Derek Haswell

Company-building is a creative act. I love working alongside founders & CEOs to build businesses people care about, and to use that work to bring more of who they are into how they lead and how they live.

I’m a builder at heart. I fell in love with product development early in my life, trained as a mechanical & aerospace engineer, developed a healthy obsession with tech startups in 2005, and haven’t looked back since. In 2013 I (accidentally) co-founded 10% Happier, a meditation app & media company. I spent the next decade assembling an incredible team, building an award-winning product (140,000+ reviews at 4.8 stars), and scaling the business to eight figures in ARR. It wasn’t always easy, but I had a blast.

Part of my role was leading our content team, which meant working alongside world-class meditation teachers like Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and (eventually) the Dalai Lama. I threw myself into their material, spent time with them in person, attended silent retreats, and explored different practices and traditions. Slowly, gradually, and sometimes painfully, this opened me up to a different way of seeing and being in the world. As I (imperfectly) brought these insights into how I led and how I showed up as a husband and father, I began to see how much of my drive came from needing to prove I was enough. I also began to discover what became possible when care for the people around me took more of the lead.

In 2022, I left the company to coach full time. This dance between growing my “outer” capacity to make things happen and cultivating more “inner” alignment changed my life, and I’m grateful (and a little stunned) that I get to support other founders & CEOs on a similar path as they do the work of their lives. I’ve spent years training in several different coaching modalities, including Aletheia and Internal Family Systems. Clarity and warmth are my not-so-secret ingredients, and two ways my clients often describe me as a coach. At Camerado, I get to bring that same spirit to working alongside Ryan and Steve, whose perspectives keep expanding my own.

I live on a regenerative farm in Upstate New York where my wife and our three kids are building a non-profit school that helps kids connect more deeply with the land and their own humanity. We also have two donkeys.

You can learn more about me at derekhaswell.com.