About Us
Before you read a little more about us, take a look at our journey from strangers living in different countries to co-authors and founding partners of The Intentional Organization.
- 2025
The book
Our book launches for preorders and is an Amazon bestseller on day one!
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Los Angeles
We hold our book in our hands for the first time.
- 2024
Washington, DC
Mathias facilitates a leadership offsite in DC, expanding our scope in working with leadership teams on strategy, planning, and cohesion.
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New Product
We start working with founders as relationship counsellors, adding a new product to our portfolio.
- 2023
London
We gather with our families in London in August of 2023.
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Los Angeles
Mathias is in LA for a week of writing, book editing, and cooking together, in May of 2023. And more ocean swims.
- 2022
Nova Scotia
Our annual retreat in Nova Scotia, including daily ocean swims, after three years of not meeting in person!
- 2021
TIO Inc.
The Intentional Organization incorporates as a business!
- 2020
@saralouhicks Apr 17, 2020
📣 Hello, I’ve got some big news: Reaction Commerce has been acquired by Mailchimp!
- 2019
Cooking Together
We share a mutual love of cooking and having meals with good friends.
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Reboot Podcast
Leading Shoulder-to-Shoulder
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Palm Springs, CA
Reaction Commerce All Hands with a team outing to Joshua Tree!
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Scharmützelsee
An offsite to prepare for the upcoming All Hands. We also invent Pier Reviews, our end-of-day reflections on a pier!
- 2018
Berlin, Germany
Sara's first trip to Berlin
Lots of walking around the city and working from coffee shops!
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Reaction Commerce
Mathias no longer interim-CTO! (after 2 months as interim)
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Santa Monica, CA
Mathias visits Santa Monica, CA, Reaction HQ
First of many beach walks!
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Boulder, CO
Our first in-person meeting! :)
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Reaction Commerce
Mathias joins Reaction Commerce as interim CTO
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The Internet
We have our first video chat and start with personal checkins, a recurring pattern in our relationship that we stick with to this day
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@roidrage May 24, 2018
Hey folks, I’m looking for a new role as VP Eng or CTO, remote or Berlin. I care about healthy and diverse engineering teams, engineering culture. Let’s chat!
- 2014
Reaction Commerce
Reaction Commerce also adopts a minimum vacation policy
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Mathias' blog
Travis CI adopts minimum vacation policy, setting the course for our aligned values in business.
Sara Hicks
Sara Hicks is an executive coach for startup founders and technology leaders, a founder and product leader, and co-author of The Intentional Organization: A Leadership and Management Guide.
She has spent more than 20 years building products, teams, and companies. She co-founded and led venture-backed Reaction Commerce from zero to its acquisition by Mailchimp, then later served as Mailchimp's Chief Product Officer and Product Advisor. Earlier roles took her through product and design leadership at Etsy, Media Temple, Yahoo!, and GeoCities. Today, she is also building HappyHQ as its founder and CEO.
Sara coaches founders, CEOs, and product, design, and technology executives navigating growth, delegation, executive-team relationships, difficult people decisions, and leadership transitions. She has a particular interest in the shift from founder to CEO, from functional leader to executive, and from running your own company to leading inside a larger organization after an acquisition.
Her approach is curious, direct, and practical. She works with clients on the challenge in front of them while examining the assumptions and patterns underneath it. Sometimes that leads to a decision, sometimes a difficult conversation, and sometimes an experiment.
Her goal is to help people become more intentional about the leader, and person, they want to be.
Sara’s favorites
Mathias Meyer
Mathias is an executive leadership coach and advisor to founders and CTOs. He started his career as an engineer who was mostly good at debugging and fixing production code and keeping things up and running. Over the years as an engineer, he also built up an interest in company culture, organization behaviours and psychology, and what it means to build companies where great products come first and foremost from people who are nurtured, supported, and able to contribute broadly.
He co-founded two companies in the developer tools space. Both exited successfully. At Travis CI, he moved from a co-founding engineering role to management responsibility, and eventually took on the role of CEO, shifting his focus from building great products to building organizations that build great products. Debugging has remained one of his most useful skills along the way, only nowadays he’s coaching co-founders and CTOs to apply it in their organizations. Over most of his career, Mathias has been working at or has built organizations distributed across the globe, making him an experienced leader and builder of truly remote teams. He’s a firm believer in sharing those experiences and helping others.
Beyond coaching founders and CTOs through the challenges of growing themselves and their organizations, Mathias loves to spend time in the kitchen, trying out new recipes, or making his own hot sauce. He lives in Berlin, with his family and a collection of jars where something is constantly fermenting.
What matters to Mathias?
Advisors
Jenny Herald
Jenny Herald is a storyteller whose career is best described as a jungle gym. She’s held various roles from product marketing to military service. For about 20 years, she’s been trying to help others define and achieve success. Although she currently works in tech, she spends her down-time on low tech things like knitting, baking, and gardening.
Rashid Muayyed
Rashid is a self-proclaimed misbehavioral economist, company builder, product thinker, systems designer, and chicken tikka masala aficionado. He enjoys collecting comics, reading, software, operations management, strength training, ecommerce, and history. His favorite quote is one by Heraclitus: “Character is destiny.”
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