FinTech Female Fridays: Meet Samantha Lassoff, Executive Coach & Leadership Advisor

Samantha Lassoff is an executive coach and leadership advisor who works with founders, CEOs, and senior operators navigating complex decisions, growth, and the demands of scale. Her career spans financial services, fintech, technology, and high-growth companies. Her work focuses on helping leaders operate with greater clarity, stronger judgment, and more intentional impact.

She began her career in executive search, shaping early leadership intelligence approaches that redefined how organizations identified, calibrated, and selected senior leaders. That experience revealed a truth that still anchors her work: leadership decisions are among the most powerful and durable levers of value creation.

At Heidrick & Struggles, Samantha built the commercial strategy that drove more than 40% revenue growth across the private equity and venture practices in under two years. She then created the firm’s first integrated talent analytics and workforce strategy capability, developing models that forecast leadership potential, succession risk, and organizational design implications across global practices.

She then joined Human Capital, building a real-time advisory capability for early-stage fintech, technology, and healthcare companies. Her work informed compensation, talent strategy, and workforce decisions at moments when speed, clarity, and alignment mattered most.

At Blackstone, Samantha architected a portfolio-wide leadership and talent ecosystem integrating data, insight, development, and organizational design, enabling thousands of leaders and employees and accelerating value creation across the global portfolio.

After Blackstone, she expanded her scope as an operator, advisor, and leadership partner for companies facing inflection points where growth, talent, and technology converge.

Today, Samantha leads an executive coaching and advisory practice grounded in real operating experience. She works with founders, CEOs, and senior leaders to build clarity, strengthen judgment, and translate who they are and who they are becoming into how they lead.

What differentiates her work is the integration of coaching, operating leadership, organizational strategy, and talent systems. This allows leaders to think and choose at a higher level, especially in environments defined by complexity and rapid scale.

In fintech, where speed, regulation, and ambiguity intersect, Samantha helps leadership teams build the alignment, structure, and decision-making discipline required to scale intentionally rather than reactively.

She also works one-on-one with senior leaders seeking a trusted space to think clearly, grow deliberately, and make high-consequence decisions. Whether embedded within leadership teams or coaching individuals, the goal remains the same: build capability that endures.

“In fintech and financial services, scaling is as much a leadership and talent challenge as it is a product or capital challenge,”.

Much of her work centers on leadership identity and decision-making, particularly how assumptions that serve companies early on often become constraints as complexity increases. She coaches founders through the interpersonal dynamics that shape alignment, speed, and trust within executive teams, and advises senior leaders navigating growth, career and leadership inflection points inside fast-moving organizations.

“I challenge myself to stay close to the work and grounded in the realities leaders face rather than operating from distance or from theory,” she says. “Leadership lives at the intersection of the human and the commercial.”

More About Samantha

Where you live: New York City

Family at home: Zoe, my rescue dog who resembles a very oversized Jack Russell Terrier

Hometown: New York City

Favorite hobby: Yoga, reading, conversation grounded in curiosity

Favorite show to binge: All Creatures Great & Small, Sanditon, and anything Hallmark that allows for a little mindlessness.

Favorite fintech media: Conversations with operators and founders across fintech, financial services, and technology. These conversations provide the most meaningful insight because they reflect the decisions and realities leaders face every day.

Can you tell us about a time someone encouraged you to try a task or take on a project you didn’t think that you would know how to do/or be good at? 

The hardest stretch in my career came when I moved from a commercial strategy role in the private equity practice into leading talent management for the Financial Services practice at Heidrick and Struggles. Up to that point, I saw myself as highly rational and structured and suddenly was operating in a space that required emotional intelligence and navigating dynamics that were not always straightforward. There was tension, growth pressure, retention risk, and moments where the stakes felt deeply human. I did not feel equipped, but I did not shy away and worked with a coach to navigate the transition. Coaching unlocked capabilities I had overlooked and showed me that empathy and anticipation were strengths, not vulnerabilities. That experience sparked my commitment to coaching and reshaped how I lead in environments where clarity, speed, and humanity must coexist.

What is the most important lesson you have learned from a mistake you’ve made in the past? 

Earlier in my career I was balancing search work with strategy and operations and outsourced the final assembly of a client report. A formatting issue slipped through and I sent a document with incorrect information to a senior client. I was mortified because excellence had always felt like the baseline. I called the partner immediately and instead of frustration, he laughed and said, “So you are human.” He then called the client, took responsibility, and moved forward without blame. That moment taught me that honesty is always the right response, leaders who have your back earn extraordinary commitment, and perfection is far less powerful than accountability and trust.

Do you have any productivity hacks? 

My productivity comes from leaning into the work I love and the strengths that come naturally. We spend so much time trying to fix our weaknesses that we overlook how much speed and energy come from using what we are already great at. I see this with coaching clients as well. When leaders align their time to their strengths, they create greater leverage for themselves and their teams. Work and life have never felt like separate lanes to me, but I have become more intentional about integration and recovery so I can sustain the pace I enjoy.