliance questions. They decide whether an enterprise customer can say yes, whether an investor believes the data story, and whether the product can ship into the markets you want. We work on them as strategy: positioning, go-to-market, the product and data decisions which open revenue, and the narrative to buyers, partners and the board.
The product decision nobody agrees on. The cofounder who has checked out. A board member undermining you in the room. An investor who has gone quiet. A raise you are not ready for. Pricing which is still guesswork. If it is strategic and it is keeping you awake, it is in scope. We coach one to one and advise boards.
One to one coaching for founders navigating the shift from building a product to running a company. Operator to operator conversations with someone who has raised the rounds, managed the board, and had the cofounder conversation which could not be postponed.
One to one coaching for executives stepping into greater scope: newly promoted leaders, first-time C-suite executives, and functional heads now expected to influence a board. The common thread is a leader whose technical judgment is already proven and whose next constraint is organizational.
Independent board and advisory roles for companies where trust, data and AI sit on the agenda, and where seasoned operator judgment helps leadership teams build durable, trustworthy businesses.
We meet the team where they are, and stay until the work runs without us.
Map the business across strategy, go-to-market, org, and capital. Identify the constraints which actually bind.
A right-sized plan with clear ownership, timelines, and the metrics to know it is working.
Executed with your team, in your operating cadence, rather than handed off in a binder.
Hand-off with confidence. We stay on as advisors as the business evolves.
Leila Golchehreh has spent more than fifteen years building startups and scaling them: strategy, go-to-market, hiring, capital, and the board and investor work which arrives with each stage. She has served as a strategic advisor to hundreds of companies globally, from pre-seed through the public markets.
She was General Motors Cruise's first cybersecurity, AI, and privacy lawyer; advised SaaS companies including Workday and Adaptive Insights, serving as counsel through the Adaptive Insights IPO and its acquisition by Workday; and practiced at major law firms including A&O Shearman, counseling clients across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and MENA. She has also advised international organizations including the OECD and the International Court of Arbitration, served at the U.S. Mission to the European Union and the French Trade Office, and authored Workday’s written evidence to the UK Parliament’s House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence. She holds an LL.M. with distinction in French and European law from the Sorbonne, and works in English and French.
Today, through Silicon Valley Trust, Leila advises founders, executives, and boards across the full startup arc: strategy, growth and go-to-market, operations, hiring, capital strategy, and board and investor management, with international founders a particular focus: she advises founders and boards across Europe, Asia and MENA building and raising in the United States, US founders building at home, and US companies expanding into Europe. She also advises technology companies on privacy and AI governance as business strategy: positioning, go-to-market, and the product and data decisions which open enterprise revenue. The throughline: operator judgment from someone who's actually built and led companies.
She is a sought-after speaker on founder strategy, board dynamics, and building companies which last, with recent talks including a roundtable in San Francisco with a French tech delegation, the IAPP Europe Closing Keynote (Brussels), the State Bar of Georgia, Plug and Play, and a Governing AI Agents panel with A&O Shearman and Google in Paris.
A frequent voice on founder strategy, board dynamics, go-to-market, and AI adoption, at conferences from San Francisco to Paris to Brussels.
A closed-door roundtable in San Francisco with a delegation of French tech CEOs and entrepreneurs. On what U.S. startup governance actually looks like in practice, covering board composition, investor dynamics, founder protections and capital strategy, and how AI adoption fits into the modern governance playbook.
A practitioner conversation with early-stage founders on the work that actually moves a company forward: how to read your investors, structure a healthy board, navigate the first GC hire, and adopt AI without breaking what's working.
With privacy and security leaders from Anthropic, Box, and Uber. A practitioner-focused session on moving AI governance from theory to deployed reality inside established organizations: AI safety in practice, architectural hurdles, change management, and data integrity at scale.
Annual Privacy & Technology Law Conference. On the legal profession's responsibility around AI governance and ethics, the impact of AI on critical thinking, and why using AI to govern AI is the only practical path forward at this scale.
On the necessary shift in how technology professionals approach AI governance, that trust is not a byproduct of innovation but its precondition, and the responsibility of the industry to govern what it builds, not from the sidelines but from inside the work.
Past venues span San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., Paris, and Brussels. Additional speaking history and references available on request.
Photos and videos from recent talks, panels, founder sessions, and ecosystem visits. Click any image to enlarge.
Additional speaking videos, photos, and references available on request.
These are the questions founders actually bring, in roughly the order they bring them.
This is the work I care about most. We start from who the buyer is and what they will actually pay for, then test the roadmap against that rather than against what the team finds interesting. Most founders arrive with too many half-committed bets, and the useful outcome is usually a shorter list held with more conviction.
You start it, and you start it with a structure rather than an accusation. I help you work out what actually needs to change, what each of you is willing to live with, and how to say it in a way which leaves the company intact whichever way it goes. Waiting is the expensive option.
Not in the meeting. We work out what is driving it, who else on the board sees it, and what a corrected relationship looks like, then we prepare the conversations one at a time. Board dynamics are managed between meetings, and founders who learn that early keep hold of their own narrative.
Usually less than you fear and more than you hope. We read it against what changed since the last update, what else is happening in their portfolio, and how they behaved before the silence, then we choose a move which gets you information without spending credibility.
We look at the raise from the other side of the table: the metrics an investor will test, the story which has to hold up, and the two or three weaknesses which will surface in diligence. Sometimes the answer is to fix them first, and sometimes it is that you are readier than you think. Either answer is worth having before you start.
With the buyer. Who signs, who blocks, what problem they are paid to solve, and which alternatives they weigh against you. For AI products there is often no comparable and the usage costs move underneath you, so pricing has to be designed rather than copied. The motion follows from that, not the other way around.
I prepared a company for an IPO and for the acquisition which followed, and I did a substantial part of the integration work afterwards. Preparation starts long before a banker is involved: the numbers which have to be clean, the contracts which have to be findable, and the decisions which look very different to a buyer than they did to you. Integration is where value is most often lost, and it is worth planning before you sign anything.
More than founders expect. US buyers, US investors and US boards each have their own conventions, and a company which wins at home can stall here for reasons nobody says out loud. We work through the entity, pricing, the first US hires, and how to build credibility as a name nobody knows yet.
Sometimes, and it is worth being honest about which of the three is actually the problem. Cap table and entity questions get harder and more expensive with every round, so they are best looked at before the next raise rather than during it.
Yes, and it is a revenue problem rather than a compliance problem. The deal is stuck because a security or privacy reviewer cannot say yes yet. We work out what would let them say yes, decide what the company should commit to and what it should not, and shape the answer so the contract moves. For products capturing data in public spaces, or training on customer data, designing for this early is what makes the sale possible at all.
Tell me what you are working through, in whatever detail suits you. If it is something I can help with, we will speak. If it is not, I will say so, and where I can I will point you to someone better placed.