I help the ones that shouldn’t.
I-Corps cohorts led at MIT & NSF
Users reached through behavior change platforms
Pattern recognition across research, VC & GTM
Revenue built from zero in health behavior change
"She brought great depth of experience and a remarkable ability to get to the heart of issues and build momentum."
About You
You’re not short on intelligence. You’re not short on technology. You might not even be short on funding.
What’s missing is the architecture that moves something from attention all the way through to recurring impact. Most tools are designed to get adopted. Very few are designed for what comes after.
AI has collapsed the cost of building. The supply of solutions is becoming essentially infinite. But human attention isn’t scaling with it. Behavior change capacity isn’t scaling with it.
Getting someone to change what they actually do, durably, in ways that compound over time… that’s the whole game. And almost nobody is designing for it deliberately.
Almost everyone does. And AI is making it worse, not better. When you can build anything in weeks, the pressure to skip validation and ship feels rational. It isn’t. The fastest way to recurring impact is still talking to the humans you’re trying to change before you build the thing you think will change them.
Attention without an adoption architecture is just awareness. And awareness without behavior change is just noise. The gap between “people know about this” and “people’s lives are different because of this” is where most brilliant tools quietly disappear.
Twenty cohorts of brilliant PhD researchers have taught me the same thing. The science is rarely the problem. The journey from first contact to recurring, compounding impact almost always is.
Almost everyone does. And AI is making it worse, not better. When you can build anything in weeks, the pressure to skip validation and ship feels rational. It isn’t. The fastest way to recurring impact is still talking to the humans you’re trying to change before you build the thing you think will change them.
Attention → Adoption → Impact → Recurring Impact.
Most tools are designed for the first two.
That’s why most tools disappear.
About Me
Twenty years of watching brilliant ideas succeed and fail taught me where to look. It’s almost always the human side of the equation.
Lead Instructor, MIT / NSF I-Corps — 20+ cohorts of PhD researchers, regional & national programs
Managing Director, Winning by Design — Revenue architecture for SaaS growth teams
NSF Open Source Curriculum — Rewrote the I-Corps curriculum for POSE / open source projects
Founder, PossibilityU — $1.25M raised, Gates Foundation, Pearson, 20K users
WomenToWomen.com — Scaled health behavior platform to 400K users and $18M revenue
Board Chair — HighByte, CourseStorm
At MIT and NSF, I’ve run over twenty cohorts of some of the most brilliant scientists in the country through the I-Corps methodology. The work isn’t about building pitch decks. It’s about unlearning assumptions. Getting out of the building. Discovering whether the problem you’re solving is actually the problem anyone has. Most of the time, the answer surprises people. That’s the point.
Not advised on it. Built it. At WomenToWomen, from zero to $18M in a space where nobody had a playbook. At PossibilityU, raising venture capital and navigating Gates Foundation partnerships simultaneously. At BetterLesson, as Chief Revenue Officer through a critical growth inflection. The pattern recognition across those experiences is what I bring to every engagement.
People don’t change behavior because they received good information and a clear value proposition. They never have. Understanding why humans actually change what they do, and building that into both the product and the go-to-market from day one, is what separates tools that get adopted from tools that get abandoned. This is the layer most builders skip. It’s almost always why things stall.
What People Say
“
She brought great depth of experience and a remarkable ability to get to the heart of issues and build momentum. Betsy is keenly oriented to solving problems and pursuing high-value opportunities, and is a pleasure to work with.
“
It’s unusual to find a consultant who has her degree of operating experience. Whether you have a GTM challenge or need general strategic support, she will sidle up alongside you and your team, and bring it. The BetterLesson team and I are better for having had Betsy by our side.
“
Betsy advised me through a period where we experienced the most substantial growth to date. Her ability to listen, understand the issues, and quickly assess where to be most effective were a tremendous benefit. She breaks through bottlenecks and inspires momentum.
Services
I don’t do retainers that fill calendar time. I do work that changes the trajectory of what you’re building. The engagements that interest me most sit at the intersection of serious research, real technology, and the human adoption problem nobody’s solved yet.
01
The work that happens before everything else. The I-Corps methodology, applied outside the lab, for founders and research teams who need to know whether the world actually wants what they’re making before they spend another year building it. Most people skip this. It’s always a mistake.
02
Once you know the world wants it, you need the engine to get it there. Not a sales deck. An architecture. The system that compounds instead of resets every quarter.
03
The layer that most AI and data tools skip entirely. If your tool requires humans to change how they work, think, or make decisions, you need this built into the product and the go-to-market from day one.
04
For founders and executive teams who need a thinking partner with genuine operating experience. Someone who’s sat in your seat, made your mistakes, and can tell the difference between a real signal and a flattering one.
Thinking
Writing and conversations at the intersection of behavior change science, AI adoption, and what it actually takes to get from brilliant idea to lasting impact.
Feature Writing
Coming Soon · Substack
AI has collapsed the cost of building. The supply of solutions is becoming infinite. But human attention and behavior change capacity are not scaling with it. This is the problem nobody is naming clearly enough.
Coming Soon · Substack
AI has collapsed the cost of building. The supply of solutions is becoming infinite. But human attention and behavior change capacity are not scaling with it. This is the problem nobody is naming clearly enough.
Selected Conversations
Podcast · RevTech Revolution
A conversation with Mary Purk, Managing Director of the AI and Analytics Research Center at Wharton, on why adoption is harder than implementation and what the data actually shows.
Podcast · RevTech Revolution
Yan Yang, Chief Data Scientist at Deserve, on why more data doesn’t mean better decisions, what fairness-aware machine learning actually requires, and how to build data models humans can trust.
Podcast · RevTech Revolution
Dr. Howard Dover on why companies consistently struggle to achieve efficiency gains from new sales technologies, and the adoption cycles that create inertia at every level of the organization.