About Deepa Pulipati

Sit with me.

I have spent the last twenty-five years sitting with people inside the conversations they find hardest to have.

Hello. I am Deepa. I am a behavioural scientist, a licensed clinician, and the founder of Tula Advisory — a practice built on the belief that the hidden dynamics inside leadership teams, families, and organisations are what quietly erode execution, and that the work of naming them, holding them, and moving through them is a developable craft.

The arc

I came to this work by way of psychology — a young immigrant student who loved it without fully understanding what I loved about it. What I knew was that I wanted to be a catalyst for how people change. I had not yet learned the shape that calling would take.

In 2001, finishing my master's in clinical psychology, I interned at Alameda Family Court. One year — that was all it took to introduce me to the craft that would hold me for the next fifteen. I moved to San Francisco Family Court and stayed, inside some of the most charged and complex marital and family mediations the system saw. Across those years, seven in ten of the high-conflict cases I worked found their way to resolution without ever reaching a judge.

The craft of mediation chose me there — somewhere between the files, the rooms, and the people. I came to think of it as my own kind of divine intervention: not a career I planned, but a discipline that found me and would not let go. I stayed because the work was teaching me things I could not have learned anywhere else — what actually moves people through disagreement, through grief, through change they did not want and now had to live with.

Twenty-five years, counting from the start, inside the conversations people find hardest to have.

Somewhere along the way, the organisations started finding me. Founders, CEOs, Chiefs of Staff, heads of legal and product and operations — all of them carrying versions of the same underlying problems I had been working with inside families for years. Different stakes, different vocabulary, the same human dynamics underneath. I trained formally as an executive coach through the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and I began bringing two decades of clinical practice into the organisational world.

Tula Advisory is where that practice now lives.

The work I am doing today

Three streams of work hold my attention right now, and the one through-line beneath all three is the muscle of being effective inside friction, change, and transition.

Family businesses in generational transition.

This is the stream that holds the most of me right now, and the one I have come to think of as another kind of divine intervention — the full circle of twenty-five years, finding its way back to the thing I started in. The craft I began in San Francisco Family Court, holding families through decisions none of them had wanted to make, inside rooms where everything personal and everything structural was present at once, is the exact same craft a family business needs when the senior generation is beginning to hand what they have built to the next generation that is beginning to take it.

I work with the parents who have carried the enterprise for a lifetime, and with the adult children stepping into it — often with their own ideas, their own training, and their own grief about what cannot be done the way it was done before. I sit with both generations separately, so each is honestly heard. And I bring them into the room together — around the business decisions, the strategic direction, the governance architecture, and the family constitution itself — holding them through the conversations they have been circling for years.

Everything I have learned converges here: the behavioural scientist who reads what is happening beneath the surface, the licensed clinician who holds the room when it gets charged, the mediator who has sat with families through fifteen years of exactly this kind of complexity, and the executive coach who partners with the next generation as they step into leadership they did not necessarily choose. Four practitioner lenses in a single advisor. None of this is theoretical. This is the work I have been doing, in different rooms, for a very long time — and the Indian family business of this decade is where it is landing now.

Scaling startups.

I partner with founders, co-founders, leadership teams, and HR across the Series A inflection — before a round, when the leadership team has to become the team investors want to back; and after a round, when the capital that has just been raised has to be converted into real execution. The work holds the whole leadership team as a single subject, not just the founder.

Strategic leadership development for organisations transforming their people and culture.

I partner as an external advisor with small, mid-market, and enterprise organisations working through the people-and-culture dimensions of a transformation — leading leadership teams through the conflict, change, and friction the next stage of the organisation is asking them to carry.

The official line

Behavioural scientist and California-licensed clinician. Twenty-five years of training in organisational psychology, conflict resolution, and change and conflict management. Fifteen years inside San Francisco Family Court Services, where seven in ten of the high-conflict cases I worked resolved without reaching a judge. Certified Executive Coach through the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute. Adjunct faculty at Antioch University, teaching Ethics & Law in the Master's in Clinical Psychology programme. Board member at TiE Los Angeles and Oak Grove School.

The real line

I am a mother to a college sophomore and the household's dedicated cook. I read more than most people think is reasonable. In my experience, most of what we call conflict is really about how hard it is to look at ourselves. It is far easier to point outward — at the other person, at the circumstances, at anything that is not us — than to turn the finger around. Turning it around is where the real work begins. My motto, these days — stay in the room.