David Perry
Executive and Leadership Coach, Zürich
The leaders I work with are not in trouble. They are competent, respected, delivering, and quietly asking whether the pressure they carry is the job or themselves.
That question has an answer, and finding it is more practical than it sounds. It means looking at a way of operating you assembled under pressure years ago, kept because it worked, and never revisited.
It is the most useful work I know how to do.
I work with senior technical leaders who are already performing at a high level and want the capacity to sustain it. About half of them lead technology functions, and I spent 30 years in that world before I sat on this side of the table.
The work draws on the ontological tradition, which means working across language, emotion and body, combined with mindfulness practice. What that gives you in ordinary terms is a way to see the operating pattern you are running, and then to choose whether to keep it.
The short version
From engineer to executive coach
I grew up in New Jersey and wanted to know how things worked. I started programming in high school, studied electrical engineering at Rutgers, and moved to Santa Cruz because that is where the interesting problems were.
Nearly 30 years followed in data storage, as a software engineer and then a technical leader. Pioneering work on early RAID systems, first in class and fully fault tolerant, then the internal algorithms and failover architecture for the generation after that. Systems that had to keep running when one part of them failed. I was the person they brought the hard problem to.
I moved to Switzerland in 2010 to be closer to family. In 2016 I left Dell to find out what was next, trained as an ontological coach with Hans Phillips at Ontoco, and founded PURECOACH in 2018. I coach full time now, teach mindfulness meditation, facilitate for the Coaching.com community, and run a mastermind at Impact Hub Zürich. My daughter, whom I raised here, is a doctor in Zürich.
It took me 30 years. That is the part I want to shorten.
Why this work
A friend at university handed me M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled in my early twenties, and it started something that has not stopped. Career, marriage, family, divorce. Through all of it I kept reading, kept working on it, and kept arriving at the same place.
The pattern was the same in every direction. Family, friends, the people I reported to. I could see it clearly enough to describe it, and I could not change it. Standing at the start of something that mattered to me, I knew with total clarity that it would end the way the others had if nothing changed.
What I eventually understood is that insight is not the mechanism. I had plenty of insight. Understanding the pattern intellectually left it fully intact, which is the part nobody tells you, and it is the reason smart people stay stuck longer than anyone else.
What worked was ontological, and the distinction is practical rather than philosophical. You stop analysing the pattern and start observing the person running it, in language, in mood, in how you hold yourself when the pressure arrives. Those three are observable and they are trainable. That is why I trained in it, and it is what I do now.
Getting there took me 30 years. My work is to make that considerably shorter for someone else.
Practice
- Founder and owner of PURECOACH, an ontological and high-performance coaching practice, since 2018.
- Certified Ontological Coach, Ontoco and the Newfield Institute. Mindfulness meditation teacher.
- Facilitator within the Coaching.com ecosystem, including Implementation Master sessions and Coaching Circles.
- Founded and leads a mastermind group at Impact Hub Zürich.
- Hosts intensive coaching and meditation retreats in the Swiss Alps.
Training
- Burnout Coaching CertificationCoaching.com, 2025 to 2026
- Ontological Coaching and Leadership in ActionOntological Coaching Institute, 2022 to 2024
- Ontological coaching trainingOntoco, 2016 to 2018
- Intensives, and 100 Days of CoachingRich Litvin, 2020 to 2022
- BSEE, Electrical EngineeringRutgers University, 1987
credentials
How to start
Book a First Look
20 minutes, at no cost. Bring the heaviest thing on your plate, and you'll have a clearer read on what to pick up and what to put down. If coaching is not the right answer, I will say so, and where possible, I will point you to what is.