Zach Nies | Director

For the past 25 years, Zach Nies has dedicated his work to exploring what enables teams to tackle humanity's toughest challenges while excelling in their careers. He has delved into this inquiry across startups, large corporations, and non-profits, wearing various hats as a founder, C-level executive, investor, and executive coach.

Currently, as the founder of Growing Lean, Zach focuses on assisting teams working on planet or society scale problems adopt entrepreneurial mindsets and high-performance habits that are proven to improve time to impact, decrease risk, and foster team wellbeing. Before putting his founder hat back on, Zach was an investor at Techstars and the Managing Director for their Sustainability Accelerator in partnership with The Nature Conservancy and the Boulder accelerator. Before Techstars, Zach was part of the executive team at Rally Software before its successful IPO, serving in various roles including CTO. Throughout his career, Zach's product and technical leadership has overseen products that have accounted for over $1 billion in revenue. As a founder of 4 companies and the survivor of many M&A transactions, Zach loves working with entrepreneurs from high-level strategy all the way down to the inner game of managing the psychology of the ups and downs of the experience. He has a computer science degree and extensive studies in psychology. When he’s not working with entrepreneurs, you can find him spending time with his family or looking through a camera.