Melissa Ng Goldner is a transformation strategist turned founder, on a mission to make wholeness the new success metric.
With 20+ years advising Fortune 500s, high-growth ventures, and mission-driven organizations, Melissa built her career leading complex enterprise transformations where companies were the hero. Now, through her venture Malu, she helps women become the hero of their own story.
Before launching Malu, Melissa was a Partner at Prophet and Ogilvy, where she helped C-suites reimagine strategy, operating models, and leadership systems. But after a personal unraveling which included postpartum depression, a layoff, and the question, “Who am I without the title?”, she turned her transformation expertise inward.
Malu was born from that reclamation: a 10-week experience that bridges therapy, coaching, and community for women navigating identity shifts, transitions, and reinvention. Through it, Melissa brings the same rigor she once used to restructure billion-dollar organizations, now to help individuals rebuild from the inside out.
Her work is grounded in research, powered by cultural nuance, and unapologetically human. Whether she’s advising CEOs or sharing real talk on LinkedIn, Melissa leads with one belief: we’re not meant to compartmentalize healing and ambition. We’re meant to integrate it. We're meant and allowed to be whole.
1. What inspired you to start your business, and what problem were you passionate about solving?
I built Malu after a moment that cracked me open not in a glossy LinkedIn way, but in a “who the hell am I now?” kind of way. I was holding my newborn son while battling postpartum depression, running a global transformation strategy by day, and trying not to completely fall apart at night. The self I had spent decades building (consultant, partner, high achiever) was suddenly unrecognizable.
Malu was born from that reclamation. It’s for women like me who have outgrown the grind, who’ve checked all the boxes and still feel hollow. It’s for those who are terrified of becoming irrelevant not because they aren’t brilliant, but because the world doesn’t make space for their evolution. Malu exists to bridge therapy and coaching, to bring real healing into rooms where performance was once the only currency.
2. How did your early days as a founder look? Can you share one moment that tested your resilience?
Malu was born out of my own personal experience with grief, identity loss, and the messy process of reclamation. I had just been laid off as a Partner. I wasn’t just mourning a job. I was mourning who I thought I was. And like so many high-achieving women, I immediately went into "fix it" mode. But the truth was, I needed space and I needed to heal.
In that pause, I started to notice something: hundreds of women in the Chief Executive network were doing the same thing—throwing themselves into the job market after a layoff, but showing up to interviews carrying unprocessed shame, sadness, and anger. We were told to “rebrand” when what we really needed was to reconnect with our voice, our worth, our wholeness.
So I created what I and so many others needed but couldn’t find.
The lowest moment? Probably pitching an organizational strategy while on mute, with spit-up on my shoulder, trying to ignore the newborn cries in the background and Googling “how to remove banana from hair” off-camera.
I used to lead global steering committees. Now I was relearning who I was, one messy Zoom at a time. That’s what resilience looked like not polished wins, but choosing to keep showing up human, grounded, and real.
3. What’s the meaning behind your business name or brand identity?
Malu means “horse road” in Chinese a nod to my roots and the unpredictable journey of transformation. Chinese was my first language. When I was three, my mom told me I looked disgruntled walking down. She asked what was wrong, and I said, “Why do we call this ‘Malu’ (Translation: Horse Road) when there are no horses on the road?” She told me she knew then and there I was going to question everything.
And she was right. I created my own majors in college and convinced the board to approve them. I pitched the CEO of Ogilvy to let me be Partner of Transformation arguing I could save him hundreds of thousands of dollars by bringing consulting in-house. At my next firm, I didn’t like that there were no women in executive leadership, so I launched the company’s first-ever women’s sponsorship program off the side of my desk. By the time I left, leadership was 50/50 women and men.
And then I started asking: “Why are therapy and coaching so siloed?” and “Why do we treat our healing and our ambition like two separate conversations?”
Malu was born from that frustration and from my own story of refusing to compartmentalize. I wanted to build something that helps women integrate their past, present, and future. Not just a program. A movement for wholeness.
4. What were the first 3 things you did to build momentum in your business?
1. I told the truth. On podcasts, LinkedIn, to strangers in line at Trader Joe’s. I shared the real, raw story not the polished version.
2. I convened a dream team of psychologists, coaches, healers, and unconventional thinkers, people who didn’t just have credentials, but lived experience. People who could move fluidly across modalities, who understood cultural nuance, identity, and transition because they’d walked through it themselves. They weren’t just experts. They were translators of human complexity who can bring both science and soul, systems and stories. (Basically the kind of people I wish I had when I was unraveling and rebuilding myself.)
3. I built the first pilot cohort in stealth mode… and it sold out in two weeks. No paid ads, no funnels. Just resonance.
5. How did you land your first paying customer or client?
Through a deeply personal LinkedIn post about my postpartum depression. I shared a photo where I looked happy but inside, I was falling apart. I wrote about disconnection, healing, and the journey that led me to create Malu. One woman messaged me: “I haven’t ever been able to articulate what I needed until now. Where do I sign up?” That was the first of many more. It reminded me that when we tell the truth, people don’t just listen, they also may lean in.
6. What’s one “micro move” that created outsized impact in your growth journey?
Letting go of the “right” way mentality. I used to define worth in doing not being. I made the conscious decision to invest time in finding the kind of soul-aligned collaborators and clients’ money can’t buy. My first criteria for interviewing partners or team members whose hearts were in the work. My first question isn’t where you went to school. It’s: “Do you care deeply?” “Do you live this mission?” That one mindset shift changed everything. Because heart-led people don’t just execute, they elevate.
8. How do you manage the emotional highs and lows of entrepreneurship?
I build rituals that hold me when I forget to hold myself. Scheduling “me” time literally on my calendar. Creating labels for my alarm clock with messages like “Say yes to joy before the to-do list”. Voice notes to girlfriends. Therapy. And reminding myself: joy and grief can coexist. One moment I’m weeping from my inner gremlins and spiraling about how I can do better, the next I’m belly laughing with my daughter about boogers. That’s the blend.
9. What does your current work-life blend look like—and how has that evolved?
There is no clean line between work and life for me anymore and that’s the point. I don’t strive for balance. I strive for wholeness and alignment. Some days, Malu gets my strategy brain. Some days, my kids get all of me. The trick is accepting that reality and knowing that no matter what lever I’m pulling that day, that I’m doing the best with the time, resources I have, and learning how to give myself (and others) grace.
10. What are your favorite ways to build thought leadership in your space?
Telling the truth publicly and privately. I use LinkedIn like a personal journal, not a polished highlight reel. My posts are raw, unsanitized, and in my voice. But thought leadership isn’t just about speaking on panels (though I do that too). It’s about being honest in the day-to-day: in 1:1 conversations, in how I lead by example at work and at home, and most importantly, with myself. That kind of truth-telling builds trust and trust becomes the doorway for others to give themselves permission to transform.
11. Can you share one risk you took that paid off in an unexpected way?
I combined therapist and coach-led workshops in one program, something that made my legal teams twitch and work harder. But it was the only way to honor both the past and the future of a woman’s story. That risk turned into the magic formula. Our goal is for our clients to stay connected long after the program ends. We designed for lifelong, enduring, relationships and community during a time that ironically is more digitally connected than ever, but the reports of depression, anxiety, loneliness are greater than ever. I don’t believe we were made to go through our own mental health journeys along.
12. What are your favorite tools or systems for staying organized and productive?
Great business partners. I’m not joking. Special thanks to Lydia Wu for getting us to where we are today, Kara Glassman and Vanessa Johnson. They are the ying to my yang, and the other part of the brain. This is a team of systems thinkers who bring organization, rigor and creative ideas into Malu. Not only do they keep me organized and productive, we keep each other accountable.
13. What marketing channels bring you the most qualified leads?
I would have to say LinkedIn but I’m in no way a marketing expert. I had a great business partner who gently nudged me over a course of 6 months, I remember the conversation like it was yesterday – I was procrastinating on posting due to discomfort. As an Asian American, daughter of two Chinese, conservative and Christian parents, I was brought up to do my best to fit in the background. My business partner said “Melissa, it’s now been 6 months since I’ve asked you to post in LinkedIn, this is not about your discomfort anymore, this is about the impact that this can make on others’ lives.” I started posting the next day. The result? For the working women or the women that are in-between chapters who find themselves at 2am wondering, “Is this all there is?” I speak to them. And it’s been amazing how they not only speak back, but have encouraged and supported me along the way by signing up because they believe in this vision, mission and maybe even me.
14. What’s your approach to pricing your services or offers?
Our intention is to provide a vessel for every season of life. Our programs are an investment in identity, in healing, in building a new way of being. Our approach to pricing our offering was to work with an expert pricing consultant. Our next cohort will be $3,200 but we are offering an early bird discount of $2,800 for those that sign up before September 21st. We also hold space for access offering scholarships and community tiers because equity is part of the design, not an afterthought.
15. What does success look like for you now vs. when you started?
Before: titles, promotions, strategy decks with 87 slides.
Now: voice notes from clients saying, “I feel like myself again.”
Success is watching a woman rewrite her story and realizing she was never broken to begin with.
16. What’s one piece of advice you’d give to a founder just starting out?
Be braver than your brand. The marketplace will try to shape you into what’s palatable. Don’t let it. Build what feels inevitable to your soul even if it makes no sense on a pitch deck.
17. What legacy do you hope to leave through your business?
That wholeness is not a luxury. That healing belongs in boardrooms. That a woman’s power is not in doing more, but in becoming more of who we already are. I want my daughter to grow up in a world where ambition and softness are not contradictions.
18. What can we promote for you (offer, product, launch, etc.)?
We’re launching our next Malu cohort this September consisted of 10 weeks of guided transformation through therapy, coaching, and real community. It’s for women in the in-between career shifts, identity transitions, or just asking bigger questions. Join us: www.malujourney.com
19. Where can our readers/listeners find you online?
Website: www.malujourney.com
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissasng/
Malu LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/104833047/admin/dashboard/
