Inside Out Leadership

CEO coaching, for founders, by founders. We help early/mid-stage startup founders scale into executive leaders & build low-drama companies, through CEO-coaching that blends psychological growth and operational excellence.

Founder, Executive Coach

Endeavor

Endeavor is a global non-profit that for 19 years has helped entrepreneurs and their companies in 25 countries reach global scale and relevance.

Endeavor Entrepreneur

GVSU Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Board Member

On Deck

Helping founders step fully into their lives and scale their masterpieces.

Coach for Scale-Up Founders (via On Deck Scale)

The largest and fastest growing high school sports communication platform in America.  As the exclusive web/mobile platform for over 11million passionate fans across 40+ states (20% of the total US market), VNN is rapidly aggregating the fragmented, multi-billion dollar high school sports market onto an intelligent platform, and transforming high school sports.

Co-Founder + CEO

Helping entrepreneurs in West Michigan connect to the resources they need, while cultivating strategic positioning within the Michigan startup community.

Entrepreneur in Residence

West Michigan All Star

The largest high school sports publication in Michigan.  A tight knit group of sports junkies who made it their business to ensure that high school athletes in West Michigan got the positive coverage and recognition they deserve.

Founder

Exited founder turned CEO-coach | Helping founders discover who they are as leaders and build high-performance, low-drama companies

Over 15 years I founded and served as CEO to three companies. The last of those, VNN, became the largest and fastest growing high school sports marketing platform in the US. I raised $20M from leading VCs, built a world class team of over 100 professionals, and scaled that company to nearly 20% of the US market.

All while doing everything I could to present only the most polished, hyper-competent version of myself and my company, at all times.

And then in 2020 I left it all behind.

When I signed the papers, officially removing myself as CEO of the company I’d started a decade prior, it felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

Without my persona as the “CEO of VNN,” I realized that I had no idea who I was anymore, or what to do with my life.

It was the opportunity of a lifetime.

I spent the next 2 years searching, meditating, hanging out with monks, diving into psychedelics, and trying on new identities that never felt right.

I was stuck.

And then, I finally opened up.

I started being honest about my struggles, despite the voice in my head telling me to play a role. I let go of my compulsion to be “Ryan the CEO,” or “Ryan the entrepreneur,” or even “Ryan the guy who’s raised a ton of money and scaled a media company.”

I was just, Ryan.

And the most surprising things happened.

1. The more I opened up, the more everyone else did around me. My network grew and developed into one of deep relationships spanning life and business.

2. The more I let go, the more the universe seemed to place exactly what I needed on my doorstep. Things began to happen organically, in ways much better than I could have planned.

3. The quieter my mind got, the more I was able to access an innate wellspring of creativity and inspiration that, frankly, made work feel easy and joyful.

Me, the guy who’d worked so hard his whole life to be perfect, when I learned to let go and be me, great, meaningful work flowed out of me.

And from that foundation, I started Inside-Out Leadership, a boutique executive coaching firm that helps founders transform their companies into their masterpieces and step fully into their lives.

Today, in my work as a coach I see the tendency to present that veneer of polished competence in nearly every founder I meet. And while I recognize the need for presentation in some cases (fundraising, recruiting), I also see how that need to look good actually gets in the way of our learning and growth.

If you're tired of doing your own impression of the "perfect leader," you're not alone.

Shoot me a DM. There's another way. And it's fucking incredible.

Ryan H. Vaughn

When I co-founded VNN in 2010, I didn’t know what I was doing. My degree was in creative writing, not business. But I learned fast how to play the part - to be whoever the room needed me to be.

Raising $20 million from top VCs? I could project unshakable confidence.
Scaling from two people to nearly a hundred? I could figure it out.
Even when I had seven days of runway with fifty families depending on me, I kept that mask perfectly polished.

For years, I mistook this performance for leadership. I thought my job was to absorb the fear so my team didn’t have to. When we were down to weeks of cash, I’d make decisions through the lens of survival, while my team wondered why I wasn’t thinking bigger.
They didn’t know we were on the edge of collapse.
And I was too afraid of being vulnerable to tell them.

The startup bias toward action became my nervous system. Move fast. Check boxes. Solve the next crisis. Never stop.
But the armor that once kept me alive was now suffocating me.

Then in 2020, I signed the papers and walked away from the company I’d built for a decade. The moment the title disappeared, so did the identity that had kept me upright. It was as if I’d been holding my breath for ten years - and now, all at once, I was empty.

Without the performance, I didn’t know who I was.
I’d spent a decade building something that looked successful on the outside, but I’d never stopped long enough to meet the person underneath it.

So I went searching.
I stayed at a monastery.
I studied meditation under Zen masters.
I sat in silence until the noise of ambition started to dissolve.

Meditation taught me something simple: when you learn to sit with urges without acting on them, you discover a space between stimulus and response.
In that space, I began to see how much of my leadership had been driven by fear disguised as responsibility.

When I finally dropped the armor, something unexpected happened.
Real conversations began.
When I shared the truth of what I was struggling with, everyone around me began to do the same.
It turned out we were all exhausted from pretending to be unbreakable.

I started a small meditation group for ten founders. Within six weeks, it grew to five groups - just people calling, saying they needed this space.
They were tired of performing too.

And then, because the Universe is weirdly awesome, that somehow evolved into Inside-Out Leadership - a place for founders to do the inner work while they’re still building.

Because you don’t have to wait for the exit or the breakdown to become whole.

If you’re tired of performing the perfect CEO and ready to lead from clarity instead of fear, let's talk.

Sometimes the most courageous thing a founder can do is to take off the armor and see who’s been waiting underneath it all along.

Exited founder turned CEO-coach | Helping early/mid-stage startup founders scale into executive leaders & build low-drama companies

Years ago, I gave a talk on risk that included jail time and went semi-viral. In my experience, risk is profoundly misunderstood. And this talk is every bit as relevant today...

I got to that jail cell by chasing the great American novelist dream the way Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson did, which is to say I drank like a fish and experimented with everything I could get my hands on. It led exactly where you'd expect.

Sitting there, I couldn't see past the next hour. The novelist dream was dead. My relationships were damaged. The path forward looked like court dates and probation, not companies and meaningful work.

I'd like to take the opportunity now to say that I'd advise you all to avoid jail at all costs. But that cell did teach me something pretty profound about risk:

Most of what stops us isn't the actual risk. It's our imagination of what the risk could be.

Risk = the actual possibility something bad happens.
Fear = your automatic emotional story about it.

When you've hit actual rock bottom - not the fear of failure, but genuine loss of freedom, you gain perspective on this distinction. And it changes how you evaluate every decision after.

The framework for separating these: 

First, name your catastrophic fear story. 
Then name the actual risk, stripped of drama. 
Most founders realize their fear is playing a 10 when the risk is a 3.

This distinction powered everything that came next for me.

I hid the concept for my second company, VNN, for months, terrified someone would steal it. Then Matt Anderson approached me at Ford Field and pitched the exact same idea I'd been sitting on. Turns out if you have a good idea, a hundred other people probably already have it.

I started VNN with Matt in 2011. During our first funding round in 2012, I had to separate the real risk (they might say no) from my fear (I'm a fraud). I can tell you now, the risk was not equal to the fear. 

I also remember being terrified when our two largest competitors announced an alliance. We had 20 schools, they had 500+. I remember walking around telling a friend it was over, and he agreed.

My fear said: We're finished, I'm exposed as a fraud, it's all over.

The actual risk: Competitive dynamics might shift.

Separating those two kept me building, and we ended up being 10x their size.

I learned this through a painstaking process of trial and error, and now I see a ton of other founders trapped in the same pattern. Every overwhelmed CEO convinced they're about to be exposed, every founder paralyzed by decisions, confusing actual risk with fear stories.

I gave this talk nearly a decade ago, running an entirely different company, and yet parts of it have become the foundation of how Inside-Out Leadership helps founders move from fear-based decisions to clarity-based action.

If you're making decisions based on fear rather than actual risk, DM me. I've sat exactly where you are, scared the next choice will be the wrong one. There's a better way.

My parents got divorced when I was 15, and 15 years later, it almost killed my business...

I was blindsided when my dad told me, driving home from school, that he was moving out. At the time, I played it off like it didn't faze me - no big deal. But I can see now just how thoroughly that event shaped my view on life. On relationships. On business. On people leaving me.

Fast forward 15 years. I was running a venture-backed company. We'd scaled from 15 to 75 people in 9 months post Series A, hitting all our numbers.

But I'll never forget the specific brown of the boardroom chair in which I was sitting when an investor told me the presentation I'd spent weeks on was garbage. He instructed me angrily to take an entirely different angle.

The CEO's job is to push back, and I knew this. But I didn't, because fear took over.

I remember the wave of shame hitting me. A bodily rush that turned me from a competent CEO to a defensive little boy, scared his father would leave if he didn't do what was asked. That fear whiplashed me into a 180-degree turn in how we were going to market.

None of this happened consciously. I simply found myself executing a new plan because the investor was so convinced.

I changed the pitch to what he wanted. And naturally, because I didn't believe in it, the investors I pitched didn't believe it either. Our raise failed. We closed a bridge round with our tails between our legs, and it took years to recover.

We can call this poor leadership, but ultimately it's just a symptom of unexamined fear.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate." - C.G. Jung

The issue is that we treat this internal fear as a personal flaw to be hidden, rather than a quantifiable business risk to be controlled.

Think of how many times you've seen:

• Burnout
• Being uncoachable
• Flat investor pitches
• Flinching in a negotiation
• Defensiveness or blaming
• Underhiring key direct reports

These are all fear-based. Mostly unexamined. We can see it in others easily, but struggle to see it in ourselves. For founders, ignoring this can mean the difference between success and failure.

So what do we do?

In short, we look at the fear directly and talk about it openly. In this way, we can learn the texture of our fears and manage them consciously.

For those brave enough to do the work, the best bet is to do this with a trained professional, which is one reason why so many venture funds are funding mental health programs for their founders. 

As in my case, we’re often too close to see how our decisions are being made, so it’s helpful to have an outside perspective to help us see what’s going on. 

Doing this, helping founders navigate their fears consciously to enable authentic leadership, is one reason why I coach.

We need to treat fear as a business risk to be managed, not a weakness to be shunned.

If you're ready to look at what's really driving your decisions, send me a DM.

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I’ve invited one of our awesome clients to tell his story about working with Inside-Out. Stories like these are usually highly confidential, but this client has agreed to share theirs. Here goes:

I reached out to Ryan on Twitter in 2021 after launching my business the year before. From the outside, everything looked good - new company, new role, clear opportunity. But inside, I was drowning.

I'd been to therapy and worked with coaches before. It had always helped, but I'd plateaued. I had this gnawing sense that if I didn't overcome my personal challenges, I could experience very scary consequences.

The first year Ryan and I worked together, we focused 80% on my personal life and 20% on work. Because, as I came to learn, there's no separation. It's all just me issues. Early on, Ryan would ask where a feeling was located in my body, and I'd go completely blank. I felt embarrassed, deficient.

So he'd guide me: "Do you feel it in your throat? Your chest? Your stomach?"

Eventually, I could say, "I guess... in my throat," and that felt okay.

I was learning the language of my own feelings. I remember thinking, "It's like he's speaking a language I don't speak. I feel really illiterate."

Ryan helped me see my disconnection wasn't a problem. It was reasonable. It had served me. That release of shame let us go deeper.

2022 became the year I learned that awareness alone is progress. I got curious about my patterns without trying to immediately change them.
In 2023, we landed on a theme of where to go next: messy and connected.

I'd spent my life creating safety through control. Being the "good" son, husband, CEO. But control is an illusion. Real safety comes from being messy and connected. From showing up as who you actually are.

At work, I started speaking from uncertainty. "I'm feeling fearful about this decision" instead of always having the right answer. My team didn't pull back - they leaned in. They wanted more of the real me, not less.

My business grew from 1 company with 75 employee-owners to 4 businesses with 250+ employee-owners. Enterprise value up 200%. But more importantly, my stress dropped from unsustainable to manageable.

Here's what captures it best.

I always felt I needed to be perfect. Now I understand I was put on earth to be me. The best version isn't perfect. He's the messiest, most connected version. How much more fulfilling could life be if just being me is the point?

---

Nearly every founder I work with wears some version of the perfect CEO armor. Achieving externally while struggling internally.

If you recognize yourself in this journey, if you're achieving but not thriving, send me a DM.

I work with founders at this inflection point. The work isn't easy. But it might be the most important work you do.

For years running a startup, I only used 2 notes: On and off. On meant running full tilt toward the next objective, and off meant recharging so I could do it again. 
But I became so optimized for productivity, my creativity died...

While I checked boxes efficiently, my company's innovation slowly died. What had once been a font of creative output, slowly, by degrees, became an optimized machine driving ever more efficiently to where the puck used to be.

It's remarkable how quickly nimble startups turn into slow legacy companies when they stop nurturing the creative recklessness they started with.

I've since learned there's a spectrum, with productivity on one side and creativity on the other, and I'd been stuck at the productivity extreme for so long that I'd forgotten about everything else.

So the question became: is it possible to optimize for creativity?

I used to think creativity was chaotic. Something spontaneous, unmanageable - useful for artists, not CEOs. But I’ve learned it can be cultivated deliberately, like a muscle you’ve simply stopped using.

Creativity begins where control ends.

It can't emerge from pressure or optimization - it emerges from permission.
From leaving a little space in your schedule unclaimed.
From walking without plugging in to a podcast.
From noticing what your mind does when it isn’t told what to do.

The irony is, the less I tried to be creative, the more creative I became.
I’d gone from “on/off” to something much richer - fluid, alive, responsive.

As leaders, we model the behavior we most value. If we only reward output, our teams will learn to suppress imagination. But if we make space for curiosity, they’ll follow us there too.

You can’t build a masterpiece from binary inputs.
You need the full range.

If you're wondering how to rediscover play after optimizing it away, try the Imaginary Lives exercise, modified from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

If you had 5 other lives to lead, what would you do in each?

I'd be an astronaut, author, professional basketball player, hippie, physicist. You might be a cowhand, psychic, scuba diver, belly dancer, painter, rock drummer.

Write down whatever occurs without overthinking it, then select one and do it this week. If you put down country singer, can you pick up a guitar? If you dream of being a cowhand, what about horseback riding?

The secret is realizing you only have one life, and you won't get another chance unless you take steps now.

Not only does this work wonders for juicing your creative capacity, it is a great launchpad to a more nuanced, complex, and complete way of life.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

I've never been big on business books. Most say their point in 3 chapters, then repeat themselves for 200 pages. But these 5 books changed everything for me - in my business and my life:

1. Reboot by Jerry Colonna

Written by a former VC turned executive coach, this was the first time I felt someone really understood what I was going through as an early-stage CEO.

Colonna's questions helped me see how my need to appear competent was actually making me a less effective leader. After reading it, I stopped presenting only the polished version of myself in meetings and started being honest about my struggles with my leadership team.

Perfect for: Founders struggling with the weight of the role.

2. The Second Mountain by David Brooks

This book transformed a monthly book club I set up over a decade ago.

So many of us spent years chasing success, only to realize upon getting there that it was an incomplete goal. Brooks helped me shift my focus from optimizing my company's appearance to investors to building it around what truly mattered to me.

Perfect for: Accomplished leaders questioning their "why."

3. The Meaning Revolution by Fred Kofman

The former head of culture at LinkedIn taught me that people yearn to dedicate their lives to work that outlives them and connects to values beyond themselves.

His framework helped me reframe our team's work from hitting metrics to building something that mattered. We went from tracking outputs to talking about impact.

Perfect for: Second-stage companies hitting a ceiling.

4. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron

Most founders look back at their early days as a time of tremendous innovation. Then the constant demands of running a company beat the creativity out of them.

Cameron wrote The Artist’s Way to help people rediscover their creative spark. For a leader, this can be the key to unlocking previously inaccessible levels of growth, as founders are simply artists working at scale.

Perfect for: Leaders looking to regain their edge.

5. The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni

The most useful "how to run a business" book I've read.

Lencioni's blueprint for company operations was foundational to how we rebuilt our corporate culture at VNN, aligning a 100-person team with only a few key structures.

Perfect for: Entrepreneurs leading companies >20 people

Reboot helped me see my patterns. The Second Mountain helped me question my goals. The Meaning Revolution helped me rebuild culture around purpose. The Artist's Way reignited my creativity. The Advantage gave us the structure to scale it all.

These books provided the frameworks. But turning frameworks into lived transformation is where the real work begins.

That journey from founder to conscious leader is exactly what we help navigate at Inside-Out Leadership.

And to save me some time, help me out. What other business books are worth reading all the way through?

In 2015, when Volkswagen’s emissions scandal broke open, the world focused on the software - the quiet lines of code that made 11 million cars look cleaner than they really were. But what struck me was the culture required to create it...

To build something that deceptive, you first need a room where truth has become dangerous.

A room where engineers are aware that the math doesn't quite add up, but also know that saying so might cost them their careers.
A room where fear, often slow, invisible, and cumulative in nature, has more influence than integrity.

Every founder builds some version of that room.

I certainly did.

Early in my first company, there were days when I moved through the office like a storm. I didn’t yell or threaten. I just radiated tension - the kind that makes people speak in careful, buffered sentences. I thought this was me being “focused.” My team thought otherwise: Don’t bring him anything he won’t want to hear today.

It happens gradually. A roadmap that’s slipping. A sales forecast that needs optimism to survive. A technical debt warning softened because last time you talked about it, your jaw clenched and your tone tightened.

No one lies. They just start performing.

This is how cultures drift - not through dramatic moments, but through tiny shifts in reality. The truth becomes something people handle with gloves.

Volkswagen’s investigation blamed “individual misconduct and weak processes.”
But the deeper, human truth is far simpler:

When leaders react poorly to hard truths, teams learn to stop sharing them.

And it almost always starts inside the leader.

For me, it started with fear:
Fear of slowing down. Fear of appearing uncertain. Fear of confronting the parts of myself I’d spent years outrunning.

When I couldn’t hold difficult truths internally, I couldn’t hold them externally.
So people shielded me. Humans are prone to protecting each other from discomfort, especially when power is involved.

It took burning out, emotionally and physically, to realize the actual cost of this. Once your team learns to protect you from reality, you very quickly lose the ability to lead it.

Unfortunately, like all complex things, the antidote isn’t as simple as transparency training or an open-door policy.

It’s inner work.

The slow, sometimes painful excavation of the fears, patterns, and old identities that make certain truths feel threatening.

When a leader builds internal safety - the ability to hear hard things without collapsing, defending, or retaliating - a strange thing happens:

People start telling the truth again. They bring you problems earlier. They stop curating the world on your behalf.

And the company breathes.

Volkswagen is an extreme example, but the pattern is universal. A culture of honesty starts with a leader who can sit with uncomfortable truths without flinching.

If you’re scaling fast and want to make sure fear isn’t quietly writing your culture’s code, DM me.

A 2020 study found that 88% of languages face such severe AI neglect that they are at risk of extinction. We're building a biased foundation for how humanity will access knowledge - and it's causing a global "knowledge collapse..."

A recent analysis found that nearly half of all ChatGPT queries since launch were attempts to understand the world or solve a practical problem. We’ve already crossed a threshold. We've outsourced knowing to these systems without questioning what they actually know, or more importantly, what they're systematically forgetting.

Knowledge doesn’t enter these models evenly. It flows in through particular, narrow channels, shaped by power, literacy, colonization, economics, and the long shadow of which cultures were digitized early and which were ignored. They privilege certain epistemologies, typically Western and institutional, while marginalizing everything else. Oral traditions, embodied practices, and ways of knowing that never got written down are simply omitted.

Look at the evidence. Common Crawl, one of the largest AI training datasets, contains 300 billion webpages. 45% of its data is in English, a language spoken by only 19% of humans. Hindi speakers make up 7.5% of the global population but account for only 0.2% of the data.

When I sit with those numbers, I see a slow collapse of the tributaries feeding the river of human wisdom. A deliberate, almost willful intellectual atrophy.

The computing world classifies 97% of languages as "low-resource." But that framing reveals the problem. These are languages with millions of speakers and rich traditions that simply aren't represented in digital spaces that AI systems can access.

To make matters worse, these systems are now training themselves. AI models are ingesting AI-generated content at a pace no human can audit. Each cycle sifts the world through the same sieve, tightening the mesh. Dominant ideas become more dominant. Niche knowledge, local wisdom, and context-specific understanding gradually disappear from what the systems can retrieve. 

Researchers are calling this "knowledge collapse."

What's at stake isn't representation in some abstract sense. It's whether future generations will have any connection to ways of understanding the world that evolved over millennia.

I believe Small Language Models (SLMs) are the solution to this systemic problem. We must be intentional about building models that preserve localized wisdom rather than flatten everything toward statistical dominance. 

The main challenge - and the profound arbitrage opportunity - is that the knowledge being marginalized often sits within communities that are not able to digitize it and train their own models.

One perfect example of this opportunity I see is a Wisdom Tradition SLM.

Question for the builders and thinkers: 

Are there any projects or tools you've seen focused on creating an open-source, non-commercial SLM trained specifically on the world's wisdom traditions?

Moneyball came back to Netflix recently, so Laura and I watched it for the umpteenth time. Billy Beane’s quest to change baseball teaches us a surprising lesson about disruption in any industry...

In every field, the status quo resists outsiders. Disruptors must push against inertia, often alone, with a hunch, limited data, and a willingness to risk more than others. Beane spends the movie confronting the possibility that he’s wrong, and the failure and ridicule that would follow.

Even inside his own organization, people push back. They tell him all the reasons he’s wrong, all the reasons he should give up and build a team “the way it’s always been done.”

But as the disruptor, Beane’s job is to keep going. Disruptive ideas aren’t recognized as such until after the fact. Until then, the leader’s task is to persist through doubt.

Once he’s “convinced” his staff to sign players based on on-base percentage instead of conventional value, the pressure ramps up. For the first dozen games, his approach seems to fail - providing early data that “proves” the old way is best.

At the early stages, success is often indistinguishable from failure when measured by traditional metrics.

He keeps going.

“A good process produces good results.” - Nick Saban

With every reason to quit, Beane continues because his team’s actions align with success, even if results don’t yet show it. He sees that consistent actions matter more than short-term outcomes. It’s one of the deepest truths in entrepreneurship.

He doubles down on his belief that optimizing for on-base percentage will win in the long run. He sees his players getting on base and trusts his system to translate that into wins.

And it does.

The same story unfolded in the NBA with Daryl Morey and the Houston Rockets. “Moreyball” valued threes, layups, and dunks above all else. Early on, focusing on shooting threes, and not necessarily making them, looked absurd. But when the Rockets started winning, every team copied them.

As The Athletic put it, “Results, often, are the least important thing. The process of what happens does matter.”

Beane’s A’s looked like a misguided experiment until they rattled off 20 straight wins. Now, every team in baseball follows their playbook.

Moneyball shows what real disruption looks like. We imagine it as a bold founder rewriting an industry overnight. In truth, it’s an entrepreneur pushing an unproven idea uphill while everyone says he’s wrong and every metric says he’s failing.

When the world finally catches up, the disruptor feels vindicated. But after so many sleepless nights, doubts, and near-collapse, the first thing he actually feels isn’t pride.

It’s relief.

Keep going, friends. Second-guessing yourself is part of the process.

“How will your company become a unicorn?” The question seems innocent enough. But there’s a trap inside, just like there’s a trap in any question that asks a founder to predict the future with certainty... 

No matter how much you know about your business, how compelling the opportunity, or how confident you feel, you cannot predict the future.

Describing a spectacular outcome and a straight path to get there can seem like the norm when we pitch our companies. But predicting the future with certainty, besides being inaccurate, may also cause you to hold onto a bad strategy for too long and sink your company. This is backed by science.

A famous study once showed that rats preferred receiving shocks to the brain in the present to the possibility of receiving bad outcomes at some later time in the future. They feared the uncertainty of the future more than the pain itself.

We're not so different. Humans also hate uncertainty - so much so that we are immensely attracted to folks who seem certain. Given that, it’s no wonder startup founders project certainty in order to attract others. Certainty gets coffee, because certainty is a closer. 

But as effective as certainty is at closing deals, it’s equally effective at closing minds. 

The minute we fixate on a singular solution, not only do we stop looking for alternatives, but our minds (specifically the Reticular Activating System) filter out any evidence to the contrary. For example, when you buy a new car, and you suddenly start seeing that car everywhere. It's not that there are more of them; your mind just notices what it chooses to notice.

So when someone asks you how your company will become a unicorn, and you tell them precisely how you’ll get there, you’re locking your nervous system - and your company - into a single path.

If everything goes according to plan, you're fine. But the moment something off-script happens, your previous prediction may become your blindfold.

The best leaders, on the other hand, are confident but never rigid. 

They are confident, even when they’re uncertain, because their confidence is rooted not in their plan coming to fruition, but in their ability to navigate the uncertainty. Some leaders hide the areas in which they are unsure. But the most effective leaders own their uncertainties, knowing that uncertainty is unavoidable, and are confident in their ability to pivot and figure shit out.

Next time you spot the trap, “How will your company become a unicorn?”, I invite you to smile and confidently own your uncertainty:

“I don’t know. The current data suggests it might happen this way. But if not, we have a plan for that, too.”

Why would someone follow a leader who answers like that?

Because they see that you have the same doubts that they have, but you are confident in your ability to navigate the unknown, and you’re betting your life on it anyway.

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

I chased achievements for 20 years and felt empty the moment I got each one.
Only the next goal mattered, until that became meaningless too.
Here's the pattern that kept me trapped (and how to break it):

Everything humans do is either to steer toward feelings they interpret as positive or to avoid those they interpret as negative. There isn’t much more to it than that.

I’ve gone to incredible lengths to curate the feelings I’m exposed to. Ended relationships rather than face my failings. Blamed others rather than confront what I’ve done wrong. Most often, I imprison myself in tunnel vision, diminishing everything that isn’t the Goal to avoid my deepest fear: 

The fear that I’m not good enough.

That fear leads to knee-jerk decisions that seem right in the moment but that I regret later. I’ve sent so many emails that gave me a dopamine hit of productivity, but did more harm than good.

I learned early in life that I wasn’t good enough, and decided I’d do anything to prove otherwise. My life became one long chain of achievements, each seeming like the most important thing until I attained it, at which point it became irrelevant. I was still not enough. Only the next achievement would prove otherwise.

It wasn’t until I stopped achieving - forced through failure to slow down - that I could see the operating system I was living through. It was painful as hell, but it forced me to confront my inadequacy head-on. Through that pain, I finally saw the pattern and realized I had a choice.

Instead of achieving to outrun inadequacy, I could stop. Face it.

Sitting in that inadequacy was exquisite torture, yet freeing. I didn’t have to reflexively jump into action. I could simply be and, as Trungpa Rinpoche says, “lean into the sharp points.” Feel what I’d been running from and let it pass.

By sticking with the feeling, I developed familiarity with it.

For me, fear feels like:
• Wired eyes, like I haven’t slept
• A tight chest, like after smoking too much
• A pounding heart when I see success in others
• A spinning mind, comparing my achievements to others

I can now recognize it when it comes, and resist the reflex to act. I know it always passes, even when it feels like it won’t.

I’m familiar with my primal fear. Not friendly with it, but acquainted enough to recognize it. The fear I once jumped through hoops of fire to avoid is just bodily sensation mixed with an urge to achieve.

For years, that feeling drove my actions - fueling both success and destruction.

Now, when it arises, there’s a choice. Most of the time, I sit with it and appreciate how its intensity reminds me I’m alive.

Then I look at the situation with clarity and do the next right thing.

That shift from reactive to conscious changed everything.

I created Inside-Out Leadership to guide founders through this transformation because I know how powerful it is - and how difficult it is to do alone.

If you recognize this pattern, let's talk.

It seems self-evident that the harder and longer you work, the more you get done. It's also not true. NASA's long-term study showed that taking a 26-minute nap in the middle of each shift increases job performance by 34%:

To restate: take a 26-minute power nap and you'll get 1/3 more done.

Before you dismiss this as "interesting but I gotta get back to work," recognize that most major breakthroughs come from leaning into something that's both counterintuitive and true.

I speak with stressed CEOs regularly, and when I talk about self-care I usually hear the same thing: 

"I'm too busy. I know it's important, but right now I'm just strapped. Maybe tomorrow."

If I share this NASA data, most get excited about it. Many even think about how their teams could power-nap. But almost none would take a nap themselves later that day.

If I told them that Harvard Business Review found:

Healthy eating leads to better moods and higher energy, exercise increases blood flow and boosts learning and memory, and good sleep improves focus, creativity, and empathy... they'd probably still think that's compelling for someone else, but they themselves have too much to do.

I get it. I've been there. And now I spend 5-7am every morning on a rigorous self-care routine, simply because it makes me more effective.

Here's the thing: trying to outwork your problems is precisely how most leaders react to the idea of taking care of themselves first. 

And that's the popular choice.

Which means there's a competitive advantage when you lean into the counterintuitive benefits of self-care.

Eat healthy, exercise, sleep well, and take naps. Go win your market.

If you're ready to address the deeper patterns driving your burnout and your inability to stop, shoot me a DM. I'd love to help.

Ben Horowitz says most successful companies will experience 5 "WFIO" (we're f*****'d, it's over) moments. It’s an entrepreneur’s resilience in those moments, not strategy or tactics, that separates the successful companies from the rest:

I use the word resilience intentionally, deliberately drawing a distinction between it and its close cousin: persistence.

Most founders hear "resilience" and think of a stone-cold badass shrugging off every challenge. A scarred warrior gritting through the pain, lifting up his spear once more.

That's persistence. 

Persistence is force.
It’s the inner voice that says, “Keep moving, no matter what.”
It gets you out of bed when everything hurts.
It carries you through the sprint, the crisis, the all-nighter.

But persistence runs on pressure. And while it works in the moment, it comes with a huge cost.

It demands control, suppresses emotion, and burns a fuel that will eventually, without fail, run out.

As decades of psychological science will attest, every time you push down your emotions to get shit done, you incur what I call emotional debt.

Like companies incur technical debt, leaders incur emotional debt when they repress fear, worry, or anger to keep moving. A little can be useful when managed consciously and paid back quickly. But perpetual emotional debt clouds your judgment.

Think of a time when you’ve seen a leader bite an employee’s head off for asking a question. Or think of the dreaded burnout. I know this one personally. I thought I could will myself past the unpleasant stuff with no repercussions. Then it all came due at once and I had to take a sabbatical. 

It can be a good decision to max out your emotional credit cards by persisting in the heat of a crisis. Just remember that debt compounds, and if you don’t pay your bills, don’t be surprised when the creditor comes calling to break your kneecaps.

Resilience is different.

Resilience is supple. It bends.

It's the way skyscrapers flex in the wind, moving with every gust before returning to center. It's water adjusting to every obstacle but never stopping its flow.

Resilience is intentionally feeling the emotions without changing them, all the way through to completion, and then moving forward with a clear head.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, leaning into your negative emotions - consciously feeling the texture of your fear rather than trying to fix it - produces profound results.

By processing emotions in real-time with curiosity rather than resistance, you allow them to move through you and be completed. You pay the emotional cost in cash, not credit.

Next time you get bad news, try this:

Before opening Slack or calling your team, take 90 seconds. Close your eyes. Notice where the emotion lives in your body. Chest tight? Stomach dropped? Just observe it without trying to make it go away.

That's resilience.

How about you? Are you habitually practicing persistence or resilience?

I ask one question in every CEO group I run: Tell me about the time when you felt most alive. 90% of the answers are the same (and not what you'd expect):

One CEO, fresh off selling his company: "Halfway up a mountain in Patagonia, alone between everything. Looking back at how far I'd come. Looking forward at where I was going. That moment."

Another: "Almost dying in a truck in Asia during a freezing rainstorm. I'd never felt more alive."

A third: "After 100-hour weeks, standing at our kickoff watching it unfold. Everything went wrong the day before. But we did it. I felt like I could do anything."

These moments have something in common. They all happen in liminal space. 

The transition space between who we were and who we're becoming. When we step off our path and see it clearly. In these spaces, stripped of our everyday answers, we're awake to the fundamental question of ourselves.

We feel infinite. Alive.

Yet we spend most of our lives avoiding these moments.

We optimize away uncertainty. We convince ourselves we know exactly where we're going - Series A by Q3, Series B by next year, exit in 5 years. We shine our pitch decks and LinkedIn profiles until every rough edge is gone. We tell ourselves once we hit the next milestone, close that round, get to profitability - then we'll have time to figure out who we are and what we want.

But when faced with the fundamental question of our lives, we race for the next answer. The next salve of certainty, in a milestone, a compliment, or a white picket fence. The very moments that could wake us up - uncertainty, transition, not-knowing - we treat like problems to solve as quickly as possible.

The power of liminal space, and the importance of intentionally creating it in your life, is actually the oldest topic in the book, and as close to perennial human wisdom as it gets.

Richard Rohr: 

"If at least one-seventh of life is not consciousness, presence, and naked human being, the other six days will be caught up as human doings that have little depth, meaning, or final effect. 

If at least one-seventh of life is somehow Sabbath and sabbatical, the rest will take care of itself. 

Without daily, weekly, and yearly choices for liminal space, our whole lives eventually become liminoid and we end up just doing time.”

Read this post ten times and you'll find no answers. No four steps. It's uncomfortable publishing this way. But I'm not writing for comfort. I'm writing to feel alive.

Life will create opportunities for liminal space whether we like it or not. The question is whether we'll rush toward the next answer, or allow ourselves to be changed by the question. 

This is some of the work we do with founders through Inside-Out Leadership. Creating the liminal spaces where you see yourself clearly, stepping off the path long enough to know if it's the right one, and accessing the aliveness that's always been available.

What a fun job I have :)

I worked with a founder recently who was about to begin raising his Series B. His company was doing well, its unit economics outstanding, and its growth rate solid. But he was still worried he was going to f**k it up...

He had tried and failed to raise the year before. He’d told investors the story, generated interest, gotten partner meetings with top-tier funds, moved through diligence quickly. But then every firm passed.

Failed fundraises are traumatic.

It’s not for nothing that people refer to a founder’s company as “their baby” - founders pour every ounce of their lifeblood into their company for years in an effort to help it grow up. Then, when other smart people tell you your baby isn’t worth their time, it tends to leave a mark.

As a good CEO, he went back to the drawing board, broke down the story he’d been telling investors and himself, and identified critical issues that needed fixing. He and his team spent twelve months ruthlessly addressing them.

And yet, preparing for the growth round, he hesitated.

What if it turned out the same as last time?

His failed fundraise had given him valuable data, which he used to improve the business. But the driver of that change was also traumatic.

The reptile part of our brains deals with trauma in a way so highly adapted to survival that it hurts. His nervous system was “helpfully” reminding him how dangerous fundraising was. It recognized a threatening situation it had survived and sent the same red alert.

Our brains are wonderful tools, but trauma can sabotage high performers and prevent them from regaining confidence. And to get a fundraise across the finish line, confidence is everything.

So he needed to process the trauma.

One way to deactivate a traumatic response is to look analytically at the present with your more evolved brain, clarifying what’s different now so the fear center calms down. For him, that meant examining the previous raise closely.

Looking at it through a process lens, we noticed something important: all investors passed post-diligence. That meant he’d actually done a great job getting them excited - otherwise they never would have completed diligence. They passed because they uncovered flaws in the business - the same flaws he’d gone on to fix.

Which meant this: 

If he was the guy who convinced smart people to invest time into a fundamentally broken business, he was certainly the guy who could get them to invest time in the rocketship he was running now. And if they invested time now, he was confident they’d invest capital.

This simple reframe turned a confidence-sapping failure into a proof point of his fundraising mettle.

And this time, the odds were in his favor.

Nothing had changed. But by looking more closely, everything had. He left our conversation jacked up (a term I don’t use lightly) and ready to pitch. 

I felt like Wendy Rhoades in Billions.

I’ve always liked Paul Graham’s essay about how to do what you love. He describes a two-step process for achieving the career you've always wanted. However, research from Johns Hopkins suggests that he got this all wrong...

Graham's first step: working hard, with ridiculously incomplete information, to determine what you actually love to do.

Second step: incrementally steering toward that outcome via a specific process of either A) gaining influence to enable you to do more of what you like and delegate what you don’t, or B) moonlighting in what you love to do until you can make money at it.

This process is very similar to how I got started in entrepreneurship. 

I first decided I wanted to watch sports and call it “work,” then figured out how to make that happen. That also happens to be how Inside-Out Leadership started: I identified a passion for helping entrepreneurs build life-giving companies without self-immolating, and from that I’ve constructed a business to make that happen. The hard part, and Graham talks about this, has always been figuring out what you want.

So we’ll call this paradigm “How to do what you love.” 

It turns out, it may not be the best way.

Research from John’s Hopkins University indicates that it actually works the opposite of this. They showed in a clinical setting that humans random choices lead to preferences, not the other way around. We decide something, and then create reasons why we like that decision. From this, it follows that choices lead to preferences lead to habits lead to identity, to us becoming the person we somehow decide we were born to be.

In other words, from a granular, neuroscientific, process perspective, human beings don’t choose what we like - we like what we choose.

The implications of this on doing what we love are profound. The process of painstakingly finding what we like to do and then creating a life in which we get to do that is a tried-and-true one. But it’s hard, as Graham illustrates:

"Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight, you'll be more likely to arrive at it."

However, based on the science about how we actually develop what we love, there may be a better option, significantly less arduous and more in keeping with the mechanics of what it is to be human.

Instead of searching for what we want, we can simply search for why we love what we do. The “how to love what you do” paradigm, if you will.

As Seth Godin said: If we commit to loving what we do, we’re more likely to find engagement and satisfaction. And if what we do changes, we can choose to love that too.

---

Where in your life are you still waiting to “feel passion” before making a choice?
And what might happen if you flipped the sequence?
DM me or let me know in the comments.

I see over and over how traditional goal-setting methods can actually demotivate founders. Here's a quick, 7-step process for setting goals that actually produce momentum:

Here’s a typical case:

You set a long-term goal - say 1M users. You break it into milestones, like 500 users in 30 days. You build an action plan: SEO, paid ads, landing pages. You work nights and weekends, sacrifice everything - and miss.

Maybe your software went down, or Facebook changed its rules, or your target was just too ambitious. Either way, you worked hard and still missed. Now you’re not just fighting market challenges, you’re questioning whether you even have what it takes.

This is the trap: tying your self-worth to outcomes. Society tells us this is how it works. But it doesn’t have to.

Starting a company is hard enough without setting yourself up to feel like a failure when things outside your control go wrong.

The most effective founders attach their sense of accomplishment to completing actions, not to producing results. That way, they can generate momentum - the lifeblood of any startup - through their own efforts, regardless of outcome.

Here’s what that looks like:

You set your goal, break it down, and execute your plan. You finish your landing page, your SEO, your ad campaign. You celebrate completion because that’s the win. Then something breaks. You miss the goal - but you’re still winning. You iterate, adjust, and keep going.

You can imagine which approach produces better results.

The best founders I know follow this 7-step process:

1. Set your goal
2. Break it into milestones
3. Build an action plan for the first milestone
4. Complete the plan (this is where you either succeed or fail)
5. Analyze, dispassionately, whether actions taken produced expected results
6. Accounting for that analysis, iterate action plan to reach revised milestone
7. Repeat

Your job as a founder isn’t to control outcomes - it’s to complete the actions you commit to.

So by all means, set goals. Big hairy audacious ones. But remember: you control your actions, not the results. Be ruthless about doing what you said you’d do, and leave the rest to the universe.

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership , CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

Minds

CEO & Founder

Mindvalley

Certified Life Coach

Leathwaite: Executive Search

Asia Strategy & Transformation Practice

True Search

Partner, Greater China Country Lead

H.I. Executive Consulting (HIEC)

Partner, APAC Professional Services Practice

VCube International

Founder and Partner

Alcoa

Director of Strategy and Analysis, Asia-Pacific

Roland Berger

Deputy Project Manager/Senior Consultant, Consumer & Retail and Technology

A.T. Kearney

Business Analyst, Financial Services

Gavin is a transformtional leader in executive search and personal coaching, renowned for his expertise in elevating senior leadership in high-growth start-ups and scale-ups. Collaborating with private equity, venture capital funds, and founders across Asia, Gavin delivers strategic talent insights and pioneering thought leadership.

With an illustrious career that includes conducting over 20,000 executive interviews, Gavin’s mastery in talent identification and influence has driven the success of global companies like McKinsey & Company, L Catterton (LVMH), Accenture and Permira.

Gavin’s passion for connecting with people and unveiling their unique stories led him to establish "Empower Through Stories", an initiative that inspires and motivates the next generation of leaders through powerful narratives. 

An alumnus of Stanford and the University of Chicago, Gavin’s global experience spans the US, Italy, Singapore, China, and Thailand. His leadership continues to set benchmarks in excellence, innovation, and influence in the industry.

Email: gavin@mindssearch.com
IG: gavng89

Gavin Ng

I had an amazing conversation with Creasoft Capital — and it’s one every founder should pay attention to - 

Entrepreneurship and the quiet costs that rarely make it into public conversation.

According to a study by UCSF, entrepreneurs are nearly twice as likely to experience burnout and chronic stress compared to the general working population.

And McKinsey & Company  projects that 30–45% of tasks will be automated by AI, which sounds exciting — until you realise automation doesn’t reduce demands on your mind.
Sometimes it increases them.

Decision fatigue.
Constant adaptation.
Th pressure to lead a team through a landscape that shifts every quarter.

So here’s the real question for founders:

What happens to your energy, clarity, and mental resilience when your business, your people, and the world all fight for your attention at the same time?

That’s what Wajeeh H. and I explored — the true cost of entrepreneurship in an AI-driven decade.

🎧 Podcast is on the way.

Stay tuned.

Gavin

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#entrepreneurship #founders #AIfuture #mentalhealth #leadership #thecostofit

Investor | Founder | Executive Search Leader | Coach

Meta just quietly signalled what every employee and leader needs to hear:
your future performance won’t just be what you do, but how much AI amplifies it.

From 2026, Meta will tie employee performance to “AI-driven impact.”

Not “Did you use AI?”
But: Did AI materially move your results?

Employees are being told to:

Use AI in day-to-day work.
Capture AI-fuelled wins in self-reviews.
Expect performance systems (and even review-writing) to be AI-assisted.

This isn’t just a Meta story.
It’s a preview of where performance culture is going.

Here’s what stands out to me:

🧠 AI literacy is shifting from “nice to have” to “core expectation.”
The question is no longer “Should I use AI?”
It’s “How irresponsible is it not to?” — especially in knowledge work.

⚡️ Performance is moving from effort-based to leverage-based.
It’s not just: “Did you complete the work?”
It’s: “How much did you use AI to multiply speed, quality, and output?”

🧩 The real differentiator won’t be AI access—it’ll be AI habits.
Everyone will have tools.
Few will build daily workflows: prompts, automation, internal copilots, AI-assisted thinking.

🚀 Companies are formalising an AI-native culture, not just AI tools.
When AI shows up in scorecards, hiring, promotion criteria, and even how reviews are written…
it stops being innovation and becomes muscle memory.

If you’re an employee, manager, or founder, here’s what I’d start doing now:

1️⃣ Rebuild your personal performance philosophy around leverage, not effort

Stop thinking in terms of “tasks completed” or “hours invested.”
Start thinking in terms of:

What did I accelerate?
What did I automate?
What quality did I improve?
What decision became sharper because of AI?

Your career advantage will come from showing compounding leverage, not incremental output.

2️⃣ Redesign your core workflows so AI becomes infrastructure, not an add-on

Pick 2–3 workflows that define your role: analysis, communication, research, reporting, client prep, project management.
Then ask:

Where can AI remove steps?
Where can it take the first draft?
Where can it pressure-test my assumptions?
Where can it replace low-value cognitive load?

Employees who make AI invisible (because it’s embedded everywhere) will outperform those who treat it as a tool they “use occasionally.”

3️⃣ Build a visible “AI impact narrative” — not a usage narrative

Management doesn’t care that you used AI.
They care what AI changed.

Create a simple track record you can point to:

Faster delivery cycles
Higher accuracy
Reduced manual work
Stronger client-facing outputs
Better decision frameworks
More scenarios explored per unit time

Now - What's the one thing that AI can meaningfully improve your performance?

- Gavin 

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#ai #executivesearch #aitalent

You don’t need the title “Head of AI.”
You just need one AI success metric.

In the past month, 3 mid-career professionals asked me the same quiet question:

“What can I possibly do next?
The job market pivots to AI. 
My skills feel… falling behind.”

They weren’t wrong.
AI has reshaped the talent market.
And many were never trained to use it.

But here’s the part most people misunderstand:
Recruiters aren’t looking for AI titles.
They’re looking for proof that you can deliver impact in an AI-enabled world.

Last week, I coached a senior corporate exec from a logistics company who felt “outdated.”
His CV said “AI Project Lead.”
But zero numbers. Zero proof.

We rewrote one line:

“Reduced onboarding time by 40% through AI automation.”

Within 2 weeks, his response rate tripled.

He didn’t become more “AI.”
He simply showed he could use AI to drive real business results.

That’s what the market rewards.

Because concrete metrics beat shiny titles every time.

More importantly — talent branding has shifted.
Your value is no longer your job title.
Your value is the impact you can prove.

Here’s the paradigm shift:

You don’t need to master AI.
You need to show how AI makes you more valuable.

And you can start small.

Here’s how to build your first AI success metric — even if you’re not technical:

1️⃣ Choose one task where AI can help you work faster.
Pick something you already do — drafting emails, analysing data, summarising meetings.
AI upgrades you.
This is your easiest path to a measurable win.

2️⃣ Use AI to reduce the time by 20–40%.
Ask AI to generate drafts, automate steps, or summarize.
Small wins count — they prove productivity.

3️⃣ Measure what changed.
Track minutes saved, errors reduced, or turnaround speed.
Numbers make your story credible.

4️⃣ Turn it into one CV bullet.
Grade-5 English.
Specific.
Impact-focused.

Like:
“Cut reporting time from 3 hours to 45 minutes using AI-assisted workflows.”

5️⃣ Update your LinkedIn intro with that one metric.
Leaders and investors notice people who can deliver, not just talk about AI.

This is how mid-career professionals stay relevant.
Not by chasing new titles — but by proving real-world value.

What’s one AI result you could show if someone asked you today for proof of impact?

– Gavin

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#CareerGrowth #Executivesearch #AI #mindssearch #ExecutiveCoaching

In Asia, I’ve watched great founders turn defensive, even destructive, when investor alignment broke down.

The first argument between founders and investors rarely happens in the boardroom.

It happens in the spreadsheet.
Revenue forecasts. 
Burn rates. 
Valuation and exit pressures.

The founder sees vision.
The investor sees math.
Both are right — and both are looking for a common ground.

Here’s the deeper truth:
Most founder–investor conflicts aren’t just about results.
They’re about rhythm.

The founder is playing the long game — obsessed with legacy, momentum, and the next horizon.
The investor is reporting quarterly — focused on discipline, clarity, and protecting capital.

One’s driven by conviction.
The other by validation.

The best founders learn to measure progress without shrinking their dream.
The best investors I’ve seen translate ambition into accountability — without killing belief.

5 practical moves to achieve this goal:
1. Translate Vision into Metrics
Sit down quarterly. Founder leads the “why.” Both define the “how to measure.”
Walk out with one shared story, two columns: vision + KPIs.

2. Build Dual Dashboards
Run two scoreboards side-by-side:
• Growth (users, brand, expansion)
• Governance (burn, margin, cash)
Review both monthly — no decision if one goes dark.

3. Agree on Non-Negotiables
Founders list 3 red lines (e.g. no mission dilution).
Investors list 3 (e.g. no governance blind spots).
Put it in writing — revisit every 6 months.

4. Hold Pulse Checks
15-minute sync mid-quarter.
No slides. One question:
“Are we still aligned on rhythm?”
Prevents big misalignment later.

5. Co-Author the Narrative
After each board, founder writes vision, investor writes evidence.
One internal memo — one message.
Story + numbers = trust.

But rhythm is a choice.
You can always choose to tune before the music stops.

- Gavin

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#asialeadership #executivesearchforfounders

This chart puts a visual to the quiet anxiety a lot of us are feeling right now.

For decades, the formula was simple: Corporate growth equals hiring. 

When the S&P 500 went up, job openings followed. They synchronized.

We are witnessing the "Great Decoupling." in real time. 

The S&P 500 is roaring to new heights, driven by efficiency and AI optimism, while total job openings are freefalling back to pre-pandemic levels.

What does this mean for us as professionals?

It means the future isn’t just unequal; it’s sharply "K-Shaped." he "K" represents a split in how we work and how our value is measured.

🔹 The upward arm of the 'K': Professionals and companies using AI to decouple their output from their headcount. They are achieving exponential efficiency. Growth is no longer labor-dependent; it's capital and compute-dependent.
🔹 The downward arm of the 'K': Roles defined by repetitive cognitive tasks, or professionals waiting for the "hype to blow over." The chart shows the market no longer values this labor at the same rate.

The debate isn't "Will AI create more jobs than it destroys in 20 years?" The reality is today. Today, companies are realizing they can grow massive value without massive hiring.

If you are reading this as a knowledge worker, this may be a wake-up call. The middle ground is vanishing.

Actionable Insights for the K-Shaped Future:
🚀 Stop being a "user" and become a "leverager." 
Don't just ask ChatGPT to summarize an email. Use AI to redesign your entire workflow to be 10x faster. If your output is tethered to your hours worked, you are vulnerable.

🔍Audit your role for automation risk. 
Be honest. What percentage of your week could a sophisticated agent handle in 2 years? If it’s over 50%, pivot immediately to strategy, complex human relationship management, or high-level creative synthesis.

🤝 Become the "Human-in-the-Loop" expert. 
The upward arm of the K belongs to those who can orchestrate AI systems, audit their outputs for hallucinations, and apply high-judgment ethics to machine decisions.

The link between growth and jobs starts to break. Which side of the break are you standing on?

- Gavin

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#ArtificialIntelligence #executivesearch

When humanoid robots clean skyscrapers and load aircraft, what happens to the ‘entry-level job’?

Three headlines this week hit me harder than usual:
✈️ Amsterdam is testing robots for aircraft ground operations.
🏙️High-rise façade-cleaning robots are now commercially deployed in Asia.
⚙️Yamaha expanded its industrial robot line — longer reach, faster cycles, more flexible form factors.

Individually, these are cool engineering stories.
Together, they signal something larger:

The ‘first job’ in many industries is quietly disappearing.
Not in a dramatic Hollywood way.
But in the slow, economic way that reshapes a labour market before people realise what happened.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Technology doesn’t remove jobs — it removes the starting point of a career ladder.

And when the bottom rung disappears, the entire pathway above it must be rebuilt.

And the deeper truth emerging from these signals is this:

🤖Automation enters through the work humans avoid… but exits through the work humans thought they owned.
Cleaning buildings wasn’t a “career destination,” but it was a pathway upward.
When the pathway automates, the middle weakens next.

⚠️We’re not moving into a labour shortage—we’re moving into a skills misalignment crisis.
Japan needs robots because workers are disappearing.
ASEAN will have workers—but not enough robot-literate ones.

🔀 The divide won’t be humans vs robots—it will be humans who can work with robots vs those who can’t.
A cognitive divide.
A workflow divide.
A judgement divide.

🧩 The real competitive advantage won’t be robot hardware—it will be the ecosystem around it.
Robot OS, predictive maintenance, safety layers, orchestration software, industry-specific modules—
this is the “AWS of robotics,” and someone will own it.

In your industry, which entry-level role in your industry will automation quietly absorb first — and what new pathway replaces it?

- Gavin
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The Hidden Role of Executive Search in Scale-ups

Executive search in a scale-up isn’t about recruitment.
It’s about risk management.

When a company hits Series B or C, every new leader either protects enterprise value — or destroys it.

I’ve sat on both sides:
The founder wants someone who “gets it.”
The investor wants someone who can run it.
And somewhere between those two worlds is the person who can actually scale it.

In one Series C search, the brief wasn’t “Find me a CEO.”
It was “Find me someone the founder can trust — and the board can believe in.”

Skills were easy to check.
But the real test was chemistry, emotional maturity, and timing.
Because you’re not just hiring for execution —
you’re designing the next phase of governance.

What Smart Founders and Investors Do Differently ⚙️

1️⃣ Define the next chapter, not just the role.
Clarity on where the company is going shapes who you need — not the other way around.

2️⃣ Hire one phase ahead.
The best leaders can handle the next 18 months, not just the current quarter.

3️⃣ Run the founder–fit test early.
Don’t wait for chemistry issues post-hire — build trust during the search.

4️⃣ Split ownership clearly.
Founders lead vision, new hires lead systems — and both report truth to the board.

5️⃣ Onboard with alignment, not paperwork.
Use the first 60 days to sync culture and expectations — not just sign contracts.

The best searches don’t replace founders — they protect what made them and the company successful.
Hire for continuity.

- Gavin

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#executivesearch #scaleupleadership

If AI is part of your fund raising pitch, investors only want to know one thing:
“Does this make your business more repeatable, or more replaceable?”

I sit with a lot of early-stage founders across Asia, and there’s a pattern I’m seeing more often now.
They come in with ambitious ideas, clean slides, early success and a long list of AI features.
But when we move into the business model, very few can explain how AI might actually strengthen the engine of the company.

Not the vision.
Not the narrative.
The engine.

Last week, a founder walked me through a pitch that looked great on the surface.
But as we discussed their operations, it became clear that the AI was more decoration than discipline.
It didn’t deepen their defensibility.
It didn’t increase output consistency.
It didn’t reduce dependence on human judgment.
It was simply there, like a new coat of paint over the same old wall.

And that’s the skepticism many investors feel today.

We’re no longer asking whether AI is there.
We’re asking whether your business can survive when AI becomes a commodity — because in many categories, it already is.

A single engineer with vibe coding can now rebuild half of what used to be considered a SaaS product.
Features are less important.
Repeatability is key.

The founders who get investor trust are the one who can walk investors through a workflow and point to the exact place where AI improves speed, accuracy, or consistency — and then tie that directly to cost, margin, or scale.

When AI reduces variance, that’s repeatability.
When AI removes friction, that’s repeatability.
When AI shifts work from intuition to process, that’s repeatability.
And repeatability is what investors underwrite at early stage — because it’s the only signal that the business can grow without collapsing under its own weight.

How to make your investor deck “AI-repeatability ready”

1️⃣ Add a “Before vs After AI” slide

Show the exact process today vs. the AI-enhanced version.
Use simple numbers.
People understand contrast more than concepts.

2️⃣ Quantify one metric that moves

It can be delivery time, onboarding hours, churn, accuracy, or CAC.
One number is better than ten assumptions.
Keep it real, even if it’s early.

3️⃣ Explain why AI makes the process repeatable (solving a pain point)

Say it plainly:
“What used to depend on human judgment now depends on a system.”
Repeatability reduces risk — and investors invest to reduce risk.

4️⃣ Pressure-test the idea with a non-technical audience

If they can’t explain back how AI helps, you’re still speaking jargon.
Clear storytelling beats technical depth.

Your next investor meeting will go very differently depending on that answer.

– Gavin

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#StartupPitch #InvestorDeck #AIValue #StartupInvestment #GrowthStrategy

The Fragile Middle (0→1 vs. 1→10 vs. 10→100)

Most startups don’t die at zero.
They die in the middle.

At 0→1, everyone’s a builder.
Speed matters more than structure.
You hire missionaries, not mercenaries.
Every win feels like a miracle.

At 1→10, momentum arrives.
You start hiring specialists, building functions, tightening focus.
Meetings appear. Processes emerge.
Chaos slowly gets organized.

At 10→100, the business demands systems.
Governance, predictability, structure — everything investors love.
But that’s when something else breaks.

I’ve helped companies move from startup to scale-up, then to growth, and eventually pre-IPO.

And the most fragile stage isn’t the start —
it’s that messy, awkward scale-up → pre-IPO transition (10→100).

Because that’s when:

The company outgrows its early heroes but hasn’t yet attracted institutional leaders.
Every process feels half-built.
Everyone’s learning on the job — under investor pressure.

It’s long, scrappy, and brutally exposed.
Because for the first time, you’re building the plane while flying toward the runway.

That’s why this stage kills momentum more often than the early chaos.
The skill set that got you here — creativity, speed, hustle — now needs to evolve into discipline, clarity, and governance.
And most teams underestimate that evolution.

Here are 5 ways to navigate the messy middle 🚀
🔥 1. Build your bridge team.
Hire a few people who’ve scaled before — they’ll turn chaos into order without killing speed.

🧭 2. Write things down early.
Don’t wait to “get organized later.”
Document what works now so new hires don’t start from zero.

⚙️ 3. Balance growth and control.
Keep chasing growth, but make sure someone’s watching burn, cash, and compliance.

🧩 4. Make board talks useful.
Stop reciting updates — talk about what’s changing, what’s breaking, and what help you need.

💬 5. Communicate more than feels necessary.
The moment you think “everyone knows,” they don’t.
Keep repeating direction until it sticks.

What stage are you really leading right now: 0→1, 1→10, or 10→100? What's that one small win you can get this month. Small wins compound faster than perfect plans. 

- Gavin

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#scaleupgrowth #executivesearchforfounders

I love the positivity in this.

A young engineer getting recognised because her actions mattered more than her volume.

If AI can help leaders spot quiet, consistent, high-integrity contributors… that’s a future I’m excited about. 😊

No.1 Tech Voice to Follow & Influencer on LinkedIn|Award Winning Author|AI-IoT-Blockchain-Cybersecurity|Speaker|61k+

Google co-founder Sergey Brin ran an unusual experiment inside an internal company chat by asking #Gemini which participant deserved a promotion.
Instead of selecting senior or outspoken employees, the AI highlighted a young woman engineer who was rarely vocal but consistently contributed.
After reviewing Gemini’s suggestion, leadership approved her promotion.
The incident underscores how AI systems may surface overlooked talent that traditional performance reviews often miss.

We have 2 years before everything changes.

Not 10.
Not 5.
But 2.

I watched Steven Bartlett's new hashtag
#doac episode today, and it hit me harder than I expected.

Because the truth is — many people think AI is a “future nice problem" to have, which we would enjoy the increased productivity, accessibility to better and cheaper services and goods. 

And here’s the part people don’t want to hear:
What's the "trade" when we are opt in to this future?

Love the the balanced, real perspectives on our near future discussed in this episode. 

If you watch one thing this week, watch this:
https://lnkd.in/gfRwuiDA

This will shift how you think about the next two years — and why the real disruption is happening sooner than we think.

- Gavin

https://lnkd.in/gWDXuzqj

Open video: AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris on youtu.be

AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris

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