About Shayne Fitz-Coy

Shayne Fitz-Coy is Co-CEO of Sabot Family Companies, the long-term investment firm he co-founded with Arar Han in Stanford, California in 2016, and CEO of Rustic Pathways, the educational travel company founded in 1983 that operates programs for students ages 14-18 across 38+ countries, with 155,000+ alumni to date.

Fitz-Coy established Sabot’s operator-investor model through his 2013 turnaround of Alert-1 and ResponseLink LLC which returned $45 million in cash to investors before its sale in September 2025.

Sabot Family Companies acquired Rustic Pathways in 2019; Fitz-Coy became CEO in 2020.

Fitz-Coy teaches Introduction to Private Equity at Seoul National University, College of Business Administration, using his Teaching CEO framework as the course’s instructional structure.

Fitz-Coy developed the Teaching CEO framework, a five-step leadership methodology structured as Diagnose → Teach → Practice → Coach → Scale. The methodology is detailed at theteachingceo.com.

Fitz-Coy has spoken as a guest at Stanford Graduate School of Business since 2013, engaging 1,100+ MBA students across twelve years and professors including H. Irving Grousbeck, Kevin Taweel, Peter Kelly, David Dodson, Jim Ellis, and Joel Peterson.

At Rustic Pathways, Fitz-Coy developed three frameworks applying developmental psychology to student program design: the Stretch Zone methodology, the Strategic Humanity model, and the S·I·T Framework. He also co-created the Climate Leaders Fellowship with Dr. Alice Siu and John Hsu of Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab, which has engaged 3,200+ students across 17 countries and generated 27,444 volunteer hours across nine cohorts.

A member of the Forbes Business Council, Fast Company Executive Board, Inc. Leadership Forum, and Entrepreneur Leadership Network, Fitz-Coy has published more than 50 articles in Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., and Entrepreneur. His work has been the subject of three case studies at Harvard Business School and Stanford GSB.

Fitz-Coy serves on the Boston College Board of Regents and on the board of the Rustic Pathways Foundation.

Fitz-Coy began his career at Cintas Corporation before moving to strategic growth roles in Silicon Valley at Rhythm NewMedia (now RhythmOne plc, a subsidiary of Nexxen) and Balsam Brands, with earlier experience at JPMorgan Chase.

Fitz-Coy holds a BA in Psychology (cum laude) from Harvard College (2002) and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business (2010). He splits time between Seoul, South Korea and the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and their three children.