How career coach Angelina Darrisaw went from side hustler to CEO

Meet Angelina Darrisaw, a career coach who went from side hustling to CEO. She is the founder and CEO of C-Suite Coach, a firm that offers expertly designed professional development and coaching programs for working professionals and small business leaders.

Darrisaw’s decision to start C-Suite was influenced by her work in corporate America. While doing business development, she was working with media companies and curating deals to help her outfit figure out which digital partners to form partnerships with.

As a result, she worked with partners like Twitter, Snapchat, and Tumblr, among others. Her success soon drew people’s attention to her and later got people coming into her office to ask her questions about how to have conversations around negotiations and applying for programs that would accelerate careers.

She told Forbes that most of the people that were coming to her office were underrepresented groups like Black employees, women employees, and members of the LGBT community. She also noticed a consistent theme when she got approached frequently by people having challenges in the same areas. For Darrisaw, it was definitely ‘an aha moment.’

She was also driven by the fact that she wanted to create something for herself that could provide more resources to groups that don’t typically get it. This led to the founding of C-Suite Coach.

“When I started my company, the mission was about scaling one-to-one coaching for Black and Latinx professionals. So it was tough for me to move on from the fact that my mission changed and the work was moving me in another direction. However, due to reframing and remaining resilient, I was able to pivot and return to our original mission with the launch of our C-Suite Coach Network,” she noted on ShoutOutAtlanta.

Today, her company provides training programs for global firms like Google, Wayfair, Major League Baseball, NYU’s Veteran Lab Accelerator, Zendesk, Oscar Health, Union Pacific, and Railroad Company.

Before starting C-Suite Coach, Darrisaw was the Senior Manager of Digital Business Development at Viacom and did similar digital strategy work previously at ESPN. 

Darrisaw is a New Yorker, originally born and bred in Brooklyn. Her mom was a single teenager when she had her, and has inspired her with the sacrifices she made to ensure that her life was set up differently.

According to her, her mom went from being a teenage mom to being an assistant superintendent with a Ph.D. “Her tenacity is a daily inspiration I carry with me as I continue to be the CEO of my company,” she told ShoutOutAtlanta.