Sunny Sabbini in the Media
Sunny Sabbini is a partnership advisor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Journalists covering how business partners build, choose, and structure their working relationships have come to her as a source for a decade.
The coverage below spans 2015 to 2023, across five outlets, and it keeps returning to the same question from different directions: what makes a partnership hold, and what tends to be missing when it doesn't.
Sunny Sabbini is a partnership advisor in the San Francisco Bay Area working with
business partners and cofounders whose partnership has outgrown how it was set up.
About Sunny Sabbini
Sunny Sabbini is a partnership advisor in the San Francisco Bay Area and the founder of ASCENT Partnership. For more than twenty-five years she has worked with business partners and cofounders to build the structure a partnership needs to keep pace with the business it's becoming: decision rights, role clarity, operating rhythm, and agreements that hold under pressure.
Her training spans clinical work, organizational consulting, and mediation, including more than five years as an Interpersonal Dynamics Facilitator at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
This is the only work she does.
As Seen In
Built for Now, or Built for What’s Next?
The Partnership Capacity Check looks at ten situations growing businesses bring to their partners, and asks one thing of each: can the way you work together now carry it?
Featured Coverage
The Guardian
"Businesses on the couch: the co-founders in couples therapy" · September 20, 2017
A look at cofounders working through partnership strain together. The founders profiled worked with Sunny, who helped them see that what looked like a personality clash was a structural mismatch in how each of them was built to work.
Los Angeles Times
"Therapists help tech start-up co-founders resolve disputes and save their businesses" · December 25, 2015 · by Tracey Lien
A feature on founders addressing partnership strain before it threatens the business. Sunny is quoted on how avoiding the harder conversations lets small structural gaps compound into much larger ones.
The Globe and Mail
"The challenges and rewards of building a business with your best friends" · October 13, 2022 · by Déjà Leonard
A feature on partners building a business with a close friend. Sunny is quoted on how the working relationship needs its own structure, separate from the friendship underneath it, and on what it takes to keep a hard conversation productive under pressure.
U.S. Bank — Financial IQ
"Money Talks: The Right Way to Launch a Business With a Friend" · October 27, 2023 · interviewed by Katherine Hobson
Advice for friends going into business together. Sunny's suggestion: choose a partner you'd still choose on skill and character alone, even if you weren't already friends, and start with a small pilot before going all in.
StartupJuncture
"How to find the right co-founder: insights from founders and psychologists" · June 9, 2015 · by Hans Klis
Advice on choosing the right cofounder. Sunny makes the case for treating a partnership as something you keep investing in deliberately over the long haul rather than a decision you make once and then leave alone.
What the Coverage Keeps Coming Back To
Read across a decade, these pieces are all circling one idea, well before it had a name.
Partnerships get chosen carefully and then left alone. The choosing gets attention. The building doesn't. And when strain shows up years later, the available language for it is personality, or communication, or fit, when what's usually happened is that the way two people set things up at the start stopped matching what the business grew into.
That's the thing Sunny has been saying to journalists since 2015, and it's what the practice is built on now.
Where to Start
If any of this sounds like your own partnership, the Partnership Capacity Check is a place to begin. Ten minutes, free, no score. It puts what's changed in the business next to what hasn't changed in the partnership, so the gap is something you can date rather than something you feel.
A partnership built for what's next.
San Francisco Bay Area · Remote sessions nationwide