Wise Friends
The human side of Effective Organizations.
We help Effective Organizations become more effective. Our lever is the people: the leader who's stuck, the hire that isn't working, the meeting that wastes ten smart hours, the idea that dies in someone's head.
The problem
The right topic isn't enough
Organizations working on the world's most important problems are unusually good at choosing what to work on, and unusually bad at the human work that turns a good problem into impact. The right topic doesn't produce good hiring, good positioning, or good communication on its own. Wise Friends is that work, performed intentionally.
How we work
We meet you where you are
Everything is bespoke. There's no program, no curriculum, no laminated framework. We start from where you are, figure out what's actually stuck, and build the fix to fit. Every org's tangle is different; the work should be too.
Services
What we do
CEO whispering
A confidential ear for the person at the top. Decisions, management, conflict, the things you can't take to your team or your board. We unblock leaders so leaders can unblock everyone else.
Hiring and contracts
Work trials that test the actual work. Onboarding that makes week one useful; offboarding that keeps friends. Contract structuring and incentive alignment, because shared values only take you so far: the contract is where alignment becomes real.
Fundraising
Grant applications, pitches, and terms. You know why your work matters; funders hear a hundred pitches a week claiming major impact. We help you tell the story so the people with money understand it.
Words and rooms
Positioning: what you stand for, which work to put forward, how to be understood by funders, collaborators, and hires. Public speaking and presentations. Meetings worth showing up for: agendas, facilitation, and the craft of getting experts to converge instead of talking past each other. And ghostwriting, for the ideas locked in your head that deserve to be in print.
What clients say
“In my first four days of working with Julian & Nikki, they created somewhere between $3k and $12k of value.”
Our work has shown up at
Julian Wise
Ten years ghostwriting for Silicon Valley leaders: clients include Justin Kan (founder of Twitch), Ellen Pao (fmr CEO of Reddit), and Ann Miura-Ko (founder of Floodgate, board member of Lyft and Yale). He has run blogs and built web presence for top Silicon Valley companies, and he coaches founders, executives, and freelancers; one freelance writer's revenue doubled in two months of his coaching. For one startup, he mediated a combative cofounder dispute, leading to a peaceful separation; when that startup was unable to raise money, he spearheaded their fundraising efforts, ultimately raising $1.5M for the company.
His specific and slightly unusual skillset: befriending eccentric people and writing their philosophy. He tests board games, advised a youth group for five years, and trained at École Philippe Gaulier, the world's foremost clown school. B.A. in Philosophy from Yale.
Nikki Teran
Nikki runs international policy convenings with deep expertise at the intersection of AI and biosecurity. She has technical and policy fluency in both AI and biosecurity. She was named one of Vox's Future Perfect 50 for her work in Washington, DC on Pandemic Prevention. She helped build a tabletop exercise run at the Munich Security Conference and for congressional staffers; has facilitated for the Astera Institute, NTI | bio, and the Institute for Progress; and regularly runs working groups that bring policymakers and frontier-lab researchers into the same productive room.
She has taught public speaking at Stanford, tutored senior policy staff on technical subjects, and knows firsthand that policymakers turn to the people who make complex things clear. She once turned an idea into a New York Times OpEd, and the OpEd into a bipartisan congressional hearing. Nikki has a PhD in Genetics from Stanford and a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale.
Talk to us
Start with an email
Tell us what's stuck. Half-formed is fine; half-formed is kind of our specialty.
friends@wisefriends.team