About

Work & Track Record

Global. Strategic. Ambitious.

◇ Our Story

The Conduit

Rene & Matei met at the Conduit in 2023 through a founder friend and hit it off immediately. It was a room full of entrepreneurs with ideas, investors that could fund them, and creatives who could communicate them. A global community of changemakers.

Rene thinks in strategy and story. Matei thinks in brand and design. Together, they kept gravitating toward the same kind of person: the innovator with a great idea and not enough momentum.

Since then, they've worked on a handful of company makeovers—from school uniforms to industrial equipment. The pattern was always the same. Founders needed clarity, alignment and traction, and they needed it fast.

So they built Eklipse, a single system that fuses strategy and design into a clear direction that helps founders move with strategic velocity.
Rene Zou seated on a stool in a studio portrait Rene Zou with Eklipse co-founder Matei Vulpe

Rene Zou & Matei Vulpe · co-founders, Eklipse

Rene is a builder, connector and strategist. Over the past decade, she's lived in seven cities and worked across three continents in roles spanning international finance, consulting, and technology. Her focus sits at the intersection of China, EV, geopolitics and ESG: macro research on China's economy, direct management access to major EV brands, and ESG due diligence.

One thread has stayed constant: working side by side with founders and CEOs to turn big ideas into strategy, story and execution. Most recently, she helped a 30-year-old industrial technology company expand into new global markets. Before then she was at the UN, the Economist, and a run of startups and scale-ups — building on her entrepreneurialism.

At Eklipse, she brings that experience together with a love of storytelling and systems-building — helping innovators turn vision into frameworks built to scale.

◇ EKLIPSE currently building

Eklipse is building strategic infrastructure for ambitious founders and companies navigating critical moments of growth and complexity. It combines a proprietary process, Eklipse, with its platform, Polaris, to help leadership teams gain strategic clarity, align people and priorities, and turn vision into execution.

Where traditional consulting delivers recommendations, Eklipse works with companies to create a strategic operating system that turns vision into a scalable, repeatable process.

Visit Eklipse ↗

◇ The Story

Narrative & Systems

Rene is interested in the trajectory of ambitious people, ideas and companies — and what allows them to become more fully what they are capable of being. Her edge is meaning-making: connecting events into narratives, finding patterns across people, markets and systems, and translating complexity into a clearer sense of what matters and where to go next. These days, that instinct is at the heart of her work with founders: turning moments of uncertainty into forward momentum. She believes the best kind of ambition expands what is possible without requiring us to trade humanity for progress, or people and planet for profit. Rene is always interested in hearing from founders and what becomes possible when direction and ambition align.

my inbox is open ↗