Andrea Michalek · @ThatAndreaM
Building things, bringing people together, and following my curiosity wherever it leads.
I'm Andrea Michalek. I'm a founder, advisor, coach, community builder, and occasional van lifer.
I've spent much of my career building companies, products, and teams. These days, I'm just as interested in creating the conditions that help people do their best work and the rooms where the right people can find each other.
A few different projects. One fairly consistent obsession: creating better conditions for people, ideas, and relationships to grow.
Full Moon Forum is a private, curated community for women founders, executives, and innovators who want real peer relationships with other women who understand what comes with leading.
No pitching. No performing. No selling. Just thoughtful conversations, stronger relationships, and a room where you get to be a peer.
Explore Full Moon Forum →I advise and coach product and technology leaders navigating growth, change, difficult decisions, and the moments when yesterday's playbook stops working.
Sometimes the problem is strategy. Sometimes it's the team. Often it's the environment around both.
Explore Leadership Advantage → Ideas + FrameworksBeyond Incremental is the leadership framework I've been developing from decades of building products, companies, teams, and, occasionally, starting over myself.
It's about moving beyond execution mode and creating the conditions where people, performance, and passion can produce something bigger.
Explore Beyond Incremental →Istarted as a developer. Became a CTO. Co-founded a company, sold it twice, and ended up as VP of Product at Elsevier. On paper, I had figured it out.
Then I had a brain injury.
Recovery took three years. Slow, humbling, and clarifying in ways I never expected. I had to relearn things. I had to sit still when everything in me wanted to keep moving. I had to figure out, without the titles and the calendar and the momentum, who I actually was and what I actually wanted.
It turned out to be the most useful education of my life.
When I came out the other side, I bought a van.
Her name is Bessie. She gave me somewhere to go, things to learn, and a completely different way to think about how I wanted to spend my time.
Somewhere along the way, "figuring it out" stopped being only about what I wanted to do next.
I became interested in the environments we build around ourselves. The teams we lead. The people we learn from. The rooms we choose to be in.
That's the thread running through most of what I'm building now. Different projects, but a question I keep coming back to: what actually helps people grow?
Leadership, innovation, ambition, work, and what happens when the old playbook stops working.
August 22, 2026
After a career spent learning how to succeed as one of the only women in the room, I started asking a different question: what if we built a different room?
July 27, 2026
The questions that matter most don't get solved. They return. Why the best leaders win by giving old questions new answers instead of chasing new ones.
July 18, 2026
The point of asking people about your idea isn't to win them over. It's to hear what you didn't already know.
I've never been good at, or particularly focused on, achieving work/life balance. I'm more interested in building a life that has room for all of it: meaningful work, interesting people, new places, things I enjoy making with my own hands, and the freedom to pursue my curiosity wherever it takes me.
Bessie, DIY, travel, and everything in between show up on Instagram and TikTok.