Culture shift, Performance Improvement, Leadership Coaching, Management Development, Business Performance through people. 

With a huge emphasis on outcomes and culture, I am completely obsessed with human beings and human performance. A wise man once said: “Organisations don’t change unless teams do. Teams don’t change unless people do.” And this is my passion!

Steve Bent 🔓🟣

Mark MacLeod

I help startup CEOs go from $5M in revenue to a massive exit

Most founders I've worked with are operating on depleted energy and reactive thinking.
They don't realize it's quietly capping their ceiling.

I lived this tension for years. As a CFO, VC, and investment banker, I helped founders raise over $1B and facilitated $1B in exits. I have lived in the world of the always-on operator with no boundaries.

But I am also a kundalini yoga teacher. A meditator. Someone who had been building a daily practice since 2012.

What I discovered over those years is simple but not obvious: the founders who keep compounding year after year are not the ones who grind harder. They're the ones who treat their energy, clarity, and inner state as their primary business asset.

That's the thesis behind Limitess.

Limitless is a community and coaching program for ambitious founders who want to scale world-changing companies without sacrificing their health, happiness, or humanity. 

Not wellness. Not therapy. Performance infrastructure for founders who want to keep growing without burning out.

What founders get inside Limitless:

An elite, growing community of tech founders
A proven framework for compounding yourself and your company year after year, without limits
Transformational, in-person event experiences

Founder

I coach, advise and invest in the CEOs of high growth technology companies & help them execute game-changing deals.

Naval Ravikant screens founders for 3 things: high intelligence, high energy, and high integrity - Not traction. Not TAM. Not revenue. 

The person.

I've spent 26 years on every side of the startup table, and I've arrived at a similar conclusion.

The Limitless Equation:

Here’s the equation I use:

(Energy * Clarity) ^ Inspiration = Growth Rate

Energy is the foundation. Your physical capacity to move fast and sustain it. Not for a quarter. For decades. Naval says that startups die when founders run out of energy. I have seen this over and over. But most founders never measure energy, protect it, or treat it as a strategic asset.

Clarity is your focus. The ability to see what actually matters instead of reacting to whatever is loudest. Remove everything that shouldn't be there. What's left is clarity. It is operating with intention. Tuning out all the noise.

Inspiration is the exponent. When you're operating from flow and intuition instead of fear and reactivity, the equation doesn't just add up. It multiplies. Decisions that felt hard become obvious. Work gets lighter instead of heavier. When you are in this state, decisions are effortless. Ideas just show up.

Most founders try to grow by adding more. More teams. More capital. Longer hours.

But all the biggest outcomes in the startup world are founder-led. And the founder is the constraint.

Where are you weakest right now: energy, clarity, or inspiration?

That's the bottleneck on everything else.

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

Helping ambitious CEOs & founders scale world-changing companies without sacrificing their health, happiness, purpose, or humanity

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The best CEOs I've worked with all have one thing in common: They're blunt.

Not rude. Not cruel. Not careless with their words.

Blunt.

They say what needs to be said in the room where it needs to be said.

They don't soften feedback until it loses its meaning.

They don't wait three months to have the conversation everyone knows is overdue.

They don't hide behind politeness when clarity is what the team actually needs.

Most founders confuse being nice with being kind.

Nice avoids the truth to protect feelings.

Kind delivers the truth because the stakes are too high not to.

Your team doesn't need you to be comfortable.

They need you to be clear.

Bluntness with respect is one of the highest-leverage leadership skills you can develop.

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

The word "should" implies somebody else's expectations.

Pay attention to how often you use it.

I should be further along. I should take that meeting. I should respond faster. I should work harder. I should want to scale. I should be grateful.

Every "should" is a clue. It means you're making a decision based on someone else's operating system. Your board's. Your investors'. Your parents'. Your peers and competitors. The startup playbook you absorbed ten years ago and never questioned. Your default assumptions.

I've been a CFO, VC, investment banker, and coach for 26 years. 

The founders who build the biggest outcomes are the ones who learn to separate what they actually want from what they've been told they “should” want.

That's harder than it sounds.

Because "should" feels like responsibility. It feels like doing the right thing. But most of the time, it's just noise dressed up as duty. 

And every decision made from "should" instead of genuine alignment costs you energy. It compounds in the wrong direction.

Here's a test: Take any decision you're sitting on right now. Ask yourself: am I doing this because I want to, or because I feel like I should?

If the answer is should, dig into whose voice that actually is.

Remove what doesn't belong. What's left is clarity.

Members of the Limitless.ceo community are learning how to build without breaking.

If that’s something you’re working on, you’ll fit right in: https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

The #1 reason founders came to me to sell their companies was exhaustion.

Not competition. Not bad timing. They just had nothing left.

I ran an investment bank. Personally closed over $1B in exits. And the pattern never changed.

The founders who built the most valuable companies weren't the ones who worked the most hours. They were the ones who still had something in the tank in year seven.

I used to think that was just wiring. Some people have more stamina. But after 26 years as a CFO, VC, investment banker, and coach, I started seeing it differently.

Energy is a system. And almost nobody treats it like one.

Founders track MRR to the penny. They obsess over CAC and LTV. But they have zero data on the one thing that determines whether they'll be around long enough to compound any of it.

Their own body.

Revenue is a biological output.

The founder sleeping 5 hours a night and white-knuckling through every quarter isn't tough. They're burning down the most valuable asset their company has.

Compounding is the most powerful force in the universe. But you can't compound when the engine burns out in year three.

The founders I've watched build the biggest outcomes treated their energy the way they treated their cap table. They got data on it, they protected it, and they built their whole operating rhythm around it.

Not because they were soft. Because they could do math.

Members of the Limitless CEO community are learning how to build without breaking.

If that’s something you’re working on, you’ll fit right in.

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

Marie Chevrier Schwartz spent 10 years building Sampler. Raised venture capital. Grew it to real scale. Then the business went bankrupt.

Most founders go dark when that happens. Marie did the opposite. She went on social media and told everyone.

The thing she said that stuck with me most: The day she accepted it was over, she felt relief. Not defeat. Relief.

Because she finally separated who she was from what she built.

That's the hardest thing in entrepreneurship. Not the fundraising. Not the product. Not the market timing.

It's realizing you are not your company.

Marie was late in her pregnancy when she learned the business wouldn't survive. She had a newborn when it officially ended. And instead of shutting down, she used that moment to rebuild her identity entirely.

She's went on to runTechTO, Canada's largest tech community, serving 60,000 founders. Different chapter. Same energy. More clarity.

If you missed the podcast, the full conversation is on my blog → link in the comments.

Burnout is a breach of fiduciary duty. I know that sounds extreme. But think about it.

If you're a venture-backed CEO, your investors bet on you. Your team followed you. Your customers depend on your judgment.

When you break down, every single one of those stakeholders pays the price.

According to Octopus Ventures, 65% of startup failures stem from internal conflict or founder burnout. Not bad markets. Not bad products. Broken founders.

A 2025 Sifted survey found that 49% of founders are considering quitting. Half.

I ran an investment bank and personally closed over $1B in exits. The #1 reason founders came to me to sell was burnout. Same pattern, over and over, for 26 years.

We treat burnout like a personal problem. Something you solve with a vacation or a long weekend.

It's not personal. It's structural.

It's what happens when the most important system in the company has no monitoring, no maintenance, and no protection.

The sacrifice mentality is a trap. You don't have to burn out to build something great. Your company can only scale as fast as you can.

Members of the Limitless.ceo community are learning how to build without breaking.

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

I don't think I will ever fully retire.

Retirement is a concept built for a world that no longer exists.

It assumed you'd grind for 40 years, then stop.

Trade your health for money, then try to buy it back.

But what if you could work forever?

Not because you have to. Because you want to.

Because building still lights you up at 60, 70, 80.

That changes the entire equation.

You can't run this game like a sprint.

The founders who burned out at 45 didn't fail because they lacked talent. They failed because they built a pace they couldn't sustain.

We're going to live longer than any generation before us. The question isn't when you stop.

It's how you build a life and a body and a mind that lets you keep going as long as you choose.

That means sleep isn't optional. Recovery isn't weakness. Energy isn't something you sacrifice for the next milestone.

It's the asset that makes every future milestone possible.

Retirement is what happens when you run out of energy.

Sustainability is what happens when you never do.

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

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Certified Personal & Business Performance Coach

Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA)

An exclusive community of VC and PE-backed CEOs who want
to scale themselves and their companies without limits.

Limitless is an exclusive community of VC and PE-backed CEOs who want
to scale themselves and their companies without limits.

I coach startup CEOs to grow themselves and their business all the way to a massive exit

SurePath Capital Partners is the premier strategic financial advisor to the global SMB Software market. With offices in Toronto and San Francisco, we aim to be the #1 advisor in this space globally and the one call CEOs and board make when they need to make a deal happen.

I led finance and corporate development at FreshBooks - the #1 cloud accounting specialist for small business owners. Since 2004, over 5 million people have used FreshBooks to track time, organize expenses and invoice clients online and in the cloud.

Accomplishments:
- Closed $30M institutional funding round + other unpublished transactions
- Led the process to find a partner to backstop a new product line
- Sourced and closed other key revenue-generating partnerships

CFO + Chief Corporate Development Officer

Venture Partner

Parter at Real Ventures where I focus on SaaS, freemium, e-commerce and digital media seed investments

Director, Fabric Technologies
Director, Context.io (sold to Return Path)
Director, Frank and Oak
Observer, Rewardli Inc.
Investor, Thinknear.com (sold to Telenav)
Investor, Localmind.com (sold to Airbnb)
Investor, Massive Damage Inc.
Director, Sweet IQ (sold to Reachlocal)
Observer, Unbounce.com
Investor, Engagio (sold to Influitive)
Investor, Origin.al Internet Company General Partner

General Partner

CFO for Tungle - a great solution for meeting coordination.

Raised a $5M "A" round. Served as CFO through the successful sale of the company to RIM.

Interim CFO, Shopify
Advisor, Well.ca
Advisor, Cakemail 
Advisor, Dok Dok Inc 
Advisor, Raymark
Advisor, Sitezoogle 
Interim CFO, Status.net Inc.

Advisor & CFO

Led finance, operations, legal, HR, strategic planning functions for this mobile communications startup. Raised an $10M B round led by Flybridge. Raised an additional $1M in China. Made major improvements to execution, ops, key metrics, etc.

Led finance, operations, customer support, IT and manufacturing for this venture-backed networked storage vendor. Negotiated the sale of Terrascale to Rackable Systems (NASDAQ: RACK) in a deal returning 10x on invested capital.

VP, Finance

Prepared this 15 person IP networking startup for commercialization & ‘B’ round funding. Responsibilities included financing, all back office operations, investor + board relations and negotiation of all  agreements. Towards the end of my term, I was given increasing responsibility for OEM sales and strategic relationships.

Strategic consulting assignments: 
•	Advised on the sale of two software companies and the purchase of an education services company
•	Led the successful restructuring of an insolvent retailer. The company is now thriving and expanding
•	Enabled the restructuring & strategic refocus of a new media company that resulted in a 3x growth in revenues and 5x growth in profit & cash flow

President

Was responsible for Finance, Alliances and Corporate Development functions. Raised $19M in equity over 2 rounds + oversaw growth to over 100 people. Established many key partner relationships

Director, Finance + Corporate Development

Helping VC-backed CEOs scale themselves and their companies without limits. 
| Host of The Startup CEO Show podcast

Most founders have no boundaries. Always-on. AI is making this even worse. Founders feel like they need to move faster and keep their agents busy.

Victor Tay is doing something harder.

He's a member of the Limitless.ceo community, and he recently made one rule in his company: no emails or Slack messages after 6 p.m.

Anything sent after that gets scheduled for the next morning.
The only exception? Real outages.

I LOVE this! Victor recognized that he is running a marathon. He recognized that to succeed, he and his team needed mental clarity. This is what enables great, rapid decisions.

When people have breathing room, they think more clearly. You enable intuition to show up. You make it easier to access a flow state.

When you grind nonstop with no downtime, you make it impossible to access the flow state.

In the AI era, everyone is optimizing for speed. Victor is optimizing for clarity. Clarity feels slower but is ultimately faster. 

Less zigging and zagging. No "ready, fire, aim", which is the default path for most startups.

That's the Limitless mindset.

Your team's best thinking doesn't happen when they're always on.

It happens when they have fresh, energized minds. 

Here's to more CEOs creating healthy, intentional boundaries that create more clarity.

Suffering = Pain × Resistance

Pain is inevitable.
Suffering is optional.

This insight is from my guru.

Every leader will face pain: market shifts, hard decisions, uncertainty, failure, and criticism. That’s simply the nature of growth and responsibility.

What turns pain into suffering is resistance:

Resisting reality, resisting change, resisting the lessons embedded in the challenge.

When we stop fighting what is, something powerful happens: Clarity returns. Energy returns. Creative solutions emerge.

Your work is not to eliminate pain, but to cultivate awareness so you stop amplifying it with your reactions. 

The moment you shift from resistance to curiosity, the situation becomes a teacher instead of an enemy.

Leadership is not the absence of difficulty. It is the capacity to meet difficulty without multiplying it.

Pain is part of the path.

Suffering is the story we add to it.

Where are you resisting what reality is asking you to see right now?

Most founder interviews are about fundraising, growth hacks, and exits.
This one was different.

I sat down with Tonya Papanikolov, founder of Rainbo, one of the leading functional mushroom brands. She's a holistic nutritionist, a Kundalini yoga teacher, and someone who built her company from a meditation download, not a pitch deck.

What struck me most was how she thinks about success.

Not revenue targets. Not market share.
Alignment. 

Is what she's building aligned with her deeper purpose? And when the answer is yes, everything else follows.

She also said something that stopped me: when she feels the urge to escape and retreat from the work, that's usually a sign she's avoiding the next level of growth, not that she needs rest.

That's a distinction most founders never make.

We talked about building a CPG brand from scratch, getting into Whole Foods, running a company with her husband, and why her morning practice is the most important thing she does for the business.

If you missed the podcast, the full conversation is on my blog

The true test of your values isn't when you fire a low performer.
Everyone can do that.

It's when you exit a high performer who violates them.

The person who is hitting their numbers. The one the board loves. The one your team depends on.

But they're toxic. They undermine trust. They treat people like collateral damage.

And you know it.

Most CEOs tolerate it because the results are too good to lose.

That's not pragmatism. That's a signal to your entire company that values are negotiable when the numbers are right.

The moment you exit that person, two things happen.

First, it hurts. Revenue might dip. There's a gap.

Second, your culture becomes real. Every person on your team now knows the values aren't a poster on the wall. They're the operating system.

And that's worth more than any one performer.

You hired smart people. Then you stayed involved in everything they do.
And you're calling it "founder mode".

It's not. Founder mode doesn't mean being in every decision, every Slack thread, every review. That's just micromanagement with a trendy label.

Real founder mode means:

✅ You operate at your altitude.
✅ You focus on the handful of things only you can do.
✅ You swoop in only when there's a real issue or a real opportunity.
Then you get back out.

If you're in everything, your people stop thinking for themselves. They wait for you. They optimize for your approval instead of the right outcome.

Over time, you become the bottleneck, the weak link. You hold the company back. 

If this is happening at your company, step back and reflect. Are your people the problem, or are you the problem?

graphical user interface, text, application

I sat down with my good friend Amar Varma late last year.

We covered a lot of ground.

41% of all VC dollars this year went to just 10 companies.
That's not a blip. That's a structural shift.

We talked about what that means for the rest of us building companies.

We also got into: 
✅ The OpenAI alumni network and how it's creating the next generation of power law companies.
✅ Pattern recognition in VC. Whether it still works.
✅ Seed strapping. Why some founders are skipping the seed round entirely.
✅ What it actually means to compete against an incumbent like Carta.

Amar is one of the sharpest operators I know.
Every time we talk, I walk away with a new frame.

Missed the podcast? Read the full interview here.
https://lnkd.in/e5vZC9jS

Open article: Amar Varma on AI's Power Law, OpenAI Alumni Networks, and Building Mantle Against Incumbent Carta - Mark MacLeod by markmacleod.me

Amar Varma on AI's Power Law, OpenAI Alumni Networks, and Building Mantle Against Incumbent Carta - Mark MacLeod

AI made you faster. It didn't make you better at stopping.

Every CEO I speak with has the same problem right now: the tools keep getting better, but the days keep getting fuller.

So I teach them a simple boundary protocol: Block one hour a day that is completely analog.

No screens. No Slack. No AI. No input at all.

Walk. Breathe. Sit. Think. Or do nothing.

This isn't a wellness hack. It's an operating decision.

Because the quality of your leadership is determined in the space between inputs. Not during them.

The founders who protect that space make sharper calls, see further ahead, and last longer than the ones running at full capacity every waking hour.

Your brain needs time offline to process what it's taken in. Without that, you're not thinking. You're just reacting faster.

AI gives you speed. Analog time gives you clarity.

You need both. Most founders only have one.

The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.

For most founders, the mind is running the show.

It wakes you up at 3 am with worst-case scenarios.

It replays the board meeting you can't change.

It tells you that every competitor is ahead of you.

It convinces you that rest is laziness.

The founders I work with at Limitless are learning to think with more intention.

They choose what to focus on rather than letting their minds choose for them.

That's what meditation is. That's what journaling is. That's what a morning practice is.

Not escaping the mind. Training it to work for you, not against you.

You are a mental athlete. You need to train your mind the way athletes train their bodies.

Your mind built your company. Don't let it destroy you in the process.

Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Block, just gave us a lesson in making hard decisions.

Often, when faced with decisions like layoffs, the temptation is to do the minimum necessary. To avoid as much pain as possible. 

Jack did the opposite. He leaned into the pain. He cut 40% of Block's workforce. Over 4,000 people. In one move.

Not because the business is struggling. Gross profit grew 24% last year.

He did it because he saw where AI is heading and decided to get there first. He leaned in.

Dorsey said it clearly: “Repeated rounds of cuts destroy morale, focus, and trust.” He'd rather take one hard, clear action than manage a slow bleed toward the same outcome.

You can disagree with the decision. But the leadership principle is worth studying.

The hardest decisions aren't hard because you don't know what to do. They're hard because you don't want to feel the pain of doing it. They're hard because you resist.

So you delay. You half-measure. You spread the pain out over months, hoping it hurts less.

It doesn't. It just hurts longer.

Whether it's a layoff, a co-founder conversation, or a pivot you've been avoiding, the cost of the slow path is almost always higher than the cost of the decisive one.

Suffering = pain * resistance. If you don’t resist what you need to do, you will not suffer. 

It’s no surprise that Jack took this approach, given his spiritual practice. Jack does long Vipassana retreats. Anyone who has done these will know that they are painful but always worth it.

The way out (of whatever issue you are struggling with) is through. Lean into the discomfort. Make the bold call.

Your job as CEO isn't to do more. It's to remove friction.

Friction is everywhere. It's the slow approval process. The unclear ownership. The meeting that should be an email. The hire you haven't made. The conversation you've been avoiding.

It's not one big thing. It's a hundred small things quietly dragging your company down.

Most founders tolerate them. They work around them. They get used to the drag.

Limitless CEOs have a different habit.

They remove one piece of friction every single day.

It sounds small. But compounded over a quarter, that's 90 obstacles gone.
Over a year, you've fundamentally changed how your company operates.

Not through a big reorg. Not through a new strategy deck.

Through the daily discipline of making things a little easier for your team to win.

That's the real job.

Find and remove one piece of friction every day.

The biggest risk of AI isn't losing your job. It's never being able to stop working.

The people burning out fastest right now aren't the ones resisting AI.
They're the ones who embrace it most.

A new Harvard Business Review study followed a tech company for eight months and found that when people genuinely adopted AI, they didn't work less. They just did more. 

To-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, then kept going. 

Work bled into lunches and late evenings. Not because anyone was pressured. Because the tools made it more doable.

This is the trap nobody's talking about.

AI doesn't create boundaries. It removes them.

And without boundaries, more capacity just becomes more work.

This is why health, energy, and inner clarity aren't nice-to-haves in the AI era.
They're survival tools.

The founders who thrive through this won't be the ones who squeezed the most out of every AI tool.

They'll be the ones who knew when to stop. Who protected their sleep. Who built recovery into their operating system. Who had the self-awareness to say 
"I can do more," and the discipline to say "but I won't."

Being able to call it a day and feel good about what you accomplished will become a superpower (it always was..).

AI is the most powerful accelerant founders have ever had.

Without boundaries, it accelerates burnout just as fast as growth.

A founder built an AI system that scans everything. It was making him worse at his job.

AI lets you measure everything now. Every Gong call. Every Slack thread. Every data query. Every customer conversation.

One founder I spoke with built an AI system that scans a thousand times more data than his team could manually. Every day, he is briefed on literally everything in his company.

Impressive. Also dangerous.

Because the ability to do everything is not a reason to do everything.

When I dug in, his real bottleneck was one thing. So we cut one of three product initiatives entirely. Narrowed focus to the one thing blocking growth.

More data didn't solve it. Less did.

Here's what I see happening everywhere right now:

AI gives founders superhuman capacity to monitor, measure, and manage.

But capacity without focus is just sophisticated distraction.

The founders who win won't be the ones who do the most with AI.

They'll be the ones disciplined enough to do less.

Every startup's 2026 budget is already wrong.

Not because someone made a mistake.

Because AI is changing the cost structure faster than anyone can model.

Roles you planned to hire for in Q3 might not be needed by then.

Tools that cost six figures are being replaced by agents that cost hundreds.

Runway is quietly extending at companies that are paying attention.

And the ones that aren't are still hiring against a plan that was outdated the week it was approved.

This is the new reality for founders:

You can't forecast spend the way you used to.

The old was was full of certainty. Full of proven formulas. 

The founders who adapt fastest aren't the ones with the best financial models.

They're the ones willing to revisit assumptions every month, rather than every quarter or every year.

Rigid budgets were already dangerous. In the AI era, they're fiction.

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

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Mark MacLeod

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