About Linda

Linda Holroyd is a serial entrepreneur, executive coach, and strategic advisor who helps leaders and organizations move from information overload to integrated, purpose‑driven action in an AI‑accelerated world. As founder and CEO of FountainBlue since 2005, she works with founders, executives, and boards to align leadership, strategy, and execution—turning complex headwinds into disciplined growth, healthier cultures, and more ethical innovation.

Beyond FountainBlue, Linda has spent over 20 years building and supporting innovation ecosystems as a founder, investor, and community leader. She co‑founded Galatia Inc. in 1995 and scaled it to 18 employees and $4M in revenue before a successful exit in 2001, later serving as a director at a venture firm and managing director at an innovation center while advising startups, teaching, mentoring, and curating programs such as When She Speaks, VIP Roundtables, and Front Line Managers Online. Across these roles, her overarching theme has been helping humans stay “in and above the loop” and designing structures, decisions, and relationships where hope becomes a repeatable discipline rather than a fragile emotion.

Outside of work, Linda mentors entrepreneurs, judges pitch competitions, and performs as a first soprano in several choirs. She loves to cook, play games, and make people laugh, and maintains a daily practice of walking, strength work, and meditation. Linda takes particular joy in bringing the next generation together across cultures and communities. She dotes on her adult daughter, a former UCLA beach volleyball champion now training as a therapist, and has been married for decades to a former Googler who shares her curiosity about technology and humanity.

Executive Bio for Board, Executive, and Strategic Advisory Roles

Linda Holroyd is the CEO and founder of FountainBlue, a leadership advisory and executive coaching firm focused on helping senior leaders navigate digital and AI-driven transformation.

With more than two decades of experience advising startups, founders, and enterprise leaders, Linda brings a distinctive ability to operate fluently in both innovation and leadership domains while quickly diagnosing underlying issues and shaping practical solutions. Senior leaders engage her when they need a seasoned problem solver who can rapidly understand a complex environment, surface root causes, frame options, and support execution across cross-functional stakeholders.

Linda’s work centers on how and when to lead, manage, and oversee in the age of AI, with particular emphasis on aligning strategy and execution with culture and workforce needs. She supports executives and senior teams facing high‑stakes transformation, leadership‑team alignment, organizational redesign, and AI adoption issues, ensuring each is approached in ways that are effective, scalable, and human‑centered.

Through FountainBlue, Linda advises on leadership effectiveness, transformation strategy, and operating models that help organizations become more resilient, innovation-ready, and decision-capable. She is especially effective in situations where ambiguity is high, stakeholder interests are diverse, and the path forward requires both strategic clarity and executive judgment.

To support FountainBlue’s advisory and coaching services, Linda has developed practical web-based tools that help executives with scenario planning, decision-making, and problem-solving as they respond to internal shifts and broader macrotrends in the age of AI. These tools help leaders clarify when to lead, manage, or oversee; decide when to pursue AI use cases that build opportunity while addressing challenges; determine when to delegate, orchestrate, or collaborate; and judge when to operate, rebuild, or augment with AI as part of a broader transformation agenda.

Linda’s approach combines calm executive presence, strong facilitation, and structured problem diagnosis with a deep commitment to helping leaders navigate periods of digital and AI-driven change. Her current focus is on project-based and retainer-based advisory, consulting, and executive coaching engagements with organizations seeking thoughtful leadership support to seize opportunities while addressing complex challenges.

Signature Frameworks, Books, and Tools

An overview of FountainBlue’s web-based tools and structured frameworks is outlined below:

  • Identifying AI use cases that expand opportunity while addressing operational and organizational challenges.
  • Scenario planning around how leaders can best lead, manage, or oversee in specific change-charged situations.
  • Clarifying when to delegate, orchestrate, or collaborate while overseeing AI-enabled solutions.
  • Determining whether to operate, rebuild, or augment with AI in response to strategic and execution pressures.
  • Brainstorming strategic initiatives, go-to-market and customer acquisition efforts, and product development priorities in response to customer and market shifts.
  • Enabling and empowering a more hopeful, agile, and resilient workforce and culture.

Linda designed these tools, resources, and books to make abstract transformation challenges concrete, support troubleshooting and forward planning amid ambiguity, and improve the quality, efficiency, and thoughtfulness of executive problem-solving in the age of AI.

Areas of Strategic Impact

Linda is best suited to conversations involving:

  • Strategic vision and operational effectiveness.
  • Organizational transformation shaped by market, customer, and technology shifts.
  • Innovation agility and resilience, driven by customer insight, cross-functional collaboration, and adaptive leadership.
  • Flexible and agile operating models that support human-centered AI adoption.

Working Style

Linda brings a calm, structured, and diagnostic approach to advisory work. She is known for helping leaders make sense of ambiguity, distinguish symptoms from underlying causes, and move toward solutions that are strategically sound, operationally realistic, modular, agile, and scalable.

See executive bio here or e-mail any initial inquiries about board, advisory, or executive consulting opportunities.

Just published:

Elevate Hope from Mindset to Framework to Economy

FountainBlue’s book Elevate Hope from Mindset to Framework to Economy, published February 2026 shows how hopeful leadership can become a repeatable practice and a shared operating system.

Hope has been the quiet constant in Linda Holroyd’s career spent navigating sticky technical details and sophisticated business models. For decades, her work focused on tech market fit, momentum and funding, digital transformation, team structures, and executive alignment. Only while writing Hope in an Age of Disillusionment did it become clear that a single discipline kept showing up underneath it all: a stubborn, practical hope that the next version of the system could be better and worth the hard work to build.

What FountainBlue Means by Hope Economy

FountainBlue defines a Hope Economy as collaborative and inclusive, other-centric and customer- focused, dynamic and proactive, and centered staying agile and human through times of great change. A Hope Economy embraces an abundance, rather than a scarcity mindset and reflects how leaders choose to work and lead when the world moves noisily, divisively, and uncertainly forward at warp speed.

FountainBlue uses a simple progression that underpins the Hope Economy.

As a mindset, hope shapes how leaders interpret change and challenge.

As a framework, it becomes a set of tools, choices, and practices that can be repeated and refined.

Agility in action. Clarity unlocks agility so organizations can adapt with discipline and trust rather than with panic.

Hope as the foundation. Leaders begin with a grounded belief that something better is possible and worth working toward.

Resilience in practice. That hope fuels the resilience to persevere when conditions are ambiguous or difficult.

Clarity in focus. Resilience supports the clarity to see what matters most and align people, priorities, and resources.

Hope in an Age of Disillusionment – published December 2025

My goal in writing Hope in an Age of Disillusionment is to communicate that Hope is the foundation that leads to the Resilience to persevere, which in turn leads to the Clarity to understand, which in turn leads to the Agility to adapt.

We can’t control what’s coming at us, but we can lean on each other, hang on to our hope, and believe that things can get better.​​

This is the core message behind the nine narrative case studies in Part One and the practical toolkits in Part Two. My wish is that Hope becomes the foundation and center of the repeatable patterns and choices we make for leading in this time of amplified change.

  • If you want more hope in your life, order a copy of Hope in an Age of Disillusionment for yourself—and, if you can, one for someone you coach, mentor, or lead. Details for the regular and workbook editions of the book are below.
  • Use it as a guide. Bring the Hope → Resilience → Clarity → Agility lens into your planning, your conversations, and your decision-making, especially when things feel ambiguous.​​

The 6″x9″ Regular Edition is a portable, reader‑friendly book that introduces the core Hope framework along with 100 tools, each with two suggested actions to help you move from mindset to momentum. This is ideal if you want a thought‑provoking, practical guide you can underline, share, and return to over time.

The Hope in an Age of Disillusionment Workbook contains the same stories and introductions from Part One of the Regular Edition and expands Part Two to 125 tools, each with five suggested actions and structured space to reflect, plan, and track your progress.

It is designed as a hands‑on implementation companion for coaching conversations, strategic decision‑making, personal reflection, team development, and exploring synergistic opportunities.

Coaching Qualifications

Linda Holroyd has spent the past two decades leading coaching, development, and advisory work for FountainBlue clients. Recent certifications and training have also helped her better support managers and leaders with their challenges and opportunities.

Summary of Work Experience

Experience – As a versatile and agile professional, I thrive with challenges brought on by change and leverage my vast and broad experience to support client companies.

  • Executive coach, leadership consultant, strategic adviser, FountainBlue – since 2005
  • Nonprofit management, fundraising and advisory – 2001-2004
  • Strategic Adviser and Consultant for client companies, Galatia Inc – 1995-2001
  • Sales and marketing leadership for three startups – 1992-1995
  • Elementary school teacher

Summary of Recent Certifications

A detailed list of certifications and trainings is available here.

Recent Coaching and Leadership Development Certifications and Trainings

Consulting Qualifications

Recent Management, Technical, and Strategy Trainings

Recent Generative AI, Business, Prompt Engineering Specializations and Certifications

Industry and Technical Courses, Trainings, and Specializations

Strategic Board Advisory

Additional information is available on LinkedIn and on our Certification page and a board bio and Author Page is available if you’re a global technology company looking for strategic advisory and human capital management expertise.

For more information:

See full list of recent certifications, board bio, or Author page.

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