First-Gen Career Strategy
Theo Williams coaches mid-career first-generation professionals navigating corporate careers built for someone else. No borrowed playbook. Just the map your manager assumes you already have.
The Work
1:1 Coaching
Three- or six-month engagements for mid-career first-gen professionals who are competent, credentialed, and navigating without the rulebook. This is strategy work, not cheerleading.
The Cohort
The institutional knowledge your colleagues absorbed at their parents' dinner tables — compressed into three months, alongside seven other people who get it. Runs twice yearly.
Speaking & Advisory
Keynotes for ERGs, first-gen summits, and corporate events. Advisory engagements for organizations building infrastructure to retain first-gen talent past year three.
He doesn't coach mindset. He coaches strategy.
Theo Williams spent twelve years in corporate America learning what they don't teach you at orientation — and what they won't tell you at performance review. He made director. He was usually the only first-gen voice in the room.
He left in 2021. Not because he failed. Because he couldn't stop thinking about the invisible tuition his peers were paying every day — the salary negotiations they lost, the sponsors they didn't know to cultivate, the political capital burned navigating systems no one explained.
Now he teaches what he spent a decade figuring out on his own.
What clients say
“I was in my fourth year at Google wondering why my peers were getting promoted and I wasn't. Theo didn't give me a pep talk. He showed me exactly what signals I was missing and how to change them. I got promoted six months later.”
Marcus T.
Senior Software Engineer, Google
The Writing
Your mentors aren't giving you bad advice on purpose. They're giving you the advice that worked for them. The problem is that it didn't work for the same reasons.
Most salary negotiation advice assumes you can afford to walk away. Here's how to negotiate when you can't — and still win.
There's a curriculum your colleagues absorbed over decades of family dinner conversations and summer internships. Here's the accelerated version.
The Crossing
Every week, one essay on the unwritten rules of corporate America — salary negotiation, sponsorship, visibility, and everything they assume you already know. Read by 2,400+ first-gen professionals.
No noise. No archives. Just the work.