Core Sciences

Evan LaPointe is a serial entrepreneur with deep experience building and scaling products. His fourth company, Satellite, became the fourth-largest analytics product on the internet and was acquired by Adobe, where he ran product strategy and innovation for their digital business. But LaPointe noticed something fundamental was missing in how organizations operate: a systematic understanding of how the human brain actually works and how that knowledge could transform team dynamics, product development, and business growth.

The insight came from observing a persistent gap in organizations—what he calls "the dysfunction equation." As Dan Pink summarized it, "there's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does." LaPointe realized that if science knows better ways to activate human potential, motivate teams, and make decisions, but businesses aren't implementing those approaches, then the resulting dysfunction is predictable and preventable.

LaPointe built Core Sciences as an educational platform and training company, starting with a simple but powerful framework. He teaches that the brain operates through multiple systems—a "science department" for experimentation, an "art department" for creativity, and a "history department" for reference material. Most people over-rely on the history department because it's the lowest-energy way to generate answers. But the most effective thinking happens when you route problems through the right mental departments.

The company's core offering centers on understanding three major brain systems: safety (fear, uncertainty, anger), reward (pursuit, transactional motivation), and purpose (understanding impact and caring about people affected). Layered on top are concepts like focus levels, ability (knowledge and imagination), and personality traits from the Big Five model (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism/stability). LaPointe created the "Core Identity" assessment tool based on Big Five psychology to help individuals and teams understand their natural thinking preferences and tendencies.

LaPointe's approach to customer acquisition appears rooted in his credibility as a four-time founder and former Adobe innovation leader. He partners with accelerators like Y Combinator, working with founders who face immediate team scaling challenges. The content distribution happens primarily through high-level podcast interviews and speaking, where he shares specific, actionable frameworks that resonate with leaders struggling with team dysfunction, vision misalignment, and decision-making speed.

The target market is clear: founders, CEOs, and leadership teams at high-growth companies where team performance and decision velocity directly impact business outcomes. The value proposition is equally clear—the company claims that cleaning up how teams run meetings alone saves people 10-20% of their time, or roughly 0.5 to 1 full day per week.

What's working is the practical, science-backed framework approach. LaPointe doesn't sell nebulous concepts like "mindfulness" or "vulnerability for its own sake." Instead, he gives leaders concrete, testable hypotheses about how their brains work and why teams fail. The meeting optimization framework—emphasizing priming (context-setting) before decision-making, and expansionary thinking before convergence—directly addresses a massive source of organizational waste.

The personality-aware approach to strategy and vision planning also resonates deeply. By helping low-openness leaders understand that abstract thinking literally activates their pain systems (rather than being a personal character flaw), LaPointe removes shame and creates space for intentional behavior change. Leaders can then build teams and processes that don't require everyone to operate at their limit.

The ecosystem approach—building "habitats" rather than trying to change individuals—appears to be the philosophical breakthrough. Companies like Canva (with coaches instead of managers) and Figma (with imagination-as-hypothesis-generation framing) have intuitively implemented what neuroscience proves works. LaPointe's role is making that implicit wisdom explicit and teachable.

Core Sciences is positioned as a training and consulting firm working primarily with YC companies, founders, and established leadership teams. The company focuses on reducing the gap between neuroscience-backed best practices and actual business operations. Revenue figures are not disclosed, but the engagement model appears to be premium consulting and training programs rather than SaaS subscription. LaPointe uses high-visibility podcast appearances and founder networks to build credibility and generate leads.

The long-term vision seems to be embedding these frameworks into how organizations operate at scale—from meeting design tools to product development processes to hiring and team composition. The Big Five assessment tool (Core Identity) may eventually become a product, but the current focus remains on direct education and helping founders build better-functioning organizations from first principles.