Unleash Your Company’s Potential

Emerging Leaders Program — ELP

Execution Mastery for Leadership Teams

Photography by Darrel Rhea

Evolutionary Approach To Up-leveling Teams

On-Demand | 6-Week Live Coaching + AI-Enabled Curriculum + Community

ELP is an Nuclear Power For Teams with Big Missions

We promise that you will learn to accomplish the impossible.

✅ Learn radically potent and advanced leadership skills to communicate with power, manage people, and take your startup to the next level.

✅ Build performance-oriented teams, retain and motivate key people, delegate action, avoid burnout, and foster a culture of trust and innovation.

✅ Gain access to our AI meticulously trained on thousands of hours of anonymized coaching calls and ontological human potential frameworks.

Explode Your Team’s Potential with ELP

  • Mobilize high-impact teams that operate in sync, driving collective success and scaling your startup vision.

  • Master the art of drawing top talents, anchoring them with purpose, and igniting their intrinsic motivation for lasting loyalty.

  • Infuse a spirit of relentless innovation, turning your startup into a hub of groundbreaking ideas and transformative solutions.

  • Rapidly forge deep connections, breaking barriers and laying the foundation of trust that accelerates collaboration.

  • Streamline delegation mastery, ensuring tasks are in the right hands, amplifying productivity while preserving your well-being.

  • Expand your influence, establishing potent alliances that bolster your startup's reach, resources, and resilience.

  • Harness challenges as catalysts, transforming obstacles into unprecedented avenues of growth and innovation.

  • Steer confidently through the tumultuous startup seas, making informed pivots and capitalizing on market dynamics.

  • Unearth concealed issues with precision, sparking timely interventions that keep your startup's trajectory on point.

  • Fine-tune your emotional acumen, orchestrating moods and responses that resonate, inspire, and lead with authenticity.

ELP Curriculum

Cultivate 6 Managerial Leadership Virtues Over 6 Weeks.

Over the course of 6 weeks, you will develop 6 transformative virtues via weekly live group sessions with a master coach

  • Breakdowns are inevitable. Your power and quality of work, career and life, depends on how you deal with breakdowns. Learn how to deal with breakdowns powerfully and produce breakthroughs.

  • The virtue of Becoming a New Beginner is to prepare leaders to learn quickly and act effectively, in new and challenging situations, by developing a particular kind of mood that is a blend of humility, intense curiosity, and openness.

    Benefits of developing this virtue include the reduction in mistakes and waste, reduction in the time required to learn new things, and the ability to pivot effectively and quickly when needed.

  • The third virtue of Generating New Context gives an emerging leader the ability to see and bring forth a new possibility to escape from stuck and resigned situations. Leaders and teams need meaning and context to thrive and produce remarkable results.

    Benefits of developing this virtue include improvements in attracting, retaining, and energizing teams, setting and mobilizing bold missions at all levels of the organization, and providing leadership in challenging situations.

  • The fourth virtue of Navigating Moods is about building personal and team resilience and optimism and growing the capacity for dealing with change powerfully. Moods are our opinions about our future and are generally invisible to us. Our ability to navigate complicated challenges very much depends on our capacity for navigating moods in the situation.

    Benefits include improvements in relationships and communication skills, productivity, and emotional fortitude.

  • The fifth virtue, Making Assessments, helps emerging leaders wake up to their blindnesses and biases and clear the way for making diagnostic assessments about their situations and next steps. The ability to make effective assessments matters a great deal in countering new and emergent situations.

    Benefits include cultivating and practicing critical judgment without falling into analysis paralysis, disrupting resigned moods among teams, and developing deeper listening skills.

  • Action moves worlds. However, Action is not what you might think—being busy, running around, etc. Here, you will learn a powerful language and a framework for taking action and generating results.

How It Works

  • 1. Pre-Survey

    Time: Conducted ASAP after registration

    Prospective participants start with a short survey to self-assess and determine areas for growth. This gives us a baseline on where participants stand in the leadership virtues covered in ELP.

    *Pre- and post-assessment results are strictly confidential.

  • 2. The ELP Community

    Time: Joined ASAP after registration

    Participants are invited to join the private course community, where they can review the discourse video ahead of each Live Group Call and connect with other participants.

  • 3. Weekly Live Group Call

    Time: 10am - 12pm PST & 5pm - 7pm PST

    Join a 2-hour Live Weekly Group Call by Zoom. We offer 2 live sessions each week to accommodate participants from globally diverse regions. Join either session. Each session begins with a short discourse and is followed up with a lively Q&A.

  • 4. Unlimited 1:1 Coaching

    Time: Available upon request for 12 weeks

    Welcome to schedule a 15, 30, or 60 min call with any of our coaches throughout the program and up to 6 weeks after. Bring to the table a pressing concern, and let’s go to work on it.

  • 5. Post-Survey

    Time: Conducted upon graduation

    After completion, we provide a follow-up evaluation to measure progress against the ELP objectives, listen to participants’ assessments, and make recommendations for follow-on leadership coaching opportunities.

    *Pre- and post-assessment results are strictly confidential.

Apply for ELP

Meet Your Coach

“Hi, I am Saqib Rasool, the co-founder & CEO at Conceivian. As a serial entrepreneur, coach, and author, I started my career at Microsoft as an engineer. Later, I co-founded several startups, from raising millions in funding to exits, and built a start-up accelerator that has evolved into what is now Conceivian, an academy for leaders.

I see work and entrepreneurship as a way of being to deal with change, locating waves, and learning to navigate toward a better future. My passion for cultivating and mobilizing emerging leaders and changemakers led me to study human potential, action, teamwork, innovation, entrepreneurship, and power.

Over the last decade, I've had the privilege of assisting thousands in elevating their careers and finding joy and purpose in their work. My journey has shaped my unique approach to leadership development, and I look forward to sharing these insights with you.”

94% of graduates said they were “deeply satisfied” with the program.

  • “In such a high performance and dynamic industry such as Venture Capital, most people never take a moment to pause and self-reflect on themselves and whether they are performing at their best and so on. Having a forum where with the help of proper frameworks and proper coaches and friends, you can pause and approach all of these challenges is really powerful. I would definitely recommend this program for both its content and for the confidential, safe, and fun space it creates.”

    – Abel Bezares,
     Associate at Cometa

  • “In every session, I thought about the people that work with me and imagined how great it would be for them also to have the opportunity to take the course. I catch myself telling my husband repeatedly about what I learned, and for the first time in years, I feel engaged with my leadership, my career, and my self-development.”

    — Guida Sampedro,
    Head of Marketing at Moss

  • “I learned [at ELP] that leadership is the act of navigating change and creating change to remove the feeling of being stuck. The distinctions gave me new power for myself and my peers. Now, I find myself regularly using this new vocabulary, reflecting and engaging in one or more of the leadership virtues to create new possibilities for my team and the organization as a whole."

    — Adrian Latortue,
    Portfolio Manager at 500 Startups

  • “Saqib is a very sincere leader that has the intention to help and support all the participants. He brings a different outlook and forces all of us to think outside our norms.”

    — Samira Shihab,
     CEO at Tinkerlust | Principal at AC Ventures

  • “As an emerging startup leader in a volatile world, it is very important to me to navigate between moods and pressure from all stakeholders and find the much-desired work-life balance. The course helped me a lot to build fundamental skills to understand how to deal with all of this and invent new futures in an intense and effective way that I have not experienced before.”

    – Claudia Backes,
    Chief of Products at Moss

  • “There were some really good points discussed during the sessions that would stay with me hopefully forever. Especially having a starter mindset, context vs. content, thinking about care when giving negative assessment, etc.”

    – Aparna Jindal,
    Senior Associate at Capria Ventures

  • "This will be super useful in managing my team (both upwards and downwards) and also in approaching general life and work situations to avoid anxiety.”

    – Lucia Montalvo,
    Vice President at Salkantay Ventures

Teams That Are Winning

Scientific Foundations

Select References:  

  1. Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words. Harvard University Press, 1975.

  2. Bell, Chauncey, Mobilize: Dancing In The World - Navigating Questions, Commitments, and Contingencies, Harvester Press, 2020. 

  3. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Stuart E. Dreyfus, Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer. The Free Press, 1986. 

  4. Flaherty, James, Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others, 3rd Edition. Routledge, 2011. 

  5. Fiumara, Gemma Corradi, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. Routledge, 1990. 

  6. Flores, Fernando, and Terry Winograd, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Addison-Wesley Professional, 1987.

  7. Flores, Fernando, Management and Communication in the Office of the Future. Doctoral dissertation, University of CA Berkeley, 1980.

  8. Heidegger, Martin, What Is Called Thinking? Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1954.

  9. Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Shambhala, 1992.

  10. Solomon, Robert, and Fernando Flores, Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life. Oxford University Press, 2013.

  11. Spinosa, Charles, Fernando Flores, and Hubert Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity. MIT Press, 1997.

Built on the decades of work done on human potential, communications, and coordination at Oxford, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and the US Naval Academy, Conceivian programs stand in the traditions of evolutionary biology, linguistic ontology, and computer science. Over the last 3 decades, this approach has been successfully deployed to hundreds of major enterprises via thousands of leaders with highly satisfying results.  

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