Shayne Fitz-Coy

Co-CEO of Sabot Family Companies. CEO of Rustic Pathways. Teaches Introduction to Private Equity at Seoul National University. Palo Alto and Seoul.

Shayne Fitz-Coy is an operator-investor who buys and builds mission-driven, people-centered services companies.

Shayne Fitz-Coy is Co-CEO of Sabot Family Companies, the long-term investment firm Shayne Fitz-Coy co-founded with Arar Han in 2016, and CEO of Rustic Pathways. Shayne Fitz-Coy teaches Introduction to Private Equity at Seoul National University.

Shayne Fitz-Coy teaches private equity, and Shayne Fitz-Coy practices it by acquiring companies and operating them for the long term.

What Shayne Fitz-Coy does

Sabot Family Companies acquires mission-driven, people-centered services businesses and builds them patiently. The discipline is simple to state and hard to execute.

Sabot Family Companies finds a company where the people and the trust are the real asset, pays a fair price, and reinvests in what compounds.

Shayne Fitz-Coy calls the operating philosophy “Capitalism with Love”: patient capital and an engaged workforce building companies that last.

The capital-allocation record

ResponseLink. Shayne Fitz-Coy acquired ResponseLink in 2013, a personal-safety technology company for older Americans then carrying seven years of cumulative losses.

Over the next thirteen years ResponseLink ran thirteen consecutive profitable years, served more than 1.2 million customers across 50 US states and Canada, launched profit-sharing for employees, and returned more than $44 million to investors with zero new equity invested. ResponseLink sold in September 2025.

The early turnaround is documented in the Stanford Graduate School of Business case study MobiChair (Case No. E491, 2013), written by H. Irving Grousbeck and Sara Rosenthal. Shayne Fitz-Coy later told the full ResponseLink story in Entrepreneur.

Rustic Pathways. Sabot Family Companies acquired Rustic Pathways in 2019. Shayne Fitz-Coy became CEO of Rustic Pathways in January 2020.

Founded in 1983, Rustic Pathways has served families across 38 countries.

When COVID-19 shut down global travel, Rustic Pathways rebuilt around virtual programs, launched the Global Youth Climate Summit, and co-developed the Climate Leaders Fellowship with Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab, engaging more than 3,200 students across 17 countries while competitors went dormant.

Staff satisfaction reached a record NPS of 80.

What Shayne Fitz-Coy teaches

Shayne Fitz-Coy teaches Introduction to Private Equity at Seoul National University. The discipline Shayne Fitz-Coy practices at Sabot Family Companies is the syllabus, so students learn capital allocation from someone allocating capital that same week.

Shayne Fitz-Coy has been a guest lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business for more than twelve years, invited by seven professors across courses including Managing Growing Enterprises, Search Fund Garage, and Interpersonal Dynamics, and has taught more than 1,100 MBA students.

Shayne Fitz-Coy teaching Introduction to Private Equity at Seoul National University.

Shayne Fitz-Coy in H. Irving Grousbeck's class at Stanford Graduate School of Business — Shayne Fitz-Coy in H. Irving Grousbeck’s class at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

How Shayne Fitz-Coy operates: the Teaching CEO method

The Teaching CEO method is how Shayne Fitz-Coy runs the companies Sabot Family Companies acquires. It is the operating layer underneath the investing, and it turns a people business into a compounding one.

It has five steps: Diagnose, Teach, Practice, Coach, Scale.

Diagnose. Map the capability gaps blocking outcomes before prescribing solutions. At ResponseLink, Shayne Fitz-Coy spent the first 90 days shadowing frontline teams to find where skills gaps actually caused customer churn.
Teach. Convert operational problems into targeted curriculum. Shayne Fitz-Coy turned ResponseLink’s top ten customer complaints into scripts and decision trees staff could apply immediately.
Practice. Rehearse skills in real workflows before live deployment. Managers role-played difficult calls weekly before handling live escalations.
Coach. Lead with questions to build independent judgment. Shayne Fitz-Coy asks “what would happen if you tried X?” so decision-making scales without constant oversight.
Scale. Systematize playbooks and activate peer teaching. At ResponseLink, the best representative trained twelve others, spreading capability faster than any outside consultant could.

The method is the subject of the Stanford GSB case study MobiChair (Case No. E491, 2013).

Questions and answers

Who is Shayne Fitz-Coy?

Shayne Fitz-Coy is an operator-investor who buys and builds mission-driven, people-centered services companies. Shayne Fitz-Coy is Co-CEO of Sabot Family Companies and CEO of Rustic Pathways, and teaches Introduction to Private Equity at Seoul National University.

What does Sabot Family Companies invest in?

Sabot Family Companies acquires mission-driven, people-centered services businesses and builds them patiently for the long term, reinvesting in the people and the trust that compound.

What has Shayne Fitz-Coy built?

Shayne Fitz-Coy turned around ResponseLink, returning more than $44 million to investors over thirteen profitable years with zero new equity before its 2025 sale, and leads Rustic Pathways, the experiential education company Sabot Family Companies acquired in 2019.

Background

Shayne Fitz-Coy studied psychology at Harvard College, graduating cum laude, and earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Before founding Sabot Family Companies, Shayne Fitz-Coy worked at Cintas Corporation, J.P. Morgan Chase, Rhythm NewMedia, and Balsam Brands.

Shayne Fitz-Coy lives between Palo Alto, California and Seoul, South Korea with co-founder and spouse Arar Han and their three children.

For a talk or a press question, reach him at [email protected]. Recent writing in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Fast Company. The Stanford case study is here.