Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one at this show. Killing it. Killing it. Killing it. It. This is a particularly personal episode of Killing It for me because, well, it intersects with my own Killing It journey. The year is 2014, and I'm having coffee with Nectarios Lilos, an early leader in the financial service innovation game. I'm looking for advice.
I'm on a journey out of what feels like the wreckage of my life post Perk Street. So naturally, I find myself in London, the uncontested fintech capital of the world at that time, sitting in the shadow of the Tower of London. Nektarios was on a journey himself. He joined SWIFT, the global payments messaging service.
in 2007 and played roles working with funds to working with startups. He had recently left to co-found startup bootcamp FinTech and Rainmaking Innovation, a corporate innovation studio. He left both five years later for some time away, which you'll hear about before co-founding another fintech which recently wound down. Along the way, he's picked up an abundance of hard-earned advice. This wasn't just a podcast, but a continuation of the therapy session, which we started a decade earlier.
For those who haven't listened to this series, the name Killing It is based on the joke my co-founder, Dan, and I would respond with when we asked how we were doing. And we would say, we're killing it. And then under our breath, like putting a knife in it, like we're killing it. Perk Street, founded in 2008, was one of the first neobanks and we crash landed when an acquisition fell through.
Killing It isn't just about failed startups. It's about transitions and changes in identity. It's about founders successfully selling, and now their dream is owned by somebody else. It's about entrepreneurs who step away or are forced to step away. Killing It is about the journey of reinvention. And Nectarios has some very sage advice that has already impacted my life. I am so excited for this conversation. One has been way too long since we've caught up.
You've been a big part of my journey from the killing it to what I'm doing now. And you've just always had so much wisdom. But it's been a while since we've caught up. And you've been very public about your own journey and the struggles and the victories. But I'm going to start with, how are you? I'm doing really well. Thanks for asking, Jason. I don't know if it shows on the camera, but there's a little bit of sunlight still coming. I'm in the UK. It's about 5 p.m. now.
I'm doing really well. I've got a bit of a sore throat and a bit of a blocked nose, but overall, I'm fine. But I appreciate you asking. How are you? I'm good. Although I will say in preparation for this. It pulled out a couple... your scars that i thought had healed over it turns out they were just scabs in terms of like the journey the as i was reading up on what's going on you had been building radish for the last three to four years
You know, to close it down. And I started going back and rethink a whole bunch of, boy, if only Dan and I had done this or if only I had done that, would things have been differently? So why don't we start with what was Radish and what happened? Well, if you want to start kind of picking at scabs, you probably have to go a little bit further back than that. Radish was ultimately...
I will take a little bit of a detour because I need to contextualize it. So I spent most of my life in innovation, right? FinTech, we were the first people to do FinTech and InsurTech around corporate innovation, led innovation. activities, et cetera. And I walked away from all of this at the end of 2018 because I was really done talking to banks and insurers.
And hearing what they were saying, realizing they will never do the difficult stuff. They would always do the stuff that just is easy. It looks good on an annual report. It can generate some marketing value. So that. Deep frustration with the industry combined with me personally being completely burnt out was like at the end of 2018, I'm done here. I also had some co-founder conflict with the business that I was running through what we met.
so i decided to take a break in 2019 and then i realized that i have no room for that because my dad died and i was dealing with the grief of leaving my business behind, which was my identity, but also at the same time dealing with the grief of Louis Madan. So in that year in the wilderness, a few things happened, but one of them was me starting to exploring that one itch that I had in fintech about building my own.
real fintech company, because everything before there was accelerated as innovation consultancy, blah, blah. And through experimenting with doing something focused on the LGBT community, et cetera, I got together with a couple of mates and we felt... there's a whole bunch of underserved communities. that have real financing needs and the banks will never build for them because they can't even bother understanding why do these people need the money and why are they more likely to repay that loan.
even if you don't have enough data on them. So Radish was ultimately born out of this recognition that there are people out there who would be amazing lending customers because they need money for a big life-changing thing. The banks just go, you don't have a credit history or you don't have an income. We don't understand you. Therefore, it's too much effort to build this for, I don't know, 500,000 people because the segment's not big enough.
And Radish was a business focused on the UK and it was a B2B2C business focusing on underserved communities who need financing for big life decisions so i don't know you're a nurse who's come from syria to the uk You could easily get a job the next day in the national health system. You only need to reaccredit your qualification. That reaccreditation process costs three grand. Nobody will give you the three grand because no credit has due no income.
or I don't know, you're an elderly person, you have mobility issues, you need to build a stair lift in your home, you might even own your home. And that five grand for the stay lift, again, the bank will never lend to you because you're too old and you don't have an income. So, and we started figuring out, discovering all these. so many different communities who all have their own specific needs and use cases.
And on top of that, it was B2B2C because we wanted to do risk as much as possible. The communities have trust with somebody else. They don't have trust with you. So we worked through the organizations that handled the process. I don't know. a charity that deals with prison leavers or women escaping economic abuse charities or the stair lift manufacturer. So that was the premise of Reddit.
Wow. So, I mean, there's a lot to unpack here, right? So one, that identity, because, you know, as I think about Startup Bootcamp and you had pulled me in when you guys expanded to the U.S. and working with Jesse. And I think you're actually even the person who introduced me to Jesse. I'll have to go back and ask him. But like. I actually say I identified you as startup bootcamp in many regards, right? Like they're inseparable identities in terms of what you had built.
When you decided to step away from that, did you realize the separation, that you're going to leave part of your identity behind? To quite an extent, because... I was a very reluctant entrepreneur. So I left the industry. I was part of Vino Tribe. We did some cool things, but still within Swift. So the decision to leave InnoTribe and join a bunch of people to start with Konfintik and Shurtech then was quite a big decision.
Because I never imagined not being employed. But also, once I got into that and I realized you've got control over, you take decisions, you're the top of the tree, the buck stops with you and all that. It still took me a while to actually embrace the fact that I was a founder, an entrepreneur.
whilst working with hundreds of entrepreneurs who came through the program. And you could see the different flavors of it. Some of them were like me who just left the industry. Some were like 20 odd year olds who come up with a cool idea. But by the time I left, it was very much my life because I didn't have a distinction at all between my personal self and my professional self. This was all just one big thing.
I was probably using Startup Bootcamp and myself interchangeably. So it felt I was emotionally prepared that it's going to hurt. but I wasn't emotionally, I wasn't, I was not expecting it to be as bad as it ended up being. So how did you start to rebuild the strength, knowing how hard it is? Because you saw it hundreds of times, not only your own experience in stepping away, but the number...
of startups that went through Startup Bootcamp that ultimately weren't successful or founders that did need to step away, where you'd witnessed that, right? You were on the front line with them. How did you start to rebuild?
So one thing we haven't spoken about is in that year in the wilderness in 2019, I also started something called the Future Farm, which is an initiative that advocates for better well-being, emotional, mental well-being and entrepreneurship that came out of... seen so many founders struggle and in that world that glorifies the hustle and the Silicon Valley paradigm and all that, the TechCrunch articles and the Sifted news and all that.
there was no room to say, you know what, it's really hard. So there was already an awareness that this is not easy and I wanted to get involved in. destigmatizing that a little bit I also come from a home where I grew up around a severely depressed mother so we had an awareness about mental health impacting your environment So I've always been quite vocal about this at home. Like I recognize elements of depression creeping up in the last year in SPC and also just the science of real burnout.
But at the same time, we're all super capable of just ignoring all the signals and pretending and talking ourselves into believing that everything is fine. There was a moment in 2018 where I was bragging about having flown Mexico City, Mumbai, Melbourne, Australia.
in nine months, in nine days. So I did, I did this trip practically across the world because we had, we had a program in Mexico, we had a program in Mumbai that was probably, we're struggling, but we're also building one in Australia. So yeah, so that was my life. Now, how do I process that? I think for me, therapy helps. I had a therapist before and I went back to my therapist in anticipation and actually said, look, I'm about to take this big step. I need that support.
So a lot of it was just talking, but also recognizing that this is not going to be quick. Because people, especially founders, yeah, what's the pill I can take to fix it quickly and move on and just preparing myself. Keep moving. It was hard, though, because my dad passing away really threw me. But at the same time, I had to focus on family. So it took away some of that focus on me, just navel gazing.
because I had to be there for my mum, who was not well, and who ended up passing away 18 months later. So it's been bumpy. It's been bumpy. I mean, there's no pretense, right? And there's days where I was completely incapable of doing anything. The good thing is that I acknowledge that this was necessary and I wasn't giving myself a hard time for not being busy and not being active and not having lots of coffees and figuring out what to do next.
You mean like the coffees I had with you when I came to London after Perk Street to figure out? Yeah, loop our way around in the world. Now, part of what I love about Founder Farm and what you and Vladdy were building was, like, I was finding it cathartic to know I wasn't alone, right? Because like you had said, the Silicon Valley. UK, the hustle, grind culture, especially with social media now, just makes that so hard. What are some of the stories you heard cropping up out of Founder Farm?
So we started with the podcast and the idea behind the podcast was to invite founders who were happy to talk about their struggle to talk us through it. Really. talking about how they experienced hitting rock bottom, what they were doing to get better. But the key thing that we focused on was what were the signals you saw but chose to ignore whilst you were in it? Because we wanted the listeners to go, actually, hang on a second, I'm experiencing that maybe I need to do something about this.
So we have, I don't know, 80 odd episodes of founder stories. But since then, especially since the last couple of years, we started actually going and meeting people in person. And for the last few months, I've been doing a lot of these talks in front of real people. Usually small groups, 20, 30 people, quite intimate spaces where you create an environment for vulnerability. And I usually lead with my own story because I want people to really relax around what we're going to talk about.
The stories are harrowing, Jason. I can pick any story from five years ago when we started the podcast to the one I heard at the last session because... Everything is very personal. There was a guy who came to me at the end of last year after a session and said, I run a business with my dad. The dad is the inventor. He's the product person. I'm the CEO. I'm the salesperson. Our mother passed away a year ago. We haven't been able to sit down at the table and jointly acknowledge that.
for a year now because the tension we have in the business is already bad that we just don't want to be around each other after that. and you go wow wow yeah that's one three years ago money 2020 vegas private session
Money 2020 runs this separate conference called Rise Up and Amplify, which is for women in financial services and for underrepresented founders in financial services. And in that room, a woman raised her hand and said that the stresses of building a business triggered premature menopause in her early 30s. People who talk to us about suicidal ideation, people talk about the depression, people try to add color to what anxiety means. We're an amazing Pakistani founder.
on the podcast who had a business that practically lost all their clients overnight because of some sort of rumors in the market And they really struggled to turn this around, turned it around, went back to profitability. And literally the week after, she got up one morning, got into a car, drove to the office. and could not leave the car. So she sat in her parking lot outside the office for eight hours, drove home and did this for a few days until both her family and the business
realize something's up and they had to stage an intervention. It's people who, I don't know, there's somebody who looked up to me and said, that five years ago he was lying in a hotel room with a gun in his mouth because he lost his wife, his business and all his money. Divorce and separation is quite common. So that's what I'm saying. It's so many different stories. But the interesting thing is that everybody has one thing in common.
It's that you don't acknowledge what's happening when it's happening because you're too busy building, right? But in parallel, founders have got this amazing ability to be super stressed. but fulfilled at the same time because they're driven by something that the general population doesn't have, this implicit internal drive to build. But once you're doing this, you also gradually isolate yourself.
So you give up your network little by little. The people that you have as a support system gradually vanish because you make a choice, because I'm too busy for this acquaintance or that family gathering, whatever. And in the end, you get to the point where even your life partners are no longer either interested to hear the same story or are frustrated for having spent all the money or the savings or whatever it is, right? But a lot of people are just very, very lonely and very isolated.
That speaks to me. Like my wife and I talk about this, that being a multi-time founder. that you're part of the natural state is stress like you talked about and she goes i don't like your stress stressing me out i can see your stress all the time and it's like an addiction Actually, another Greek episode, Koki Haciotis talks about this very freely. She goes, it kind of ruined me.
Because there was pre-startup me and there's post-startup me. And I don't like it because I don't know how to turn that part off again. Yeah. It's interesting, the turning off. It's about managing it and knowing what's happening. And this is why when we talk to people, the first thing we want to be able to get is just figuring out how to check themselves.
Just acknowledging what's happening, because that's already an insight. And sometimes people have this recognition in the room. Like we had one session where we were talking, I was asking the audience to experience burnout. And a whole bunch of people raised their hands. Then one guy raised his hand and said, what does that actually mean? So we allowed people to describe it. And he goes, well, that's what I've been having for the last few years, right? So just going, look.
something's up and it's okay to say, you know what, I'm struggling. And that's part of the entrepreneurial thing, but also it's a cultural thing and also gender thing where you kind of go, no, it's... admitting defeat or acknowledging a weakness and this is not a space for weakness right and that goes back to the narrative that's been kind of built up by media social media
So when you went into Radish, do you feel like you went in with your eyes wide open about what that journey is? Could you do something to say, I need to be observant and do my own early intervention? So I got into business with a couple of people, one of which has been through his own journey. And he's actually been on our podcast to talk about his experience.
We are old enough and wise enough and cool enough to know better, but we still fell into the traps of a system that is just not built for self-care. And it was actually one of the biggest frustrations. Well, frustration is not the right word, but looking back, so Radish shut doors a couple of months ago, but it was technically dead in the fall of last year. And so looking back...
I made some choices against my better judgment. I did know better. But for some reason, I thought I can make this work. Mainly because I know more. I've seen more. And I naively assume, no, we'll figure it out. But then red flags never go away. And we thought we can work on them by being explicit about them. And in the end, part of the reason it failed was co-founder conflict. Part of the reason it failed was... us making decisions that were compromises that we shouldn't have made so yeah
Wow. And especially to be two seasoned entrepreneurs that you're one of the more emotionally aware and high EQ entrepreneurs, I think largely because of your work, you know, as. An accelerator, you had to be part psychologist probably. And then Bounder Farm along the way to see it. Is it something implicit? Is it hard to make it work with co-founders? Should it really be solo founders? Is it something about do they need to start couples therapy first?
So, yes to some what you said, no to some what you said. Let's unpack it. I'm genuinely fascinated by co-founder relationships and my future life is really all focusing around that. I don't care about anything anymore in terms of business. I still get every day like a couple of texts in my inbox. Hey, do you want to have a look at what I'm building? I genuinely don't care. But tell me more about how did you meet your co-founder and why are you doing this together?
It's been a subject of fascination from the beginning, and specifically conflict. Right. Now, if you take a step back and look at people who come into this, who may come into... entering a co-founder relationship as the first significant relationship in their lives after their parents.
There's no experience, there's no playbook, there's no knowing how to deal with these situations. So people are very ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of startup life. I do think... I don't think solo founders is a better choice because most people need community and a sounding board and somebody to share with. And one of the big things we've learned out of the Future Farm is that really desperate desire for peer conversation.
And that's, by the way, that's where we found the Founder Circles, which I can talk about later. But the idea of doing this with someone without having spent some time dating is very much like in a romantic relationship where you go on these dates that are like interviews and then you enter a relationship of sorts and then at some point you realize that some of these red flags are still there because they never go away.
You mentioned half-jokingly couples counseling, couples therapy, but reality is that's actually quite an interesting tool to approach this by, from the beginning, having... an objective person in the room or every couple of weeks associated with you and gives you the space to talk about the differences, but also allows you to maybe get to the point where you realize, you know what, we're maybe not compatible. So let's...
let's break this off before it gets too serious. And that unfortunately doesn't happen enough. It usually happens once you raised a bunch of money, once you had your headlines, and then suddenly you look at your co-founders and go, hmm, I'm not sure I want to do this with you.
But you just kind of missed the moment where it would have been easy to go because then you've got investors and boards. Now you're married and have kids. It was a lot easier when you were just dating to pay attention to the red flag. We own a house together is maybe the analogy. It's kind of funny because actually we were talking about this co-founder relationships and co-founder alignment being...
So important that I've always seen this as the main reason why companies also fail, if it's not there. But then when you Google top 10 reasons why startups fail, co-founder conflict is one of them. It's, I don't know, didn't find product market fit or too soon, too late, whatever, or struggled to race. But even those reasons, if you scratch the surface, a fully aligned team would have probably navigated this better.
And I think it's about a couple of months ago, there was finally a study by Stanford University to support that argument, but it's going 60% of the companies failed because of co-founder miscellaneous. So there is that. So it's super important and there's not enough support.
You know, it's funny on the couple analogy, Dan and I with Perk Street, we still have this relationship with each other, right? It's like one of those, once you've shared that kind of bond, it doesn't go away where he's my sounding board and vice versa. We had found very much like the couples therapy piece of this, that we needed to carve out time for us. Like we would do a weekly walk, just the two of us, right? The equivalent of date night where it was.
How are you feeling? How are you dealing with the stress? Let's check in on that. What's keeping you up at night, right? Like there's so many analog. to what builds a productive relationship well it requires investment right it requires vulnerability requires being willing to change what are you willing to compromise on and what are you not willing to compromise You're using all the right words. I've been to couples therapy. Go ahead. There is definitely...
So if you don't have an element of self-knowledge to be able to talk about this, you're really going to struggle. If you don't understand what motivates you, what motivates the other person, what are the differences or what do you need to do to keep the motivation up on both sides? And at the same time, if you don't know what your support system is, or if you don't have one, then you really, it's not going to be easy. This show is brought to you by Alloy Labs.
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Do you think on the entrepreneurial journey, and I want to get specific to fintech, right? There's kind of a funnel here. It's like, I know Nicarious is a person. I know startups. I know FinTech. Do you need that kind of domain expertise to be a good sounding board in this, or does it take an ecosystem? I don't think you need to be an expert to build a perfect product for a problem.
And sometimes it's helpful not to come from the industry because you've got a very dispassionate view and you really focus on solving the problem. I think what helps is that once you've got through the first phases of experimenting, then bringing in whatever's needed and fintech is usually regulated, so you need to have some additional kind of solid chops in all the different aspects where you need to be solid. But ecosystem helps. I think it's.
It's difficult to answer this with a simple answer, Jason. I think... With the right composition of skills, experience, mindset in a founding team you can get really far. Like in Radish, we realized that we don't have any risk expertise. Building a lending business, we need to have somebody who understands credit risk and underwriting. We looked around and we found this amazing woman. who came from the industry but she had a similar idea as Radish but she just didn't know how to do it.
So her first few months in Reddish was very much... reprogramming the brain to think like a startup so she had quite a bit of a journey to come to that but her expertise and her nimbleness in adapting to the new new reality was just amazing and it's kind of funny looking back how she now looks at founders will come up to her and go, oh my God, this is so industry focused and you need to reframe the way you look at it and all that. People can learn.
But it also needs to be complementary. I really believe in that complementarity because very often you've got people in founding teams who think the same way, who approach things the same way, and that causes a lack of diversity in thinking, which sometimes can be difficult, right?
yeah you need that productive conflict right like the best ideas can come through figuring it out So let's talk about this next stage of your journey because you have such a beautiful through line of like how you've taken these. to say what could be perceived as obstacles became opportunities for you in not just self-growth, but helping grow and heal the ecosystem with Founder Farm. And let's talk about this next chapter.
Yeah, it's really funny hearing you say that this is a through line, because for a lot of people, it's very much a zigzaggy, mandatory path. But I'm glad you see it, because there is an evolution. Look, I'm 58 years old. I don't need to prove anything anymore. And this is really an important thing to acknowledge at the get-go, right? From the get-go. Because I think with... With InnoTribe and with Startup Bootcamp in the early days, there was a real desire to prove.
that we can do corporate innovation differently and we can be new and pioneering and experimental and all this. And both with ridership was like, okay, it was a new thing. So I said, I've always been driven by something that doesn't exist. I have a real, I know this is an itch I always have to scratch.
But I've kind of ticked all these boxes now. I've tried Radish and I still think there's potential. We just probably weren't the right team at the right time and maybe need somebody younger or more. hard-skinned but in the end we were just too tired to try it again to raise another round And when we had an investor pull out at the very last minute and we were overexposed and just depleted. But all this to say that when we started with...
Naked the podcast and all the activities with the Future of Arm, we actually realized that there is a real need for interventions beyond the awareness raising that we did on the platform. And for me, it's very clear there's two real issues. that need addressing. One of them is creating the space for peer conversations in a facilitated founder environment.
So I joined forces with a wonderful woman called Christina Richardson, who started something called Foundology a while ago. And these are structured founder coaching sessions. uh with a founder coach who where they don't have to explain the context so people come into a safe space it's confidential they bring in a problem there's a beautiful format that we use to get people to peer coach each other in different scenarios, in different contexts.
And that creates community, but also like with a therapist, you know, that you've got a place to take things to when things get tricky. And it's amazing to get the testimonials from people who've been through this. And we do this in a B2C capacity, but we also do this B2B2C through accelerators, sometimes with investors who want to create something for their portfolio companies where they can beyond the program, for instance.
have this regular mechanism and it's not expensive and it's really easy to sign up. So this is one stream. And the other stream is focusing more with teams rather than with an individual founder who wants to be part of the peer session where you get them to better alignment by taking them through a two-day workshop.
That gets them to introspect and ultimately understand better how both sides, everybody around you communicates and how you need to be communicated with and how different motivations form a little bit the way or a lot how the way you interact. It's using a model that I've actually used with my businesses where I brought facilitators in to help me go through some conflict and it's been transformational. So we're looking to launch this in a couple of months. We've got a couple of...
pilot events in May. And for me, these two things, in addition to the content piece, is just churning the awareness raise and getting people just to hear that you're not alone and there are ways you can actually get better. for the rest of my professional life. Mind you, until something else, Flasher comes along 10 years down the line and I'll be nearly 70 and I'm going to go, I don't know. Here's my last shot.
But I don't... Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, is this going to be UK only? Is there a way for... Absolutely not. We're starting in the markets where we're comfortable with. And the founder circles exist in the UK at the moment, but because they're remote. We already have people dialing in from other parts of the world, including the US.
But our idea is to really roll this out as a sort of type of franchise across continents because we know that every market has its own specific cultural nuances and it's much better to have somebody. in the room facilitating the conversation who actually understands that so that's the plan with the founder circles with the other thing that hasn't got a name yet
This is not going to be super scalable. This is really more about me getting my hands dirty by working with the founders directly because I really enjoy it. But we can travel. Yeah. Just not Minnesota in the middle of winter? Well, yeah, I'm at the moment a little bit cautious about traveling to the U.S. full stop.
But I hear you. I will travel to you. How about that? If people want to tap in from Founders Farm and... founder circle like where should they be following and listening you know we'll post this in the show notes obviously yeah so um there's literally two main platforms. The one is thefuturefarm.co, which is where we've got the podcast, but the podcast is called Naked by the Future Farm. It's available on all the podcast platforms.
Foundology, we have our own web page. There's a startup offering and ecosystem partner offering. It's straightforward. Visit the webpage or ping me on LinkedIn and I can talk about this until the cows come home. So this is filling me with so much purpose and excitement that it reminds me of the early days of... you know to have the early days of startup boot camp we can really just talk to people about something really new and needed and yeah as you can tell it gives me a lot of energy
Well, your energy is great and helpful for me, but even this conversation has helped part of the healing process. So I'm excited to, you know, I haven't listened to all of the podcasts, but now that I know there's. a limited number. That is a manageable number for me to get through the remaining 10 that I haven't listened to. But also just knowing this exists as a resource for our portfolio and entrepreneurs that I meet and that voice out there that it isn't all up and to the right.
It's really lovely to hear that, Jason. One of the things I've noticed, so I approached this at the beginning of the year, a bit like First Principles' new venture. And I started trying to find the people in the world who have... maybe the same mindset or trying to do something that are alone. And I realize there's probably by now probably about a dozen people who do something with their own market or cover a niche or what we're doing. So one of the things I'm really keen to build is community.
just community amongst us who are practitioners in that space who want to support founders. And maybe as a result of this, there will be at some point, I don't know, a directory or whatever you want to do with the community. I've been working very closely with Flourish and Lisa Nicholson at Flourish. I don't know if you know Flourish we see in the US. who's been leading on this on the investor side. And I think this is a crucial part in all of this is if you look at
We're talking about the manifestations of stuff that are ultimately caused by a mix of things. But part of the problem is the VC community. And they're really refusing to acknowledge that. And it's difficult to get to persuade everyone that you need to do something about this if you genuinely care about the success of your venture. But it's great to find those VCs who have
a real appetite to be involved, trying to understand what is it that they contribute to this and how can they mitigate that. And there's also a grown community there, which is very encouraging. Well, you know, the VC part of it is, you know, we sometimes miss the misalignment of those incentives, right? just raising our series b and i was at an event with one of our investors It was a sporting event that we went to. Whips out his cell phone, calls another CEO.
And says, where are you right now? He's like, oh, I'm at the office. It's 10 o'clock at night. And he goes, that's what makes a good founder. And, you know, on the other side of it, my very first startup when we were having problems, Brad Feld early on intervened and they actually had the equivalent of that. couples therapists that they had for all of their startups. I actually still have the paper materials from 1999 that this guy used with us and photocopied and sent to lots of people.
This is amazing to hear, but it also shows who's been around for a while and actually listened and observed what's happening, what's needed. And the ones who... Well, when we started The Future Farm, we went out to the market and talked to the VCs that we knew because we wanted to have a sense of...
How does the market think about this? The quotes that we have are quite astonishing. I mean, things people are saying to us, generally, like verbatim, I don't care if a company fails because the founder has failed. It's just part of the portfolio game. This was pre-COVID. COVID changed a little bit.
how people see things because suddenly you had investors experiencing their own struggles with isolation, with not being able to do things, with concerns, et cetera, right? And LP is breathing down the necks, et cetera. And since then, there's also more research. that just shows that a founder who knows how to look after themselves on all levels is just a better performer. Those data points are also contributing to the investor community being a bit more aware.
Being who they are, it also flipped to the other side. And now that everybody's signing pledges, but nobody's really doing anything. It's interesting. In our portfolio, we've had two CEOs have babies while on the job. And both brought it up as a level of concern to us as an investor. It's like, does that worry you that we'll be out? And it's like, absolutely not. I'm more worried that you're not going to be able to carve out enough time.
for something in that kind of important step in your journey. And we consistently heard that that was not what they were hearing from other venture investors. We had, I think the last episode we recorded, so we stopped recording Naked episodes because Vladdy, my co-founder, had a baby and she's taking some time off to focus on her baby and her fintech company.
But the last person we interviewed was a partner at Flourish. And if I were to summarize that, what are you guys doing to support your founders on their journey? The word was trust. Building that relationship of trust where if you're the lead investor, the founder actually feels comfortable enough to come to you with everything, including I'm struggling, knowing that there's a judgment-free zone.
their investor will do anything to support them, right? And this is the thing where I haven't seen much of. Which partner at Flourish? Is it M? Yeah. Ah, I knew it. I knew it. That sounds just like her stick now. And she means it. That's part of the beauty is it's easy to, especially with VCs.
to tack on here's our values and here you know how we add value to you and what we do but a lot of times it's empty words especially on this trust side I just enjoyed hearing it from somebody where it was believable because you see the action. So as we wrap this up, what piece of advice would you give for someone who's listening and realize in that moment, it's like, hey, maybe I am struggling. Maybe I am burned out.
What is that first step on a journey towards healing? So nothing will happen without that moment of self-awareness and self-inquiry. So my first question, or it's actually two questions that I would ask any founder. One is, take a moment to figure out what are your stresses and your triggers. And the next one is take a moment to figure out what is your support system and your energizers.
and that already gives you a bit of an understanding of where you actually are because if you realize that you're high on your stresses and your triggers that are happening in your life right now and at the same time there's an imbalance with whatever support you have it gives you a bit of a shape the next thing is nothing will happen so if if people complain about who are neglected by a physical exercise
I know I need to do something. And then founders being founders, the next thing they do is to sign up for a marathon. And what they need to do is go for a two minute walk and then the next day for a three minute walk and slowly build it up. So small steps is crucial. That resonates so much on the number of founders that I can think I was like, oh, my God, they all just decided to go run a marathon. Now I know working backwards what that's probably coming from.
If you're replacing your adrenaline kick with something else, it gives you that. then you're not really doing something to get better. And the last one is really talk to people. Community is paramount. So we, when we do this talk publicly, we normally leave people with these three assets of self-inquiry, small steps and sharing. it's really difficult to snap out of it when you're really in the middle of it. So just opening up to someone of trust.
where there's a judgment-free environment where you can just talk about how hard it is. And it's already quite a big achievement. Well, and I want to harken back to something you said earlier that I think is really important, which is as you're getting stressed, if you feel like you're cutting people out of your life.
That is a big indicator. I was thinking back in that moment that you said it and say, there was a very visible sign as I was paring that down and becoming more and more solely absorbed. by the entrepreneurial journey, that should have been a big flop. It's always easy to look at the big flags in hindsight, right? The key thing is, and this is why we focus on this when we talk to people on the podcast, so people hear this. Everybody has their own little...
I'm saying little. Everybody has their own elements that indicate that. Some people, like I know, for instance, personally, and this is something I share quite publicly, when I get into these modes, which for me is a sign of depression, I start cancelling things left, right and centre. Because I need me time. And that's instead of using the time for myself, I just end up binge watching Netflix.
And I haven't done anything for myself, but I also still have those calls that I need to make or these meetings that I need to take. And it's led to me sometimes not being available for days because I was paralyzed. kind of doesn't fix itself right so i need to i need to actively start doing something about it um the sharing piece is really fascinating because that's something i experience every time i speak in these groups
People are not necessarily comfortable sharing, but at the end of the session, there's a queue. There's literally people because they feel this is somebody who's going to be. gone traveling onto the next city or whatever so it's quite safe just to go and offload and then have somebody who says nothing in a good way, who's not judging, who just acknowledges whatever that's going on, goes on in their lives. And it's not easy. It's not easy when you're in it.
Well, and I think that's why community becomes really important is to finish what you said, right? The natural extension is I offload it. I feel better in the moment. Nectarious travels on, and I feel better, but I haven't actually done anything. I have no accountability to change without community. Bloody used to run something when she was working for a VC that they called Founders Anonymous.
which was operating on a very similar principle where founders could just judgment-free talk about their struggles. So there is an element here. We're all addicted to something and we all need an outlet to acknowledge our addiction and fight our demons.
And hopefully get to somewhere. Well, and I would say entrepreneurship is the ultimate addiction, right? It can be devastating. It can be rewarding. It certainly takes you on a roller coaster, but it can really bring out those demons, as you said.
And substance abuse is much more prevalent within the founder community than in the general population. That's one of the things that came out of the first study I saw about this from Dr. Michael Friedman. You're much more likely to experience substance abuse when you're an entrepreneur. if we're talking about addiction but that takes us down a whole other rabbit hole yeah well
Thank you for what you do in the community. Thanks for your vulnerability. Thanks for sitting down with me in 2014 and saying it'll be okay. Pick up the pieces. Was it 2014? It's 2014. Amazing, Jason. Wow. Wow. Thank you. No, thank you for inviting me to talk about this. I really appreciate it. Well, excited to see where all of this goes and what you can do in building this ecosystem.
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