3
EXITS
MIT Sloan
SIX YEARS TEACHING
750+
FOUNDERS
87K+
FOLLOWING
STAY SANE
"For the better part of a decade I ran at a 95% fear level. I thought that was the job."
It wasn't. There was a year that ended with me unable to get out of bed, and nobody posts that part. The showreel is a lie of omission, and it's an expensive one.
That year is why everything on this page exists. The book is about surviving it. Humble exists so founders can decide better before it gets that far. Aelo is building the technology to protect the minds doing the building. One mission, three vehicles.
It's also why my wife and I block every Saturday, no exceptions, and why the letter arrives on Sundays. The commitment myth says you can't afford boundaries. Twenty years of pattern says you can't afford to skip them.
THE PART NOBODY SAYS OUT LOUD
You know what's wrong. Nobody will say it plainly.
You have raised, or you are about to, and you still cannot honestly say anyone wants this.
Every decision runs through you, and you have started to resent the thing you built.
The advice is all free and all contradictory. Twenty tabs open, less clarity than yesterday.
You are the smartest person in the room, and the room still is not buying.
It does not have to cost what it cost me. That is the whole of what I do.
WHAT CHANGES, AND HOW FAST
One outcome you cannot buy anywhere else.
In two minutes,
you'll see the truth. The Reality Check tells you where your business actually stands, in plain language. Free.
In a few weeks,
you'll decide like someone who's done it. One founder problem a week, and what I'd actually do about it.
In a few months,
you'll have a business that doesn't need you in the room. That's the whole point.
A handful of founders each quarter. By design.
HERE'S THE HONEST VERSION, NOT THE POLISHED ONE
I've built companies for twenty years, sold three, taught at MIT Sloan, and worked with more than 750 founders on their hardest problems.
In 2022 I hit a wall I'd watched coming for other people and was certain would never apply to me. I was very wrong. It turns out building a company can quietly cost you the one asset you never put on the balance sheet.
When I came back, I saw the thing I'd been too busy to notice. Founders don't make bad calls because they're stupid. They make them alone, exhausted, and flattered by people with something to sell them. I tell them the truth their investors won't and their friends can't. It's also the whole of my book, You Suck and Your Ideas Are Terrible, out this September.
For the record: I've sold companies to people with their own planes, and I still can't reliably work my own dishwasher. The wins changed my life. The failures nearly ended it. Everything useful I know came from the second pile.
WHAT THEY SAY AFTER
"The most honest, practical session our founders have ever had. He told them what nobody else would."
Accelerator partner
"Real-world experience and brutal honesty. My leadership team left thinking differently about the whole business."
Fortune 500 leader
"He found the problem in my company before I could see it myself. Worth ten advisors."
Two-time founder
01
Burnout, Brilliance and Bullshit. The reality of startups, from someone inside it.
02
Founder mental health. The cost nobody prices in, and how to survive it.
03
Thinking like a startup. For the C-suite who want to move fast again.
ON YOUR STAGE, OR YOUR SHOW
I speak about three things.
Audiences laugh, think, then actually do something differently.