24
Years in Silicon Valley SaaS leadership
20+
Years of personal psychedelic work
2,000+
Hours of ceremony work since 2020
100+
Personal ceremonies, over two decades
Boston Marathon qualifier · Winemaker · Beekeeper · American Gladiator TV show (as subject) · Traveled to 34 countries.
Expanding human potential. Without dulling the edge that made you successful.
I work with people at the moments when success stops feeling like freedom.
My clients are founders, executives, athletes, and senior leaders who are capable, driven, and externally successful, yet sense that something internally has not fully settled. What once worked still works, but at a cost. Pressure lingers. Rest is elusive. Leadership feels heavier than it used to.
My work supports people in understanding how their internal system operates, preparing them for meaningful change, and helping that change hold in real life.
Before this work, I sold over $80 million of software, hardware, and services at Oracle, Gartner, Siebel, and various early stage startups, with twenty-four years in Silicon Valley SaaS sales and leadership. I was acquired twice, fired, and laid off along the way. As a two-time startup founder, I have carried revenue responsibility, led teams through uncertainty, and experienced firsthand the psychological demands of performance driven environments.
Alongside the professional career, my life has included a wide range of formative experiences that shape how I work with high performers. I have run the Boston Marathon, competed on the TV show American Gladiators, traveled to thirty-four countries, made wine, and kept bees. These experiences inform a grounded understanding of discipline, resilience, and the importance of systems that must be tended over time.
For more than twenty years, I have worked at the intersection of leadership development, trauma informed approaches, neuroscience based preparation, and guided psychedelic experiences. What is often missing elsewhere is the part I emphasize most: careful preparation and sustained integration.
I built Pioneering Pathway from the inside of that experience. The frameworks, the preparation, the way I hold a client through the journey and the months that follow, all of it comes from what I needed and could not find when I was where you are now.
Dialogue, not instruction. Pacing, not protocol.
Clients often arrive with insight already present. My role is to help them deepen awareness, clarify the patterns, and create the internal conditions for change. Preparation is informed by nervous system regulation, parts work, and an understanding of how adaptation forms under pressure. Integration focuses on translating insight into real world leadership, relationships, and decisions, so that the change does not fade once life resumes.
I work in dialogue rather than instruction, paying close attention to pacing, safety, and what is actually emerging. Integration is not an add-on. It is woven throughout the entire process.
Clients often describe the outcome of this work not as becoming someone new, but as returning to a more natural way of operating. Decisions become cleaner. Leadership feels less performative. Emotional freedom increases, not through force or optimization, but because the system no longer needs the adaptations it once relied on.
Not motivation. Not insight. A different way of operating.
What clients reflect after the work is not a new mindset. It is a different operating system underneath the leadership.
- Less urgency driving decisions. More clarity under pressure.
- Leadership that holds during uncertainty, not just when things are going well.
- The ability to delegate and trust without disengaging or micromanaging.
- Emotional steadiness that strengthens teams during fragile moments.
- Growth that follows alignment, not force.
The shift is from performance driven success to integrated self leadership. Growth that no longer comes at the expense of health, relationships, or inner stability.
How Ray prepared for this work.
Twenty years of personal psychedelic work, sustained integration, men's work, leadership under pressure, and the long repair of a nervous system that learned achievement before safety.
Two thousand hours of ceremony work in recent years, one-on-one executive coaching, integration support, and a practice built around pacing, discernment, and fit.
A working foundation. Not a complete list.
What follows is the trained foundation under the work. The deeper credential is the work that does not appear on a certificate, the ongoing personal practice that keeps the guide honest and the container clean.
Foundations in Internal Family Systems, Levels 1 & 2. IFS training and certification for psychedelic guides and coaches. The Moxie School, 2025.
Psychedelic Integration Coach. Third Wave, 2023.
Somatic Archaeology. Trauma informed and culturally grounded somatic training. Ruby Gibson.
Mankind Project. Shadow work and leadership training. Certified facilitator since 2005. Five years active facilitation.
Certified Executive & Leadership Coach. The Executive Coaching University, 2010.
EMyth Certified Business Coach. 2016.
Certified Dating & Relationship Coach, Course Leader and Facilitator. Authentic World, 2006.
Certified Business and Success Coach. Success Resources America, 2004.
Certified Life Coach. Coach Training Alliance, 2004.
Certified Crisis Counselor, Suicide Prevention. SF Suicide Prevention, 1988. Seventy hours training, two years volunteer service.
Eighty hours accelerated learning training.
The deeper credential is the work that does not appear on a certificate.
The work doesn't come from me. It comes through me, from teachers and lineages I name with respect.
This work draws from multiple traditions and direct training with the people who carry them. Naming them is how I honor where the medicine and the methods came from, and how I stay accountable to them.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Trained through the Moxie School cohort, 2025. The IFS model originated with Dr. Richard Schwartz and has become the most researched parts work modality in the field of trauma psychology.
Somatic Archaeology
Direct training with Ruby Gibson, founder of the Freedom Lodge and developer of the Somatic Archaeology method. Her work integrates indigenous body wisdom with modern trauma therapy.
The Mankind Project
Active facilitator since 2005. ManKind Project is an international men's leadership and personal growth organization with chapters across the world.
Third Wave Coaching Certification
Completed 2023. Third Wave is one of the leading psychedelic coaching credentials in the field, founded by Paul Austin.
Executive Coaching University
Certified 2010. Foundational training in executive and leadership coaching.
Authentic World / Authentic Relating
Trained 2006. Decety Hendricks and the Authentic World community originated the practice of authentic relating circles that now inform much of modern circle work.
EMyth Business Coaching
Certified 2016. The methodology developed by Michael Gerber for systems based business operation.
Coach Training Alliance
Certified 2004. Among the first ICF-accredited coach training programs in North America.
San Francisco Suicide Prevention
Hotline counselor since 1988. The longest active training in my body. The first place I learned that presence is the medicine.
Lifetime Trusted Advisor Coach Training
Executive coach training program serving the top 1% of coaches working with senior operators, founders, and CEOs. A network built for depth of practice and continuity of client relationship.
I keep apprenticing. The day I stop is the day this work stops being honest.
Where the practice gets lived.
I split my time between Del Mar, California and Park City, Utah. I spend a great deal of time outdoors and care deeply about living what I invite others into: presence, integrity, and meaningful connection.
Avid cyclist. Former beekeeper and winemaker. Boston Marathon qualifier. Long drawn to physical challenge, from endurance sports to competing on American Gladiators. I snowboard whenever possible, have traveled to thirty-four countries, and share life with a 145-pound Leonberger with a surprisingly gentle soul.
Selected appearances.
The Cameron Brown Show, Ep. 48: When Success Isn't Enough
A conversation about helping high achievers move beyond the silent void that often follows success. Executive coaching, Internal Family Systems, and psychedelic integration as paths to clarity, purpose, and emotional freedom.
Listen on Buzzsprout ↗When Success Stops Feeling Like Freedom — Fully Expressed Podcast
From a Bay Area suicide hotline to walking away from a long Silicon Valley career. Not a story of burning it down, but of waking up to what was underneath the whole time.
Listen on Spotify ↗Psychedelics for Personal Growth and Leadership
Exploring the transformative power of psychedelics in personal growth and leadership development, the importance of vulnerability, self leadership, and internal fulfillment over external validation.
Listen on Spotify ↗The History & Future of Psychedelics: Gateway to Revolutionary Startup Leadership.
Aquillius Psychedelic Symposium, San Diego.
If something here recognized you, that recognition is the beginning.
45 minutes · no fee · no pitch · by referral or fit