The Founder’s Mindset explores the minds of young entrepreneurs through the early days of founding a company. While challenges are inevitable in business, how w...
S3 | E6: Passion, Purpose, or Both? Lessons From Conversations With Founders
In the final episode of season 3, Alice and Gena reflect on the five conversations they've shared.
We hope you’ve found these conversations as valuable and thought-provoking as we have.
Subscribe to The Founder’s Mindset so you never miss an episode.
This is a podcast from Entrepreneur First. Learn more at joinef.com
Thank you to Woolly Mammoth Media for consulting on and producing the show.
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S3 | E5: Founders Need Community Before Advice
In this episode Gena and Alice had the pleasure of speaking with David Booth, the founder and CEO of OnDeck—a curated community designed to increase your odds of building a successful venture-backed company.
Now, if you're thinking that sounds a bit similar to Entrepreneur First's mission, you wouldn't be far wrong. Both organizations share a belief that the world is missing out on some of its best founders, and a passion for catalyzing globally important companies by reducing the barriers for the world's smartest and most ambitious people to go and found them.
In this conversation Alice, Gena and David talked about how David's parents raised him to be entrepreneurial from an early age, why founders need community before they need advice, the mistake of seeking external validation and credentialism as a way of outsourcing your own judgment of readiness, and much more.
Subscribe to The Founder’s Mindset so you never miss an episode.
This is a podcast from Entrepreneur First. Learn more at joinef.com
Thank you to Woolly Mammoth Media for consulting on and producing the show.
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S3 | E4: Supersonic Flight and Why Big Ideas Aren't Crazy
In this episode, Alice and Gena spoke with Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic. Described by The Guardian as 'the man who aims to bring the son of Concorde to the skies', Blake is on a mission to bring supersonic commercial passenger flights to the world as soon as 2026.
Why, you ask? Well, since Blake never got the chance to fly on the Concorde himself, and nobody appeared to be trying to revive supersonic air travel, he decided to do it himself. In his words, 'I realised that I wanted to work on the most important thing that's not impossible'.
In this conversation Gena, Alice and Blake discuss what moved Blake to take on this mission at a time when it would’ve seemed crazy to almost everyone, how he honestly answered the question 'am I the person to go do this?', how he’s had to grow and change to keep pace with his company, and much more.
Subscribe to The Founder’s Mindset so you never miss an episode.
This is a podcast from Entrepreneur First. Learn more at joinef.com
Thank you to Woolly Mammoth Media for consulting on and producing the show.
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55:48
S3 | E3: Founders Are People Too! Lessons From The Founder Coach
This episode is a little bit different and a particular delight for Gena, because she got to talk to one of her colleagues and direct inspirations: Amy Buechler—who is not a startup founder herself, but rather a psychotherapist turned executive coach.
And not just any executive coach, but one of Silicon Valley’s most sought-after coaches, having served as Y Combinator’s first and only in-house Founder Couch for nearly 5 years before building her own independent coaching practice.
In this episode, Alice, Gena and Amy talked about some of the distinct psychological patterns and pitfalls Amy has observed in the countless founders she’s worked with, from feeling empowered and disempowered all at once, to being pushed along by fear; and Amy shares some of her tools and frameworks for addressing those challenges. They also talked about the very scrappy, entrepreneurial path Amy herself has taken in developing her founder coaching methodology, which really resonated with my own experience.
Subscribe to The Founder’s Mindset so you never miss an episode.
This is a podcast from Entrepreneur First. Learn more at joinef.com
Thank you to Woolly Mammoth Media for consulting on and producing the show.
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48:09
S3 | E2: Exits, Execution and Emotional Battles
In this episode, we spoke with Brett Kopf, a serial entrepreneur at the intersection of fintech and education.
In 2011 Brett founded 'Remind', a tool designed to improve communication between teachers and parents. Remind has since grown to over 30 million active users, and is used by 80% of teachers in the United States. Remind has raised $60 million to date from the likes of Naval Ravikant and billionaire philanthropist John Doerr, and Brett remains on the company's board.
Brett's current company, Omella, is an all-in-one platform for payments, forms and signatures that Brett founded after seeing thousands of educators struggling with collecting money.
In this conversation, we talked about Brett's journey into therapy and how it helped him as a founder, the differences in approach between his first company and his second, how prioritizing his responsibilities as a father actually makes him a better founder, and much more.
Subscribe to The Founder’s Mindset so you never miss an episode.
This is a podcast from Entrepreneur First. Learn more at joinef.com
Thank you to Woolly Mammoth Media for consulting on and producing the show.
The Founder’s Mindset explores the minds of young entrepreneurs through the early days of founding a company. While challenges are inevitable in business, how we respond to them can be the difference between success and failure.
Each week, clinical psychologist Dr Gena Gorlin will sit down with different guests at various stages of founding their company. They will discuss the obstacles they have faced on their journey and the behaviours and mindset they used to overcome them.
Then Gena, alongside co-host Alice Bentinck, will debrief on these challenges and analyse the learnings we can all take from their experiences to hopefully avoid making the same mistakes.
Subscribe to The Founder’s Mindset so you never miss an episode.
This is a podcast from Entrepreneur First. Learn more at joinef.com.
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