Asim Amin

Founder & CEO at Plumm | Empowering Minds & Building Thriving Workplaces | Passionate Mental Health Advocate

I’m the Founder & CEO of Plumm, the all-in-one HR platform with mental health at its core.

HR today is fragmented, companies juggle payroll, performance, compliance, and wellbeing across too many tools. Plumm brings it all into one platform, helping organisations cut costs, save time, and look after their people. Because no HR strategy is complete without mental health.

Plumm started as a mental health solution and has grown into a full-service HR platform, used by companies worldwide. Our mission is clear: make workplaces more productive, inclusive, and human.

I’m also the host of the Immigrants Building Companies Podcast, where I speak with immigrant entrepreneurs who’ve built companies against the odds, sharing lessons on resilience, growth, and leadership.

If you’d like to:
🚀 Book a demo with Plumm: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0mJb040 
🎙️ Discuss podcasts, speaking, or media features: taslynn@heyplumm.com

International Trade Program

Poor mental health costs UK employers up to £56 billion a year.

And yet, when employers invest even just £1 in preventative employee wellbeing, they see an average return of £5.30.

We’ve seen case after case, that happier employees make for a healthier business.

It’s why we developed Plumm: a seamless all-in-one, evidence-backed mental wellbeing solution for employers and their teams.

We support your team through our global and diverse pool over 200 accredited therapists and coaches, who can cater to their individual needs, preferences, and circumstances, regardless of where they are in their wellbeing journey.

Whether they can benefit from group learning, need professional help and personalised 1:1 therapy or coaching, or self-help resources, we've got it covered.

Ready to level up your team's wellbeing? 👉 https://www.plummhealth.com/request-demo

You’ll spend £4 a day on a latte without blinking.
But £27 a month for your health?
“Too expensive.”

That’s roughly what a WHOOP costs.
And no, not everyone needs a WHOOP.
It could just as easily be a gym membership. Plenty in the UK cost £20–£30 a month.

The number isn’t really the point.
It’s where the line gets drawn.

Some spending feels automatic.
Other spending gets questioned, even when it’s about your own health, energy, and how you want to feel day to day.

That says a lot about priorities.

Because health isn’t a one-off decision.
You don’t choose it once.
You choose it in small ways, over and over again.

Those choices compound.

And one day you realise how you’ve been feeling for a while now
more tired, less resilient, lower energy
or the opposite.

That’s why what you prioritise today matters more than it seems 👌🏼

PS: I still love coffee, but I’d rather have it home ;)

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Founder & CEO at Plumm | Speaker | Advisor

Let’s be honest.
 
Most of us f*cked up over the holidays.
 
Too much food.
Too much sugar.
Too much wine.
 
And now everyone’s pretending they “reset” on Jan 1.
BS.
Here’s what actually happens:
You enjoy yourself.
Then you feel guilty.
Then you convince yourself you’re already behind.
You’re not behind.
You’re human.
 
What’s messed up isn’t December.
It’s the idea that one month can “ruin” you.
Your body didn’t suddenly forget how to function.
Your discipline didn’t disappear.
Your year isn’t over because you ate more than planned.
 
The real problem?
People think progress has to be perfect.
It doesn’t.
Balance beats punishment.
Every time.
 
You don’t need extremes.
You don’t need to suffer.
You don’t need a diet built around how you look.
You need habits built around how you feel.
 
Energy > aesthetics.
Focus > abs.
Consistency > guilt.
 
So no, you didn’t fail January.
And no, you don’t need to “start again” next Monday.
You start today.
You eat better because it helps you think.
You move because it gives you energy.
You sleep because you perform better.
That’s it.
 
Just show up.
Again.
And again.
That’s how it actually works.
 
Happy 2026 everyone ✌🏼

Perfection is how average founders justify being slow.

I’ve done it.
Watched others do it.
Same outcome every time.

Early on, I hid behind “not ready yet”.
What I really meant was: “I don’t want the market to tell me I’m wrong.”
So I delayed.
Refined.
Overthought.
And nothing happened.

In the first 3–5 years, your product isn’t supposed to be good.
It’s supposed to move.
Because movement creates:
- feedback
- revenue
- momentum
Perfection creates meetings.

I’ve launched things that made me cringe.
They still taught me more in a week than months of planning ever did.
Most features I was obsessed with? Nobody cared.
The market told me that. Fast.

And the reality is, most founders fail because they wait until they feel confident.
Confidence doesn’t come before action.
It comes after exposure.

If you’re still polishing:
You’re not protecting quality.
You’re protecting ego.
Speed doesn’t mean sloppy.
It means honest.
And honesty compounds faster than perfection ever will.

DO NOT hire people who are good on paper.

The strongest hires I’ve seen recently weren’t the neatest on paper anyway.
A few gaps.
Not every box ticked.
Some rough edges.

But when things shifted, they didn’t stall.
That’s what stood out.
Work is changing faster than job descriptions can keep up.
By the end of this decade, around 39% of the skills people use today won’t be relevant anymore.
Most roles won’t disappear.
They’ll mutate.
Which makes “tool knowledge” a short-lived advantage.

In practice, I’ve learned to watch for different signals:
Who asks better questions once the brief gets fuzzy.
Who notices second-order problems, not just the task in front of them.
Who can disagree without becoming defensive.
Who recovers quickly after being wrong.

Those things don’t show up on a CV.
And they matter more when pressure is real.

Nearly 6 in 10 people will need reskilling in the coming years.
Yet the global workforce is still expected to grow.
So the edge isn’t experience alone.
It’s adaptability over time.

You can train systems.
Rewrite processes.
Roll out new tools.
What’s harder to build is judgement.
Curiosity under uncertainty.
The ability to stay useful when the rules change.

As automation takes care of the predictable, these qualities surface.
Not because they’re “soft skills”
But because they’re the difference between keeping up
and actually moving forward.

BREAKING 🚨 Europe just made its boldest move for founders in decades.

Yesterday at Davos, Ursula von der Leyen announced EU–INC.
A single, truly European company structure.
This matters. A lot.
For years, Europe hasn’t lacked talent, it’s lacked simplicity.
27 countries.
27 rulebooks.
Different equity rules.
Different compliance hoops.

So founders did the rational thing.
They incorporated elsewhere.
(Usually Delaware)

EU–INC changes the equation.
One corporate framework across the EU.
Incorporate online in 48 hours.
No mandatory notaries.
One legal entity, valid in all 27 countries.
Taxes and labour laws stay national.

The corporate layer goes European. That distinction is critical.
Because Europe’s biggest problem was never ambition. It was friction.

Scaling shouldn’t mean:
– Setting up new entities per country
– Reworking equity structures
– Burning seed capital on legal fees

If executed properly, EU–INC could unlock:
– Faster company creation
– Founder-friendly equity
– Easier cross-border scaling
– A real Single Market, not a theoretical one

Most importantly?
This is the first time Europe has clearly chosen builders over bureaucracy.
Execution will be everything.
Speed will matter.
Consistency will matter.
But the signal is loud and clear: Europe is finally building for founders 🇪🇺🚀

I didn’t wake up one day and decide to rethink health.
Life did it for me.

What surprised me wasn’t the moment itself.
It was what changed afterwards.

How quickly your definition of “healthy” shifts when it’s no longer abstract.
When it’s not about performance, or numbers, or discipline.
You start paying attention to different things.
How stress shows up in your body.
How sleep affects your mood, not just your energy.
How recovery isn’t optional if you want consistency.

Longevity stops being about adding years.
It becomes about protecting capacity.

The ability to think clearly under pressure.
To regulate stress instead of living in it.
To train, work, and live without constantly borrowing from tomorrow.

I’m reading Outlive at the moment.
What resonates most isn’t the science, it’s the reminder that decline accumulates through small decisions repeated daily.
Ignoring signals.
Normalising fatigue.
Treating rest as a reward instead of a requirement.

Perspective changes how you move through life.
You become less reactive.
More intentional.

Longevity, in that sense, isn’t about fear.
It’s about responsibility.
And once life forces that lesson,
you don’t approach health the same way again.

STOP focusing on your personal brand.

(I know, coming from someone who posts 5x week lol)
But hear me out.

A lot of people start building their personal brands, and then visibility comes:
the likes, the comments, the impressions, DMs
you somehow get momentum

but something doesn’t quite add up..
All those vanity numbers..all the likes, all the followers..
CAN’T fix a sh*t product
(or service)

The issue is that attention doesn’t give you breathing room. It does the opposite.
Once people are watching, they’re not just reacting to your ideas. They’re experiencing everything. The product. The service. The follow-up. The bits you were hoping to fix later.

If that experience is weak, people don’t argue about it. 
They just disappear.

I’ve seen people with impressive visibility struggle to keep customers.
I’ve also seen founders with no presence at all build businesses people stick with because the thing actually does what it says.

A personal brand doesn’t create trust. 
It spends it.

Does that mean you should not work on your personal brand? Absolutely not, you should.
But that shouldn’t be your priority.

Building an amazing product should be.
Building a fantastic service your customers can’t stop talking about should be.

Once you have that, then you can build your personal brand on top.
Just get your priorities straight.

And btw, sometimes the best move is to shut up, build properly, and let people talk later 👋🏻

If your best people are leaving..
it’s probably NOT about MONEY.

It’s about growth.
Companies that invest seriously in L&D see up to 50% higher retention.
Yet most still treat learning as a perk - or worse, a cost.

That’s not a people problem.
That’s a leadership one.

High performers don’t quit bad jobs, they quit stagnation.
When people stop learning, they don’t argue.
They don’t disengage loudly.
They don’t ask for more.
They just start planning their exit.

The data is blunt:
- 94% would stay longer with better development
- Growth opportunities now outrank pay for many senior performers
- Teams with weak learning cultures lose their best talent first

And yet we keep trying to fix retention with:
Bonuses.
Perks.
Offsites.

None of those solve stagnation.
Real L&D is whether someone leaves a year later with better judgment, broader scope, and more confidence than when they arrived.
If the answer is no, they’ll leave.
Eventually.

That’s why we don’t treat L&D as HR hygiene.
We treat it as leadership responsibility.
Because people don’t stay loyal to companies.
They stay loyal to growth.

“Go to HR.”

People hear it the same way they heard “go to the headteacher’s office” at school.
Somewhere you end up once things have already gone wrong.

That perception didn’t come out of nowhere.

HR usually gets involved after weeks of small things being left unsaid. 
Feedback is usually avoided. 
And, expectations are left vague. 
Managers hoping issues fix themselves. 
By the time HR shows up, there’s history, emotion, and momentum.

From the outside, HR looks like enforcement.
Inside, HR is dealing with accumulated silence.

Most problems don’t start as formal issues. 
They start as ordinary moments that weren’t handled early, when the cost was low.

When managers treat HR as the place difficult conversations go, people learn to associate HR with punishment instead of support.

If you want HR to feel human, managers have to do the human work first.

Clear expectations early. 
Feedback while there’s still room to adjust. Intervention before frustration hardens.

HR isn’t the headteacher’s office.
It just inherits what wasn’t handled sooner.

2026 HR trends you need to know:

1. HR will end up owning problems no one else wants
Because they sit between leadership intent and lived reality.

2. AI will finally expose how little most companies understand their own workforce
HR has been saying this quietly for years.

3. “Hiring shortages” will keep being blamed on the market
When the issue is internal talent stuck in the wrong places.

4. Job frameworks will keep getting rewritten
Work will keep changing faster.

5. Hybrid work will stay unresolved
Because many leaders still don’t know what good work looks like.

6. Burnout won’t be treated as a crisis
Until it hits delivery timelines.

7. As usual, HR will be looped in late,
then blamed early.

HR isn’t late. 
It’s just been convenient to ignore.

There’s one kind of decision
I never got used to making.

It wasn’t about direction or priorities.
It was about people, and knowing that whatever I chose would follow them home.

Later, it gets called a pivot. 
In the moment, it felt like sitting across from someone and realising you were about to change something you couldn’t take back.

I’ve been laid off before. 
I remember the shock, the quiet afterwards, the way it made everything outside of work feel suddenly uncertain.

I’ve also had to be the one delivering that news.
What stays with me isn’t what I said.
It’s what I saw.
The pause before someone replied.
The way they nodded, even when it hurt.
How often they asked about everyone else instead of themselves.

There wasn’t anger.
There was care.

People checking in on teammates.
Worrying about how the team would manage.
Trying to make sense of what came next.

That kind of response doesn’t come from policies or values written on a wall.
It comes from how people have been treated all along.

You don’t really understand leadership when things are moving fast and going well.
You understand it when something breaks and there is nowhere to hide.

We talk a lot about growth.
But responsibility shows up differently.
It sits with you long after the meeting ends.
Long after the decision is made.

Those moments are uncomfortable, and they should be.
Because once the decision is made, there’s nowhere else for it to land but on you.
You don’t get to soften it with language or hide behind process.
All you can do is stand in it, be clear, be honest, and make sure the people affected are treated with as much care as possible.
Not because it looks good.
Because you owe them that.

If things get hard → raise.
If growth slows → raise.
If you’re unsure → raise.

There’s a weird default in startups…
Everyone’s obsessed with raising.
But no one really stops to ask the boring question:

What exactly are we trying to buy with this money?

Not the pitch-deck version.
The one you’re honest about when it’s just you and the numbers.

Some of the best decisions I’ve made at Plumm didn’t happen after a round.
They happened when there was little (sometimes VERY little) money in the bank.
Because that’s when you’re forced to think differently.
You get creative.
You stop hiding behind “we’ll fix it after the raise”.
You really ask: what actually moves the needle?

Scarcity sharpens you.
It forces out-of-the-box thinking.
It makes you ruthless about priorities.
Sales matters more.
Focus matters more.
Every spend suddenly has to earn its place.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve been sold this fundraiser lifestyle.
The press.
The LinkedIn posts.
The idea that raising equals success.

But money isn’t success.
It’s just fuel.
And fuel on a bad engine doesn’t fix the engine.

There were moments where raising felt like the obvious next step.
And then we realised it wasn’t.
The better question became:
How do we push revenue?
How do we sell better?
What can we do without more capital?

Raising can make sense, I’m not anti-fundraising, but raising by default is a trap.
And sometimes, having less is exactly what makes you a better founder.
Because when there’s no safety net, your instincts show up properly.

You can’t make an A-player out of a B-player.

I know people hate hearing that.
I used to, too.

For a long time, I thought the right coaching, enough time, or “the right environment” would change people. It doesn’t. Not in the way founders hope it will.

I’ve tried. 
More than once. 
And every time, it cost the business.

Ash didn’t step up because he was promoted. 
He was promoted because he was already acting like it mattered to him personally.

No one had to chase him. 
No one had to spell things out twice. 
No one had to convince him to care.

He already did.
That’s the difference.
Some people feel ownership naturally. 
Others wait to be told what to do, how to do it, and when it’s “enough.”

You can train skills. 
You can’t train that internal bar.

At some point, I stopped trying to turn the wrong people into the right ones. And started backing the people who were already wired differently.

Everything got easier after that. 
Decisions. 
Trust. 
Progress.

Ash is a good example of this.
He is THAT person who takes responsibility even when no one is watching.
He cares.

If this makes you uncomfortable, good. 
It should.

PS: Choose carefully. 
And stop lying to yourself about potential.

The worst way to start a business:

	1.	Decide you want to be a founder before knowing what you want to build (because you like the “lifestyle”..)
	2.	Reverse-engineer a product that sounds good to investors, not customers
	3.	Build an MVP to justify a deck, not to solve a problem
	4.	Avoid talking to users because “we already know the market”
	5.	Call early confusion “vision”
	6.	Ship features no one asked for because they look impressive in demos
	7.	Measure success by meetings booked, not problems solved
	8.	Sell discounts as “traction”
	9.	Hire sales to compensate for unclear value
	10.	Blame sales when customers don’t convert
	11.	Add more features instead of fixing the core problem
	12.	Call lack of focus “moving fast”
	13.	Run internal meetings about growth instead of external conversations with users
	14.	Burn cash to protect the narrative
	15.	Pivot quietly, rebrand loudly 
	16.	Tell the team profitability comes after scale
	17.	Run out of time, not ideas
	18.	Buy PR articles to boost you ego

Remember: Build something people would miss if it disappeared.

Everyone wants the quick win.
The overnight success.
The shortcut.
The “one good idea”.
What they don’t want is the part before it.

It took me 10 businesses
and 27 years
to get here.

Because that’s how long it took to actually understand what works.
Most of those businesses didn’t fail, they just… faded.
Wrong timing.
Thin margins.
People problems.
Ideas that sounded good but didn’t survive reality.

Each one taught me something small and painfully specific.
How fragile cash really is.
How quickly momentum dies.
How often “almost ready” is just fear in disguise.

There was no big moment where it all clicked, just fewer mistakes over time.
The Plumm people see now isn’t the result of a breakthrough, it’s the result of repetition, and the sum of all the hard lessons learnt in those 27 years.

Everyone wants the result.
Very few want the years it takes to recognise one.
That gap is where most people disappear.

We all say we hate talking about money.
What we really hate is being exposed.

Because money has a way of cutting through the BS.

The biggest mistake I see some founders make is stepping away from numbers too early.

Because staying close to revenue forces uncomfortable conversations.

Sales conversations.
Pricing conversations.
Reality conversations.

Top line tells you if anyone actually wants what you’re building.
Bottom line tells you whether the way you’re building it is sustainable.

Ignore either, and you start lying to yourself.

I’ve seen founders obsess over growth while margins slowly collapse.

I’ve seen “strong pipelines” with no cash to show for it.

By the time they re-engage with the numbers, the options are already limited.

Spreadsheets aren’t finance work. They’re where the truth shows up first.

If you know your numbers, you feel in control.
If you don’t, you call it stress.

That’s the difference.

“Is there still a future in HR?”

That question keeps coming up because a lot of HR work is disappearing in plain sight.

AI is already handling the volume work.
Questions. Admin. Scheduling. Screening.
The things that kept teams busy and roles full.

That part isn’t coming back.

But much of that work was never the value.

For years, HR became the place unfinished thinking was sent.
Vague roles. Avoided conversations. Poor decisions dressed up as process.

AI exposes that.

Because once the admin goes, what’s left is judgement.
And judgement is harder work.

The future of HR belongs to people who can design work that still makes sense as organisations change.
Intervene early, before silence turns into resentment.
Support leaders when there is no policy to hide behind.
Read patterns humans feel long before data shows them.

AI can answer questions.
It can’t rebuild trust.
It can’t decide what “fair” looks like in a messy situation.
It can’t carry the weight of a hard call.

Teams using tools like Plumm are already shifting this way.
Less firefighting.
More thinking.

So yes, there is a future in HR.

But it belongs to those willing to step away from owning process
and into helping organisations make better decisions about work.

Cognitive decline starts earlier than what you think 
(and if you are 30+, you should be reading this..)

Yep, the decline starts in your early 30s..
way earlier than you expected, right?

And interesting enough, the other day I was reading how some studies put the difference between people who actively challenge their brains and those who don’t at 2–3 years of memory decline.
In some cases, closer to a decade…

So, I was like “Hold on a minute.. I need to do something about it..”

So I’ve been trying to go back to basics lately.
And yesterday, instead of doing anything particularly “CEO-productive”,
I did a puzzle.
No phone nearby.
No background noise.

What surprised me wasn’t that it was calming.
It was how unfamiliar it felt to concentrate like that.
Holding pieces in my head.
Remembering what didn’t fit.
Staying with the problem instead of jumping to something else.
That kind of effort used to be normal.
Now it’s rare.

The data on brain longevity is pretty consistent on one thing:
it’s not about consuming more information.
It’s about effortful thinking.
Puzzles, crosswords, problem-solving tasks - they show up again and again in studies on cognitive reserve.
They force the brain to slow down and work.

Kids do this instinctively.
Adults engineer it out of their lives.
Shortcuts.
Assistance.
Constant input.
The brain adapts.

I’m not claiming puzzles are a solution to anything.
But they’re a good reminder.
If brain health matters - not just now, but over time -
it’s worth paying attention to how often we actually ask our brains to do something hard.

Sometimes going back to basics isn’t regression.
It’s maintenance 👌🏼

PS: What was your weekend “brain activity”?

“Graduates should work for free.”

That’s not a hot take.
It’s exploiting the market while pretending it’s common sense.

What it really says is this:
We want output without accountability.
We want talent without doing the work of building it.

Entry-level roles were never meant to be efficient, they were meant to be formative.
You hired for raw potential.
You tolerated mistakes.
You invested time before expecting judgement.
That’s how people got good.

Now?
Many companies want graduates who arrive finished.
Tool-ready. Confident. Immediately useful.

And when they don’t?
The gap gets filled with unpaid labour.
“Trials.”
“Exposure.”
Open-ended internships with no real intent to hire.

The cost moves from the balance sheet to the individual.
Income disappears.
Waiting becomes the price of entry.
At that point, talent isn’t about ability, it’s about who can afford to be patient.

AI is making this worse.
The low-risk learning work is vanishing.
Junior roles are fewer.
The remaining ones demand judgement before judgement has time to exist.
Instead of redesigning how people grow, many companies opt out altogether.

Pay matters.
Not as a moral argument.
As a forcing function.
Pay creates obligation.
Clear expectations.
Feedback.
Actual management.

Without pay, there is no graduate role.
There is only unpaid labour with nicer language.

If you hire graduates, you’re making a choice.
Either you build capability, or you extract value and avoid responsibility.

We’ve always paid interns, because serious companies invest in the pipeline they depend on.

If you hire graduates, pay them.
That’s the line between developing people
and taking advantage of them.

He travelled the world building businesses. 
Then he came back to the UK.

James went to China at 18. 
1997. 
Six months to teach English.

He picked China because it felt hard. 
New system. 
New rules. 
Nothing familiar.
That choice shaped everything.

Working abroad showed him that business isn’t just about competence. 
It’s about knowing how things really work. 
What’s said. 
What isn’t.

In China, contracts were flexible. 
In the Philippines, age mattered more than ability. 
At 26, being young made selling harder.

He moved across Asia through a management programme. 
Different countries. Different businesses. 
Sometimes with a week’s notice.

Family brought him home.
He built a bike marketplace. 
It looked successful. 
Awards. Partners. Press.
But it didn’t work. 
Ethical supply couldn’t scale.

When his family needed him, he stepped in. 
He grew the recruitment business. 
88 people. Five countries. 
Sold in 2020.

He’s not an immigrant in the UK. 
But immigration shaped everything he built.

Today, he works with founders who are already carrying a lot. 
Helping them think more clearly. 
And make better decisions under pressure.

🎙️ Watch the full episode below. 
Link in the comment section.

Founder & VC Coach | Advisor | Speaker | Podcast Host

Fractional CFO | Helping Founders Scale Beyond $2M ARR with Strategic Finance & OKRs | Founder @ FounderFirst

There's a point where you just can't wing it anymore.

Usually around $2M ARR.

When growth is real, but messy. When the business works (but the numbers don't fully add up). When pricing gets risky, hiring gets heavy, and suddenly every "quick decision" starts showing up in your burn.

That's where I come in.

I step in as your Fractional CFO to help turn momentum into structure.

We build pricing, capital allocation, operating constraints, and targets the team actually runs on.

Over the last decade, I've worked with 20+ early and growth-stage companies, both VC-backed and bootstrapped, across SaaS, fintech, edtech, and agencies. I've helped scale revenue from $500K to $20M, grow teams from 10 to 200+, and build finance and ops foundations from scratch.

I've been in the room for pivots, layoffs, down rounds, near-bankruptcies, and exits - not as an observer, but owning the financial logic behind what happened next.

In 2024, I founded FounderFirst to go deeper with this work, helping teams build finance that actually supports growth, long before they're ready for a full-time CFO. Since then, we've partnered with 70+ founder-led startups and SMBs, including leading accelerators and venture studios.

That's the professional story. Here's the real one.

I grew up in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria - no English, no tech exposure, no obvious path.

At 17, I taught myself English.
At 19, I earned a scholarship to study in the U.S.

I arrived with a suitcase, less than $300, and no backup plan, and did whatever scrappy thing it took to stay afloat.

Eventually, I found my way into startups. The chaos, the ownership, the pressure, for the first time, I felt like I fit.

What started as survival became a decade of building behind the scenes.

Now I bring all of it - the scrappiness, the strategy, and the systems - to founders who are ready for real financial leadership.

When I'm not deep in spreadsheets or board decks, you'll find me hiking a national park or nose-deep in a book. (Always open to recommendations.)

If the next set of decisions actually matters, let's talk: https://bit.ly/3NEYTqT

Mariya Valeva

He was born in one of the poorest countries in the world.
And he built a $9.5 billion company…
and made his product free.

Luis von Ahn grew up in Guatemala, a country where most kids drop out of school by age 12.
Where learning English could change your life,
if you could afford it.
His mother was a single parent. A doctor.
She spent everything she had on him.
When he was 8, she bought him a computer instead of a vacation.
He started coding. And dreaming.
But dreaming wasn’t enough.

To get into college in the U.S., he needed to take the TOEFL exam,
but it wasn’t even offered in Guatemala.
So he crossed the border. Paid in foreign currency.
Took a test that said, “prove you're good enough… if you can afford it.”

He never forgot that moment.
He made it. Barely.

Graduated summa cum laude. 
Got a PhD. 
Invented CAPTCHA. 
Sold reCAPTCHA to Google.

He could’ve stayed in Silicon Valley forever.
Instead, he built Duolingo.
Not as a product.
As revenge on a system that made kids feel small for being poor.

He poured years into it. The early versions flopped.
Gamification was a desperate pivot. Investors pulled out.
People laughed at the idea of making it free.
But he didn’t stop.
He hired people smarter than him.
He fought for funding.
He spent sleepless nights tweaking tiny things - the streak, the owl, the sound a notification makes.
Because every time he wanted to give up, he remembered 16-year-old Luis.
On a bus to another country.
Trying to take a test he could barely afford… just to be seen.

Today, that same boy runs one of the most powerful education companies in the world:
📱 500M+ users
🌍 Courses in 40+ languages
📈 $9.5B valuation
💸 Still free
But the numbers aren’t the win.
The win is this:
A kid in rural India is learning English - for free.
A refugee in Germany is learning the local language - for free.
A girl in Guatemala doesn’t have to leave her country to chase her dreams.
Because Luis already did that for her.

This isn’t just a story about a startup.
It’s a story about a man who turned every closed door into an open platform.
An empire, built not on profit,
but on principle.

Fractional CFO for B2B SaaS ($2M+ ARR) | Founder @FounderFirst

Ever had a “brilliant idea”…
that never turned into anything?

Ideas are exciting.
They come with clarity, momentum, and that rush of this could really work.

But turning an idea into something real?
That’s the part no one prepares you for.
Because between idea and execution lives a messy middle:
• Trade-offs you didn’t expect
• Constraints that aren’t in the slide deck
• Systems that don’t talk to each other
• Models that work beautifully… until they meet real customers
• People problems, tech problems, money problems, all at once

Execution is rarely a straight line.
It’s craftsmanship.
And that means rethinking, rewriting, rebuilding - again and again.

The idea is just the spark.
But building? That’s the fire you have to keep feeding.
So if you’re in the weeds right now, keep going.
This is the part where the real product - and the real company - gets made.

*video credits: growasentrepreneurs insta

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