I've lived both sides of the founder journey. As a CEO, I've raised venture capital across Europe and the US, built teams, scaled through Techstars NYC, and experienced what movement is possible when you're building toward a big vision.

I've also lived the hidden costs. The sleepless nights, the crushing anxiety, the slow erosion of relationships, the part where your startup becomes your entire identity, where you lose connection to any sense of life beyond the company, where "How are you?" becomes impossible to answer honestly because all you know is how your business is doing.

I didn't just burn out. I lost touch with why I started in the first place.

After years of operating in survival mode (as most founders do) – pushing through any crisis, ignoring my body's signals, maintaining the facade that everything was going well – I made the hardest choice: to step back and ask a different question:

From "How do I make it through?" to "What does it actually take to sustain high performance without losing yourself in the process?"

Over the next years, I trained in somatic therapy, neuroscience, nervous system regulation, transformational coaching, and emotional release. I studied how chronic stress rewires the brain, how our bodies hold the blueprint for resilience, and how we can rewire our emotional responses so we can lead (and live) from clarity instead of reactivity.

What I discovered fundamentally changed how I see founder success. The leaders who are most successful aren't the ones grinding the hardest, they're the ones who've learned to stay connected to themselves while building. They've mastered the ability to regulate their nervous systems under pressure, to process emotions as they arise, and to lead from a place of internal alignment rather than chronic stress and fear.

This led to my mission: to challenge the toxic hustle culture that glorifies burnout, and build a movement where founder mental health isn't a taboo or a "nice-to-have" – it's recognized as the most undervalued competitive advantage in the startup world.

Since 2020, I've supported 500+ entrepreneurs through burnout, co-founder conflict, identity crises, and the messy, unspoken parts of leadership. I've partnered with VCs and accelerators who understand that founder wellbeing is portfolio strategy. I've taught emotional mastery at universities and collaborated with researchers on what actually helps founders thrive.

Founders Who Thrive is the culmination of all that work – a movement to make emotional mastery and nervous system resilience the standard in startup leadership, not the exception.