Alchemizing chaos for exit
Turning brilliance under pressure into clarity, scale, and category-defining success.
For founders navigating high-growth turbulence, I help you go from promising → dominant → exit — without losing your vision, your team, or your mind.
You’ve found traction.
The opportunity is massive.
But as growth accelerates, so do the cracks:
execution bottlenecks, team misalignment, story drift, and mental fatigue.
This is where most promising companies stall.
You ask yourself: “How do I scale my breakthrough vision without breaking my company?”
But when it comes to the acute issues of scaling (going “1 to 10”, from “0 to 1”), the root cause is often that the conditions for scale are discordant:
The product may work for its initial users, but it needs to scale to a larger group of consumers/users.
The category definition is unclear; it’s uncertain how the company can expand its potential, and differentiate + serve its superconsumers extremely well.
And the team is often expanding haphazardly, rife with pains and politics.
The founder faces their own growing pains, and often feels frustrated and isolated in the face of demands from every direction.
Brilliance breaks in chaos.
When alchemized, empires rise.
Chaos isn’t the threat — it’s the crucible.
Most founders try to outrun it.
I work with teams to alchemize it into momentum.
Because scaling isn’t about suppressing chaos.
It’s about transforming it.
If you scale things right, it looks like…
Initial success → Scalable success
Random experiments → Controlled experiments
Heads-down building → Heads-out scaling
Accidental growth → Repeatable growth
Initial audiences → New segments
One market → Multiple geographies
A few products → Many products & extensions
Product mostly → Strategy + ops
Focus only on WOM → Leverage press + partners
Small team (1-10) → Bigger team (~50+)
Open work outcomes → Quantified results
Fluid structure → Better reporting / syncing
Informal culture → Managing politics
Bring on who you can → Hiring + onboarding well
In-person → Remote
A few opinions from team → Endless opinions from all
Founder(s) doing everything → Founder(s) delegating most
Floundering chaos → Controlled chaos
Headless chickens → Hunting eagles
So, the question is…
How do we get there?
The key is to build the system that transforms chaos into dominance.
Strategic pathfinding when the map runs out
Operational clarity that scales the team
Story and narrative that command attention
Execution leadership that preserves the founder's bandwidth and vision
You don’t need more ideas, you need execution to alchemize chaos into success:
Most advisors are too abstract. I build with you.
Most operators are too narrow. I scale the system that scales everything else.
I bridge the gap between vision and velocity, so you get strategic clarity, execution stability, scalable structure, narrative firepower, and real outcomes — funding, growth, and exit.
I’m here to help you get where you know you're meant to go — without the burnout, breakdown, or bottlenecks.
The adventurers I work with as a Chaos Alchemist
I take each engagement very seriously, and spend a lot of time ensuring we deliver outcomes together. Hence, I am extremely selective and take on only 1 - 3 engagements personally each year.
I can add the most value to teams that are just past the initial inflection point of product-market fit — meaning you see signs of life, but it’s not clear (yet) how to get it to meaningful scale.
Usually, this means the company is generating some initial revenue, feels like you’re on the brink of breakout growth, and/or with a team of 7-10 people +. Usually, you are facing messy middle scaling, exit prep, or positioning challenges.
At the end of our joint quest, you should be able to do one of a few things:
Bootstrap to scale ~$100M - 1B+ valuation.
Raise your next big round of funding.
Privately exit / be acquired by a company you respect.
If you are working on a category-defining project with the potential to change the status quo, I’d love to jam and see how we can work together, or help in any way!
If you’d like to work together, please contact me.
In my own journey, as I thought about it more…
Isn’t running a company pretty much like playing an RPG game?
RPG: Company Fables
Appropriate challenges
Which challenges do you go after? How do you have the right amount of challenge, and set up the conditions to achieve them?
Designing the right levels
How do I design levels for the team to keep improving towards? How do you keep the “players” (team and users) motivated?
Improving our stats
Hey, actually, aren’t I just a player with RPG stats I’m trying to improve all the time? What do I need to do to systematically improve?
Check out my (prototype) Founder RPG content to get a taste of running a company like a game!
About Carylyne
About Carylyne
Hi! I’m Carylyne Chan, an experienced underdog-to-top-dog startup executive and entrepreneur.
I’m an advisor and angel investor to early-stage, lean teams focused on creating and dominating their own categories.
I’m currently building two new brands: A tea brand named Portman Tea and a sun care brand called Good Instincts.
Previously, I was CEO at CoinMarketCap, which was acquired in 2020. My previous artificial intelligence startup (AngelPad S’16) was acquired in 2018.
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