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Inspired by a conversation with Meg, founder of Mixies, a second-time founder who built an all-star team, shipped the product, and lined up the investment, only to watch the market decide none of it mattered.

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Have you ever done everything the playbook says, built the team, shipped the product, lined up the money, and still watched it come undone?

Think about the last time something failed that should have worked.

The Belief Worth Challenging

There is a deeply held belief in the startup world that execution is the deciding factor. Build the right team. Ship fast. Raise from the right people. If you do all of those things well enough, the outcome is in your hands.

It is a comforting belief because it implies control. It suggests that if you work hard enough, smart enough, and fast enough, you can outrun whatever the market throws at you. And in most cases, execution does matter enormously. But the belief breaks down at a specific point: the point where everything you control is working and everything you do not control is not.

Meg experienced that exact break point. She had co-founders she trusted, a team stacked with talent from some of the biggest studios in gaming, a product shipped and in players’ hands, and investments locked down. The company was on what she described as a “perfect rocket trajectory.” And then the market turned, the money froze, and the company closed.

The hard truth is that timing is not a minor variable. It is often the variable. And the founders who build sustainable careers are the ones who learn to distinguish between what failed because of them and what failed because of when.

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What It Actually Looks Like

Meg’s path to founding was not linear. She studied art history, wanted to be a museum curator, realized that she was ready to try something new, and pivoted to film. When she could not get hired at Sundance Film Festival because she lacked film festival experience, she did something that would define her approach to every problem that followed: she started her own nonprofit film festival in Los Angeles, partnered with Regal Cinemas, secured partnership with Air Canada to cover flights for students, and then went back and got the Sundance job.

At Sundance, she broke the fundraising record in her first year. She discovered immersive technology through the New Frontier Lab and became obsessed with virtual reality as a storytelling medium. She left for a VR studio where she produced pieces that premiered at LACMA, Venice Biennale, and South by Southwest. But the audience reach was painfully small. No one had VR headsets. She wanted to have impact at scale.

That desire led her and several colleagues to start a gaming studio focused on prosocial multiplayer games. They were trying to solve a specific problem: if virtual worlds are where younger generations do most of their socializing, what are the incentives those environments are teaching? They cold-messaged an economist on LinkedIn after reading over 200 pages of his published papers, and he became their fourth co-founder. They spent a month on daily calls, three to six hours each, to make sure the team was truly aligned before committing.

The team they assembled was extraordinary. Three of the co-founders of Call of Duty joined. They recruited from Zynga. Someone left Epic Games to work with them. They scaled to about 30 people and released their first playable build on the floor of GDC, the biggest gaming conference in the industry.

“If you have everything else and timing is not there, timing is one of the most important key things you have to success, because with timing comes so much momentum. And if you can’t get that momentum underneath you, then it’s very, very difficult.”

And then the macro environment collapsed. The post-COVID correction hit the gaming industry hard. During lockdowns, gaming had surged. When COVID lockdowns ended and people returned to normal activities, the numbers normalized, but the correction spooked publishers and investors. Roughly 15,000 layoffs swept through the industry in a short period. Studios closed their gaming arms entirely. And then Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, adding another layer of chaos. The investment Meg and team had lined up disappeared.

Meg described the weight of that moment with a clarity that most first-time founders will recognize.

“As a first-time founder who’s not had the weight of people’s livelihood on my back before, it was incredibly, incredibly hard to make that decision to close.”

She tried to exhaust every option before making the call. When the decision was final, her first priority was not grieving the company. It was helping her team. She spent months taking people to events, making introductions, and helping them network their way into new roles in an industry that was shedding jobs by the thousands.

What emerged from that process was the idea for her next company. She noticed how terrible the tools were for meeting the right people at events. She got matched with someone at a networking event who did not even speak the same language. That frustration, combined with her background in social game design, led her to co-found Mixies, an AI-powered networking platform for conferences and summits. Her current team is made up entirely of people she worked with at the gaming studio.

“Ideas die, companies die, but the connections you make, if you treat people the way people should be treated and you really value those collaborations, those continue to compound over time.”

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If this resonates, forward it to a founder who needs to hear this story.

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From the Coaching Room

Meg’s story is about the timing you cannot control. But in my coaching work, I see the other side of the timing problem just as often: the timing founders waste by not moving fast enough inside the window they have.

I worked with a founder who was taking two to four weeks to make critical decisions. Hiring calls would linger. Firing decisions would stall. The MVP sat in review cycles instead of reaching users. Marketing strategy got debated across multiple meetings instead of being tested in the market. None of these decisions were irreversible. But the founder was treating each one as if it were.

The shift came when we started sorting decisions by reversibility. If a decision can be undone, changed, or course-corrected, the cost of being wrong is almost always lower than the cost of being slow. A marketing test that fails gives you signal about your audience. An MVP that ships with rough edges tells you what users care about and what they ignore. The founder went from making critical decisions every two to four weeks to making them daily. Not recklessly. Deliberately.

You cannot choose when the market will open or close. But you can choose how much of the window you use. The founders who scale are the ones who refuse to let reversible decisions consume irreplaceable time.

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What the Research Actually Shows

The Resources That Help You Time a Market Are Not the Same Ones That Help You Win In It

Eric Yanfei Zhao, Masakazu Ishihara, and P. Devereaux Jennings published a study in the Journal of Business Venturing in 2020, analyzing 6,544 entrant games across 78 new market spaces in the U.S. console video game industry between 1995 and 2012. They found that while relevant experience helped founders both enter markets at the right time and perform well once inside, other resources like network connections had divergent effects: they could help with entry timing but actually hurt performance, or vice versa. The implication is that timing and execution draw on different capabilities. A founder can have the right team, the right product, and the right network, and still mistime entry because the skills that drive operational success are not the same skills that drive market reading.^¹

Successful Entrepreneurs Are Distinguished by Their Ability to Read Market Timing

Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, Josh Lerner, and David Scharfstein published a study in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2010 analyzing the performance of serial entrepreneurs. They found that founders who had previously succeeded had a 30% chance of succeeding in their next venture, compared to just 18% for first-time founders and 20% for those who had previously failed. One of the key differentiators was that successful entrepreneurs exhibited persistence in selecting the right industry and the right time to start new ventures. The finding that matters for founders: timing is not pure luck. There is a learnable skill in reading market conditions, recognizing windows, and knowing when to move. But the corollary is equally important. When the window closes for reasons outside your control, that is not a failure of skill. It is the nature of the variable itself.^²

What to Do When the Timing Isn’t Yours to Choose

These are practices drawn from Meg’s experience and from what the research suggests about navigating the tension between market forces and founder agency.

Sort every pending decision by reversibility.

Before letting a decision sit for another week, ask one question: if this turns out to be wrong, can I change course? If the answer is yes, the cost of delay almost certainly exceeds the cost of being wrong. Firing decisions, feature releases, pricing experiments, partnership conversations: most of these can be adjusted. The ones that cannot be reversed, equity splits, major fundraising commitments, shutting down a product line, deserve deliberation. Everything else deserves speed. If timing is the variable you cannot control, then how quickly you move on the variables you can control is the only lever you have left.

Run a post-mortem that separates the controllable from the uncontrollable.

After a failure, write two columns. In the first, list every factor that was within your control: hiring decisions, product choices, fundraising strategy, speed of execution. In the second, list every factor that was not: market contractions, regulatory changes, macroeconomic shocks, competitor timing. Be honest in both directions. Zhao’s research found that the resources driving market timing and the resources driving operational performance are fundamentally different capabilities. You can excel at one and fail at the other. If you collapse both columns into a single narrative of “I wasn’t good enough,” you lose the ability to learn what actually went wrong. The founders who improve across ventures are the ones who can look at both columns clearly and carry the right lessons forward.

Invest in your team’s careers, not just their roles.

Start before things go wrong. Make introductions for your team members that have nothing to do with your company’s immediate needs. Help them build networks that extend beyond your org chart. Advocate for their visibility in the industry, not just their output on your product. If the company survives, you will have built a team with deeper loyalty and broader capability. If it does not, you will have built a network of people who want to work with you again. Meg’s entire current team came from her previous company, not because she recruited them back, but because she spent months helping them find jobs after the closure. That kind of investment does not reset when a company ends. It compounds.

Build your next thing from whatever the last thing left behind.

After a company closes, take inventory of what survived: the skills you sharpened, the relationships you built, the problems you now understand at a level your competitors do not. These are not consolation prizes. They are unfair advantages that only exist because of what you went through. Meg’s prosocial game design expertise became the foundation for an AI networking platform. The specific pain of watching broken matchmaking tools fail her former colleagues became the product insight no competitor had. When timing closes one door, the founders who recover fastest are the ones who audit what they are carrying and build from that, not from a blank page.

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The Bigger Picture

The research tells one side of this story. Zhao and his colleagues found that the capabilities driving market timing and the capabilities driving execution are fundamentally different. Gompers and his colleagues found that reading market timing is one of the skills that distinguishes serial entrepreneurs who succeed. But the research does not tell you what to do on the Tuesday morning when you are sitting on three decisions you have been avoiding for two weeks. That part is simpler and harder: recognize that the market window is not waiting for you to feel ready, and move on the things you can control while you still have the chance.

Meg’s story is not a cautionary tale about bad luck. It is a case study in what it looks like to have genuine skill, genuine preparation, and genuine team quality meet a market force that does not care about any of those things. She built an extraordinary team, shipped a product, broke records, and lined up investment. The market turned. The company closed. And then she took the people, the insight, and the pain and built something new.

“So much value grew out of this, even though it didn’t end exactly how I wanted it to.”

There will be variables you cannot control. The market will move on its own schedule. Investors will spook for reasons that have nothing to do with your product. Industries will contract at the exact moment you were ready to expand. None of that is a verdict on your ability.

The founders who build lasting careers are the ones who learn to move fast inside the window they have, carry forward what survives when the window closes, and refuse to let the timing they could not control become the story they tell about themselves.

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Founder Circle

There’s probably a decision in this essay you recognized as one you’ve been sitting on too long. Founder Circle is a live, small-group coaching session where ten founders each work through one real challenge and leave with clarity they didn’t have walking in. Join us for our next circle by reserving your spot.

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P.S. If this topic resonated, pick up Morgan Housel’s Same as Ever. His argument that luck and risk are the same force, just viewed from different directions, is one of the clearest frames I’ve found for understanding why timing defies preparation.

What is the last decision you delayed that, looking back, you could have made in a day? I read every response.

I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC) and founder of Little Pursuits. I partner with founders and executives through the leadership inflection points: the identity shifts, the hard conversations, the decisions you keep carrying alone. This newsletter is where that work meets the page.

Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:

^¹ Zhao, E. Y., Ishihara, M., & Jennings, P. D. (2020). Strategic Entrepreneurship’s Dynamic Tensions: Converging (Diverging) Effects of Experience and Networks on Market Entry Timing and Entrant Performance. Journal of Business Venturing, 35(2).

^² Gompers, P. A., Kovner, A., Lerner, J., & Scharfstein, D. S. (2010). Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship. Journal of Financial Economics, 96(1), 18–32.

In an industry that often demands “permission,” Meg discusses the raw reality of being rejected by her dream employers and how that frustration sparked her to build her own platform.

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In this episode, we explore the “Founder Mindset” of creating your own opportunities, the visceral power of immersive storytelling in VR, and how to scale a team without losing the core mission.

From the emotional reality of closing a first company to navigating the high-stakes timing of the gaming industry, we cover:

→ The Spite Catalyst: Why being rejected by Sundance led Meg to start her own international film festival from scratch.

→ The “Rocket Trajectory” Fall: The gritty reality of building an all-star gaming team only to face a macro-industry bloodbath.

→ Building Without Permission: Why waiting for an invitation to your career is the ultimate barrier to success.

→ The Future of Networking: How Mixies is using AI to turn “cold” events into high-ROI matchmaking experiences.

→ Hiring for Mission: Why finding “true believers” is the make-or-break factor for early-stage startups.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro: From Sundance Rejection to Founding a Film Festival 10:00 - Immersive Storytelling: The Visceral Power of VR and Journalism

13:30 - The Transition to Gaming: Building Social Worlds with High Impact

18:30 - Cold Outreach Mastery: How to Land All-Star Co-Founders via LinkedIn

26:08 - The “Blood Bath”: Dealing with Industry Downturns and Closing a Company

37:10 - The Birth of Mixies: Solving the Problem of “Terrible” Event Networking

43:30 - B2B Strategy: Why Focusing on High-ROI Summits is the Ultimate Growth Wedge

58:10 - Outro: Meg’s Advice for Non-Technical Founders Building in AI

Subscribe to Little Pursuits for more raw stories from founders, leaders, and experts!

Watch Next: I Stopped Collecting Resume Logos. Here’s ...

Host: Dar Patel, Founder of Little Pursuits

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darpatel/

Join Our Founder Circle: https://luma.com/littlepursuits

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Little Pursuits

Helping founders scale both themselves and their company. Coaching tools, tiny experiments, and honest founder stories from Little Pursuits.

By Dar Patel

Guest: Meg McWilliams, Founder of Mixies

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meg-mcwilliams-b1669976/

Website: https://mixies.ai/

#FounderMindset #Entrepreneurship #StartupStories #CareerPivot #AI #LittlePursuits #Sundance #Networking #WomenInTech #FounderGrief

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Inspired by my recent conversation with Chandrika Maheshwari, co-founder and CEO of Quivly, where she's building an AI workforce for post-sales teams.

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How many doors have you quietly closed before anyone else had a chance to answer?

Sit with this question for a moment.

The Belief Worth Challenging

There’s a belief that runs deep in high-performing founders and executives: you need to be ready before you act. Ready before you start the company. Ready before you make the ask. Ready before you put yourself in the room where someone might say no.

It sounds responsible. It looks like preparation. And in many professional environments, it gets rewarded. The person who shows up with the polished deck, the airtight plan, the fully baked product gets praised for their discipline.

But there’s a version of “getting ready” that has nothing to do with preparation. It’s a version where you keep adding items to the checklist because finishing the checklist means you’d actually have to do the thing. Where you tell yourself you need one more credential, one more hire, one more quarter of data before you can make the leap.

The belief is that readiness is a prerequisite for action. But for founders operating at the edge of what they’ve done before, readiness is often just a sophisticated form of self-rejection. You say no to yourself so that nobody else has to.

Chandrika’s journey from consulting to Google to founding two companies reveals something different: the moments that changed her trajectory weren’t the ones where she felt ready. They were the ones where she acted before the checklist was complete.

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What It Actually Looks Like

When Google reached out to Chandrika about a product marketing role, she had studied engineering and worked in consulting. She had no marketing background. Her first instinct was disqualification.

“I felt like I had no business even interviewing for that position. I didn’t know the first thing about marketing because I had studied engineering. I’d worked in consulting. I was like, I think they have the wrong person.”

But then she made a small, decisive shift. She hadn’t applied. They had reached out. So instead of deciding for them, she let the process play out. She got the job. She became the first product marketing manager on the ad side of things at Google India, part of a team of twelve doing marketing for all Google products in a country of over a billion people.

It was inside that role that she began to see how deeply the pattern of self-rejection ran. She described needing to unlearn the idea that someone had to give her permission to act. In her words, being “high agency” meant recognizing that no one was going to hand her a green light. She had to move without one.

“No one needs to give me permission to do things. I just need to be able to make those decisions. Being high agency is one of those things I look for in the hires that we bring on at Quivly.”

Later, Chandrika introduced a framework she’d encountered that crystallized this pattern: ask culture versus guess culture. In guess culture, you do the mental work of predicting someone’s answer before you ever ask the question. You only reach out if you’re fairly sure the answer will be yes. In ask culture, you ask the question and leave it to the other person to respond however they see fit.

The distinction matters because guess culture feels like emotional intelligence. It feels considerate. But it also means you’re making decisions for other people based on your own projections. You’re filtering out opportunities before they have a chance to exist.

This pattern showed up again when Chandrika knew she wanted to start a company. She had the desire before business school, but she kept adding prerequisites. Get the visa sorted. Learn product management. Build a track record. Each step was legitimate on its own. Together, they formed a wall between intention and action.

The shift happened at Plaid. She was preparing for a meeting, writing a document, and something clicked.

“I’ve been collecting logos on my resume. I’ve been building all these safety nets. When do I feel like I will be ready? There’s never going to be one day I will wake up and be like, today I’m prepared. Here’s the checklist and I’ve done each one of the things and now I’m ready. So I just have to take the plunge.”

She left to start her first company. It didn’t work out the way she planned. She scaled it for twenty months, hit headwinds in the regulatory and macro environment, and made the decision to wind it down and return capital to investors. Then she started again. She found her co-founder Tanay Agrawal through what she describes as a serendipitous reconnection, went through a rigorous co-founder dating process, and launched Quivly.

When asked what she looks for in hires now, her answer maps back to the same insight: high agency and curiosity. The willingness to act without waiting for a signal that may never arrive.

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If this resonates, forward it to a founder who keeps adding one more thing to the list before making the ask.

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From the Coaching Room

I was recently working with a founder who was searching for early pilot partners. Without putting in much effort, just attending a few events, she already had a handful of leads. Real people who had expressed genuine interest in what she was building.

I asked her a simple question: what’s stopping you from asking these leads to be part of your pilot? She paused. Her answer was that her product didn’t feel ready yet. She wanted to polish it more before putting it in front of anyone.

But that’s exactly the point of a pilot. You build with real partners who will inform the product. The product doesn’t get ready in isolation. It gets ready through the conversations she was avoiding. In our session, she decided she would reach out to her existing leads and do additional cold outreach to find a few more pilot partners for the next iteration.

She wasn’t self-rejecting because her product wasn’t ready. She was self-rejecting because the conversations are hard, and we feel vulnerable when someone might say no. So we keep perfecting the thing instead of doing the part that’s toughest to do.

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What the Research Actually Shows

We Dramatically Overestimate How Often People Will Say No

Vanessa Bohns, a social psychologist at Cornell, has spent over a decade studying what happens when people make requests of others. Across more than 14,000 participants, her research on what she calls the "underestimation-of-compliance effect" found that, on average, people underestimate how likely others are to say yes by approximately 48%.¹

The mechanism behind this is straightforward: when we imagine making a request, we focus on all the reasons someone might refuse. But we fail to account for the social pressure the other person feels to comply. Saying no to a face-to-face request is awkward, and people avoid awkwardness.

For founders, this means the cold email you didn’t send, the partnership you didn’t propose, the investor you didn’t approach likely had a much higher chance of landing than you assumed. The cost of not asking isn’t neutral. It’s compounding.

Action Doubts Are the Real Bottleneck Between Intention and Entrepreneurship

Michael Frese and Michael Gielnik's comprehensive review of the psychology of entrepreneurship, published in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, examined a decade of research on what separates people who intend to start companies from those who actually do.²

Their findings center on action regulation theory: the critical gap isn’t between having an idea and wanting to act on it. It’s between wanting to act and actually acting. The primary inhibitor is what they call “action doubts,” a state of uncertainty about whether you’re ready or capable of implementing your intention. In contrast, self-control and what Frese terms “personal initiative,” defined as self-starting, proactive behavior that overcomes barriers, strengthened the connection between intention and action.

The research suggests that the founders who succeed aren’t the ones who eliminated doubt before starting. They’re the ones who started while the doubt was still there.

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How to Stop Rejecting Yourself Before Anyone Else Can

Chandrika’s story and the research point to the same conclusion: the biggest barrier to action isn’t external rejection. It’s the internal kind. Here are four ways to interrupt that pattern.

Name the projection before it becomes a decision. The next time you catch yourself deciding not to ask for something, pause and ask: am I responding to real information, or am I guessing what the other person will say? Chandrika’s suggested framework of ask culture versus guess culture distinction is useful here. If your reason for not reaching out is based on what you think someone will think or feel, that’s projection, not data. Write down what you’re assuming and notice how often the assumption is doing the work of a decision you never actually made.

Separate legitimate logistics from emotional safety nets. Chandrika needed to sort out her visa status before starting a company. That was a real constraint. But she also told herself she needed to work in product management first, build a longer track record, and accumulate more experience. Some prerequisites are structural. Others are ways of staying comfortable while feeling productive. Audit your own list of “things I need to do first” and honestly label each one: is this a real dependency, or is it a way to delay the vulnerable part?

Set a “decision by” date for open questions. One of the reasons readiness traps persist is that they never force a decision. There’s always one more thing to learn, one more conversation to have, one more quarter to wait. Put a date on it. Not a deadline to be ready, but a deadline to decide whether you’re going to act or not. The date removes the illusion that you can indefinitely prepare without choosing. When the date arrives, you either go or you consciously decide not to. Both are better than drifting.

Make the first ask small and specific. Self-rejection often comes from imagining the biggest possible version of the ask. You don’t picture sending one email to one potential partner. You picture the entire fundraise, the full go-to-market, the public launch. Scale the ask down to its smallest honest version. One conversation. One pilot request. One intro. Bohns’ research shows you’re already underestimating how likely people are to say yes. Start with a version of the ask that feels almost too easy, and let the momentum build from there.

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The Bigger Picture

There is a particular kind of courage that doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. It’s not the grand leap or the bold public declaration. It’s the moment where you send the message instead of editing it one more time. Where you ask for the meeting instead of waiting until you feel more qualified. Where you start the company instead of adding one more line to the resume.

Chandrika built and shut down a company, then started another one. She took a role she felt unqualified for and grew into it. She left a comfortable position at a company where the golden handcuffs were already forming. None of those moments came with a guarantee.

“There are never any guarantees in life. And if this is what I really want, I should not let fear keep me from pursuing my dreams.”

That’s the real inner game here. It’s not about becoming fearless. It’s about noticing the moment you start doing someone else’s job for them, deciding in advance what they’ll say, and choosing to let them answer instead.

The checklist for readiness will never be complete. At some point, you have to check yourself and ask: are these valid reasons for not starting, or am I just holding myself back? The founders who build things that matter are not the ones who waited until every condition was perfect. They’re the ones who decided the ask was worth more than the comfort of never having to hear no.

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Founder Circle

If something in this newsletter hit close to home, you don’t have to sit with it alone. Founder Circle is a 90-minute live session where ten founders each bring one real challenge and leave with the clarity to act on it.

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P.S. What’s one ask you’ve been putting off because you’re not sure how it will land? I read every response.

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I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC) and founder of Little Pursuits. I partner with founders and executives through the leadership inflection points: the identity shifts, the hard conversations, the decisions you keep carrying alone. This newsletter is where that work meets the page. Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:

¹ Bohns, V.K. (2016). “(Mis)Understanding Our Influence Over Others: A Review of the Underestimation-of-Compliance Effect.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(2), 119-123. A review of multiple studies finding that people systematically underestimate others’ willingness to comply with direct requests, with the average underestimation at approximately 48%.

² Frese, M. & Gielnik, M.M. (2023). “The Psychology of Entrepreneurship: Action and Process.” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 137-164. A comprehensive review finding that “action doubts” inhibit the translation of entrepreneurial intentions into action, while personal initiative strengthens it.

Hit subscribe to join our community of builders!

In this episode, we explore the transition from corporate leader to entrepreneur, the importance of high agency and curiosity in hiring, and how to scale an AI workforce without losing the human element.

From the emotional reality of winding down a first startup to navigating a shifting market, we cover:

→ The Leap of Faith: Why waiting for a sign or a "ready" checklist is the ultimate barrier to starting.

→ The Google Era: Why overcoming self-doubt in a high-growth environment sparked the leap into entrepreneurship.

→ Ask vs. Guess Culture: How a simple framework for getting out of your own way turned "self-rejection" into a 10-year career advantage.

→ Scaling with AI: How they are building AI agents for post-sales teams to help companies grow without linearly scaling headcount.

→ Hiring for High Agency: Why work trials and genuine curiosity are the secret to building a resilient early-stage team.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro: Breaking the Checklist Mentality and Taking the Plunge

10:00 - The Google Era: Overcoming Self-Doubt in Product Marketing

13:30 - Ask vs. Guess Culture: A Framework for Getting Out of Your Own Way

18:30 - The Permission Paradox: Why You Don't Need Approval to Move Fast

26:08 - The First Startup: Solving Financial Struggles for Immigrants

37:10 - The Pivot and the Wind-Down: Navigating Market Headwinds in 2023

43:30 - Finding the Right Co-Founder Through "Dating" Frameworks

46:56 - Defining Quivly AI: Building AI Agents for Post-Sales Revenue Growth

58:10 - Hiring for High Agency: Why Curiosity Outperforms Traditional Interviews

Subscribe to Little Pursuits for more stories from founders, leaders, and experts!

Host: Dar Patel, Founder of Little Pursuits

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darpatel/

Join Our Founder Circle: https://luma.com/littlepursuits

Newsletter: https://littlepursuits.substack.com/

Guest: Chandrika Maheswari, Co-Founder of Quivly AI

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chandrikamaheswari/

Website: https://www.quivly.ai/#entrepreneurship

#AI #fintech #leadership #founders #productmarketing #startup #littlepursuits

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Inspired by conversations with Alyssa Kushner, Celine Lightfoot, Sarah Kerin, Ayesha Kazi, and Maggie Blackburn. Founders and leaders who learned to keep building while the doubt kept showing up.

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Have you ever looked at your own track record and still felt like you were about to be found out?

Sit with this for a moment.

The Belief Worth Challenging

There’s a quiet expectation that most founders carry: once you prove yourself, the self-doubt will go away. Hit the revenue target. Close the round. Ship the product. Earn the title. And somewhere on the other side of all that proof, you’ll finally feel like you belong in the room.

It sounds like a reasonable deal. Work hard, collect evidence, and eventually the inner voice that says “you don’t belong here” will get quieter.

Except it doesn’t work that way. Across five conversations with founders and leaders at different stages, the same pattern kept repeating. The doubt showed up early, when they were just getting started. Then it showed up again when they leveled up. Then again when they took on something new. The doubt never left. It just changed what it was about.

What separated the people who kept building from the people who stalled out was a specific shift in their relationship with that doubt. They stopped treating it as a signal that something was wrong and started treating it as a recurring companion to growth.

This issue is about that shift, and why the founders who scale are the ones who learn to move with doubt rather than waiting for it to disappear.

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What It Actually Looks Like

Alyssa Kushner is a licensed psychotherapist based in New York. She leads women’s support groups, supervises other therapists, and runs her own practice. By any external measure, she’s established. But the doubt has come back at every single transition.

“I’ve had different waves of self doubt or imposter syndrome [...] being a therapist, then being a supervisor [...] then this new endeavor.”

What stands out about Alyssa’s experience is the layered quality of it. Each new professional threshold brought a new version of the same feeling. The content changed, the intensity stayed. Becoming a therapist triggered one set of doubts. Becoming a supervisor triggered another. Starting a practice triggered yet another. She described a pattern that most founders will recognize: the moment you feel competent at one level is often the moment you step into the next one, where you feel like a beginner again.

Her response to this pattern was practical. Rather than trying to silence the doubt, she learned to use her own track record as an anchor.

“I reminded myself that I’ve had this before and that I got through it.”

She also learned to turn her own tools inward. When the self-criticism got loud, she would pause and ask herself: “What would I say to a client right now?” That reframe created enough distance to keep moving. She reminded herself to give herself time, that mistakes are part of the learning curve, and that the beginning is always the hardest part.

Celine Lightfoot’s version of imposter syndrome looked different on the surface but ran on the same engine. She had been coding since childhood. Programming was the skill she’d built her entire career around. And still, she carried a persistent belief that she wasn’t particularly good at it.

“I never thought that I was unique in any way. I didn’t think that I was particularly good at it.”

She described trying to relearn how to code multiple times throughout her life, as if the skill she already had somehow didn’t count. The evidence was there. The belief lagged behind. Working with a coach helped her manage the vulnerability that comes with building a company. Having someone to talk through tough conversations and prepare for difficult moments gave her a framework to move through the doubt rather than sit in it.

Sarah Kerin, the CEO of efficientSC, experienced doubt as something closer to dread. When she entered an unfamiliar domain, she described the fear in visceral terms.

“I had this big fear [...] this was like a black hole and I would never be able to master it.”

What shifted for Sarah was incremental evidence. She didn’t wait for the fear to pass. She started collecting small data points: conversations that confirmed the problem was real, early signals that her approach was working. Over time, the fear of the black hole faded, replaced by a growing confidence rooted in the data she’d gathered herself. “I was like, okay, I can kind of figure this out.”

Ayesha Kazi, co-founder of ASL Aspire, faced a version of doubt that was grounded in a real gap. She had never built an app before. The technical demands of her venture were genuinely new to her, and the stress was constant early on. “I’ve never coded like this before [...] I was so stressed at the beginning.”

What made the difference for Ayesha was external support. “If we didn’t have that support, I would be so stressed [...] truly, from every step of the way.” Having mentors who committed to helping at every stage turned what could have been paralyzing doubt into something manageable.

Maggie Blackburn’s doubt hit hardest during a domain switch. After years in consulting, she moved into tech and lost the footing that had made her confident in her previous career. “I remember just being very stressed and had imposter syndrome, didn’t know how to navigate certain situations internally.”

She was honest about what that period felt like: “I feel like I was pretending sometimes like how to do something or that I knew the answer to.” Looking back, she recognized what she needed most was permission to be a beginner. “It’s a new role. You don’t have to do it all. Take baby steps.” Over time, a more supportive manager and growing familiarity with the pace made the difference.

The pattern across all five stories is consistent. The doubt showed up when things were changing, when these founders and leaders were growing into something new. And in every case, what mattered was how they responded to the doubt, whether they treated it as evidence of failure or as a signal of growth.

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If this resonates, forward it to a founder or a leader who’s been carrying more doubt than they’ve been admitting.

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From the Coaching Room

Every founder I’ve coached has expressed doubt about something. Getting funding. Meeting new revenue milestones. Managing the team. Feeling like they have the skills they need to build the product or company. The specifics change, but the pattern is always the same: a founder who is clearly capable, clearly doing the work, sitting across from me and wondering if they’re enough for the stage they’re in.

What I’ve noticed is that the doubt rarely shows up when things are going badly. It shows up when things are growing. A founder closes their first major client and immediately starts worrying about whether they can retain them. A founder hires their first team and wonders if they know how to manage people. A founder hits a revenue milestone they set for themselves and moves the goalpost before they’ve even sat with the accomplishment.

The doubt follows the growth. And in coaching, the work is almost never about eliminating it. The work is about helping them see the pattern: that this feeling has shown up before, at the last stage, and they got through it. That the doubt is a response to new territory, not a reflection of their ability.

Once they see the pattern, they stop waiting for the doubt to leave. They start treating it as a familiar signal that they’re doing something that matters.

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What the Research Actually Shows

The Impostor Pattern Was First Documented in High Achievers

Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes published the first formal study of what they called the “impostor phenomenon” in 1978 in the journal Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice. They studied 150 high-achieving women, including PhDs, respected professionals, and students with top academic records, and found a consistent pattern: despite clear evidence of accomplishment, these women did not experience an internal sense of success. They attributed their achievements to luck, timing, interpersonal relationships, or overestimation by others.

The finding that matters for founders: Clance and Imes identified this as a cycle, not a one-time event. Each new success created a new opportunity for the impostor feeling to return, because the person’s internal framework kept discounting their own evidence. This maps directly to what Alyssa described. Each professional threshold, from therapist to supervisor to practice owner, triggered the same doubt pattern. The accomplishments accumulated, but the internal experience of “I’m about to be found out” kept resetting.^¹

Impostor Syndrome Shows Up Across Every Demographic and Career Stage

Dena Bravata and colleagues published a systematic review in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2020, analyzing 62 studies with a combined 14,161 participants. They found that impostor syndrome prevalence ranged from 9% to 82% depending on the population studied. The variation is itself revealing: the phenomenon shows up across gender, age, race, and career level. It is not limited to any single group or stage.

Two findings from the review are worth sitting with. First, impostor feelings were strongly correlated with anxiety, depression, and reduced job performance, meaning the doubt itself has a measurable cost when left unaddressed. Second, the review found no evidence that impostor syndrome naturally resolves with career advancement. People at senior levels reported it just as frequently as people early in their careers. For founders, this confirms what the stories in this issue suggest: waiting for the doubt to leave on its own is not a strategy. The doubt persists. What has to change is how you respond to it.^²

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How to Keep Moving When the Doubt Shows Up Again

These are practices drawn from what actually worked for the founders in this issue. Each one addresses a specific moment in the doubt cycle.

Build an evidence file you can return to.

Alyssa’s approach was to remind herself that she’d had doubt before and gotten through it. Make this concrete. Keep a running document of decisions you made that worked, problems you solved, and moments where you operated beyond what you thought you could. When doubt shows up at the next level, the file becomes your anchor. The goal is to interrupt the pattern Clance and Imes identified, where each new threshold resets your internal scorecard to zero.

Replace self-judgment with a single reframing question.

Alyssa asked herself, “Would I judge a child this harshly?” You can adapt this to any version that creates distance from the inner critic. The question works because it shifts you from evaluation mode to compassion mode. When doubt turns into self-punishment, the punishment becomes the bottleneck, not the doubt itself. One question that interrupts the spiral is more useful than trying to argue your way out of the feeling.

Collect small data points before the big fear shrinks on its own.

Sarah Kerin didn’t wait for confidence before acting. She gathered evidence: conversations, early signals, data that confirmed her direction. The fear of the “black hole” didn’t disappear through willpower. It faded as concrete information replaced abstract dread. If you’re staring at a new domain or challenge that feels overwhelming, start with the smallest testable question. One conversation. One data point. The doubt starts losing ground the moment you stop imagining and start measuring.

Give yourself, or someone else, explicit permission to be a beginner.

Maggie Blackburn’s manager told her: “It’s a new role, you don’t have to do it all. Take baby steps.” That single statement changed her trajectory. Ayesha Kazi’s mentors did something similar by committing to support at every step. If you’re leading a team, consider how often you give this kind of permission to the people around you. And if you’re the one carrying the doubt, consider that no one else is requiring you to have all the answers at the new level. That expectation is usually self-imposed.

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The Bigger Picture

Clance and Imes documented the impostor cycle nearly fifty years ago. Bravata’s systematic review of 62 studies confirmed it persists across career stages, regardless of how much evidence accumulates. The research is consistent: the doubt does not resolve on its own.

But here’s what the research doesn’t capture, and what the founders in this issue show clearly. Alyssa built an evidence practice she could return to at each threshold. Celine Lightfoot found that coaching gave her a space to move through vulnerability rather than sit in it. Sarah collected small data points until the fear of the unknown lost its grip. Ayesha Kazi leaned on a support system that showed up at every step. Maggie Blackburn gave herself permission to be a beginner again.

“I’ve had different waves of self doubt or imposter syndrome... being a therapist, then being a supervisor... then this new endeavor.” ~ Alyssa Kushner

None of them found a way to make the doubt disappear. Each of them found a way to keep building while it was there. That’s the shift. And it’s available to anyone willing to stop treating doubt as a verdict and start treating it as part of the job.

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Founder Circle

There’s probably a moment in this essay you recognized as yours. Founder Circle is a live, small-group coaching session where ten founders each work through one real challenge and leave with clarity they didn’t have walking in. Join us for our next circle by reserving your spot.

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P.S. What’s the last thing you doubted yourself on that turned out fine? I read every response.

Leave a comment

I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC) and founder of Little Pursuits. I partner with founders and executives through the leadership inflection points: the identity shifts, the hard conversations, the decisions you keep carrying alone. This newsletter is where that work meets the page. Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:

^¹ Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247.

^² Bravata, D. M., Watts, S. A., Keefer, A. L., et al. (2020). Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Impostor Syndrome: a Systematic Review. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 35(4), 1252–1275.

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Inspired by conversations with Andrea Nguyen, Anyi Sun, Dani Tan, Haris Butt, Katrina Purcell, and Maggie Blackburn. Founders and leaders who had to become the person before they could do the work.

Listen to Podcast

Think about the last time you pulled back from something you knew how to do. Was it really the skill you were missing, or the permission to be the person who uses it?

Sit with this for a moment.

The Belief Worth Challenging

There’s an assumption most of us carry without questioning it: get good enough, and the identity will follow. Put in the reps. Build the portfolio. Hit the milestones. Eventually, you’ll feel like the person the role requires you to be.

It sounds logical. It’s also backwards.

Across six conversations with founders and leaders at different stages of building, the same pattern kept surfacing. The skill was already there. The experience was already there. What was missing was the internal shift: the moment where they stopped qualifying who they were and started owning it.

That shift didn’t come from a promotion, a funding round, or a positive review. It came from a decision. A quiet, often private decision to call themselves the thing they already were.

This issue is about what happens on the other side of that decision, and why it has to come first.

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What It Actually Looks Like

Anyi Sun was in the middle of a career pivot into design when she heard a podcast about pursuing creative professions. The host talked about writing yourself a permission letter to become the person you wanted to be. Anyi didn’t sit down and write one. She was cooking. Chopping vegetables. But something shifted internally.

“I didn’t actually write it down, but I wrote it down in my mind mentally. I was cooking. I was like chopping vegetable and then I was thinking about that inside my mind. And that was really helpful.”

What happened next was concrete. Anyi described a psychological flip that changed how she showed up in the job search. Once she embraced the identity of designer, the confidence in conversations followed.

“I think there was this like mental psychological flip or switch I needed to do for myself in order to even just embrace that identity. And once I was able to embrace it, I was able to talk about design more confidently when I was looking for a job.”

This wasn’t about acquiring new skills. Anyi already had the design ability. What she needed was to stop seeing herself as someone trying to become a designer and start seeing herself as one. The permission letter, even the unwritten version, was the mechanism that closed that gap.

Dani Tan went through something similar when she left her corporate role to build her own coaching business. She was already doing the work and serving clients. But owning the word “entrepreneur” took months.

“I think it took me like six months to a year where I was like, no, I’m a full on entrepreneur. I’m a business owner. I actually wasn’t necessarily fully owned and proud of it. Like even when I left, I think I had like a little bit of like, oh, it’s just made up and anyone can be a business owner. And now I’m like, no, we went through some things to get here. So we own it.”

Haris Butt saw himself as a technologist for most of his career. That was the label, the identity he operated from. It wasn’t until he joined ClickUp that something shifted.

“Up until that point [in] my life, where I saw myself primarily as a technologist. And it wasn’t until I got to ClickUp where I started to see myself as a leader.”

Katrina Purcell has been running her own company for two years and still catches herself thinking like an employee. She gets to her computer at eight o’clock. When she goes to lunch with a client, she feels like she’s doing something wrong.

“The thought of putting myself as like a CEO or a founder is always like, always feel like there’s a qualifier and I need to get to a point where there’s not.”

Maggie Blackburn experienced the same friction from the other direction. After moving from consulting to tech, she found herself in unfamiliar territory.

“I remember just being very stressed and had imposter syndrome, didn’t know how to navigate certain situations internally.” She described the transition period honestly: “I feel like I was pretending sometimes like how to do something or that I knew the answer to.”

The thread connecting all of these stories isn’t about skill gaps or lack of preparation. In most cases, the capability was already there. The lag was internal. The identity hadn’t caught up to the reality.

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If this resonates, forward it to a founder or a leader who’s been doing the work but hasn’t fully claimed the title yet.

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From the Coaching Room

I coached a client who had clearly stepped into a leadership role. She was running the team. She was making the decisions. Her manager saw it too, and offered to promote her. She hesitated.

When we explored the hesitation, readiness wasn't the issue. She had the skills and the track record. The gap was identity. She saw herself as someone doing leadership work temporarily, as if the real leader would eventually show up and take over.

Through coaching, we challenged the limiting beliefs she was carrying about what kind of person gets to hold that title. We looked at the evidence: the decisions she’d already made, the team she’d already built, the trust she’d already earned. Once her identity aligned with leadership, the promotion wasn’t a leap. It was a natural next step.

The skill was never the bottleneck. The identity was. And once she closed that gap, everything else opened up.

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What the Research Actually Shows

Identity Changes What Difficulty Means

Daphna Oyserman’s identity-based motivation theory, developed across multiple studies and published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2009, rests on three core principles.

First, identities are dynamically constructed: though they feel fixed, they’re shaped by context and situational cues. Second, people prefer to act in identity-congruent ways. We don’t just pursue goals. We pursue the goals that feel like something a person like me would do. Third, and this is the finding that matters most here: when an action feels identity-consistent, people interpret difficulty as a sign that the task is important rather than a sign they should quit. When the action feels identity-incongruent, the same difficulty gets read as impossibility.

For founders, this reframes the entire question. Claiming the identity of leader, founder, or CEO is a motivational act, not a branding one. The label changes how you interpret the hard parts of the job: whether the friction of a tough quarter feels like evidence you're not cut out for this, or evidence that the work matters.¹

Founder Identity Predicts Who Actually Makes the Leap

Hoang and Gimeno’s 2010 study in the Journal of Business Venturing examined how founder role identity affects entrepreneurial transitions. They found that people who viewed the founder role as central to their self-definition were more likely to actually make the transition from employee to entrepreneur, and more likely to persist through the early-stage difficulties that cause most people to quit.

The mechanism is worth noting: identity centrality reduced the anxiety and stress associated with role novelty. When “founder” felt like a core part of who someone was, the unfamiliarity of the role became tolerable rather than threatening. This maps directly to what Dani, Katrina, and Haris described. The capability was already there. What changed was whether the identity felt central enough to keep going when things got hard.²

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How to Own the Title Before It Feels Earned

These aren’t mindset tricks. They’re small, deliberate ways to close the gap between who you already are and who you think you need to become.

Write your own permission letter.

Anyi heard about this on a podcast and did it while chopping vegetables. All that matters is the decision. Name the identity you've been circling: founder, leader, designer, whatever the word is. Then give yourself explicit permission to use it. Say it out loud or write it somewhere you'll see it. The act of naming it is what makes it real.

Audit how you introduce yourself.

Katrina noticed she always adds a qualifier when she calls herself a founder. Pay attention to the language you use when someone asks what you do. If you hedge, soften, or redirect, that’s a signal. Practice the clean version: “I run a company.” “I’m a founder.” “I lead the team.” No caveats. The way you describe yourself to others shapes how you describe yourself to yourself.

Separate the identity from the milestone.

Dani waited six months to a year before calling herself an entrepreneur, even though she was already building a business. The milestone (revenue, team size, funding) will always move. The identity doesn’t require you to hit a number first. If you’re doing the work, the title is already yours. Stop waiting for permission from a milestone that keeps shifting.

Find one environment where the new identity is the default.

Haris didn’t become a leader through self-reflection alone. It happened at ClickUp, in a context where leadership was the expectation. Put yourself in rooms, groups, or conversations where the identity you’re growing into is the norm. When the people around you treat you as the thing you’re becoming, the internal shift follows faster.

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The Bigger Picture

The conventional path says: build the skill, earn the credential, get the validation, then call yourself the thing. Every founder and leader in this series did it the other way around. They claimed the identity before it felt comfortable, and then the capability caught up.

And the research is clear on why this works. When the identity leads, difficulty becomes fuel. When it doesn't, the same difficulty becomes a reason to stop.

“I think there was this like mental psychological flip or switch I needed to do for myself in order to even just embrace that identity.” ~ Anyi Sun

The gap between who you are and who you think you are is where many founders get stuck. Not in the strategy. Not in the execution. In the space between doing the work and owning the work.

Close that gap, and everything else gets easier.

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Ready to try this yourself?

The Identity Alignment Audit is a coaching tool built on the GAP framework (Get Clear, Audit Your Evidence, Practice One Experiment). It’s designed to help you close the gap between who you already are and who you think you need to become.

I'm Ready!

Founder Circle

There’s probably a decision in this essay you recognized as yours. Founder Circle is a live, small-group coaching session where ten founders each work through one real challenge and leave with clarity they didn’t have walking in. Join us for our next circle by reserving your spot.

Reserve My Spot

P.S. What’s a title or role you’ve been doing the work of but haven’t fully claimed yet? I read every response.

Leave a comment

I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC) and founder of Little Pursuits. I partner with founders and executives through the leadership inflection points: the identity shifts, the hard conversations, the decisions you keep carrying alone. This newsletter is where that work meets the page. Find me on LinkedIn.

Subscribe now

If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:

¹ Oyserman, D. (2009). Identity-based motivation: Implications for action-readiness, procedural-readiness, and consumer behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(3), 250–260.

² Hoang, H., & Gimeno, J. (2010). Becoming a founder: How founder role identity affects entrepreneurial transitions and persistence in founding. Journal of Business Venturing, 25(1), 41–53.

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In this episode, we explore the transition from in-house designer to business owner, the importance of finding the right co-founder, and how to scale a creative agency without losing your soul. From the "quarterly wrap" reflection process to navigating a saturated market, we cover:

→ The Corporate Exit: Why performance reviews and rigid structures led to a "fatigue" that sparked the leap into entrepreneurship.

→ Finding the "Click": How Anyi and Andrea pivoted from law, medicine, and economics to discover their passion for human-centered design.

→ The Co-Founder Dynamic: Why a dinner conversation over deconstructed ramen turned a shared aspiration into a 2.5-year partnership.

→ Strategic Growth: How they moved from scrappy cold DMs to a long-term inbound marketing strategy built on transparency and value.

→ Future of Design: The role of AI as a "co-pilot" in product building and why the human element is more critical than ever.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro: The Illusion of Corporate Security and the Leap to Freedom

01:34 - Early Interests: Navigating the Pressure of Traditional Career Paths

05:40 - The Psychological Switch: Giving Yourself "Permission" to Be a Creative

08:50 - The Lucky Break: How a Marketing Internship Led to a UX Career

13:10 - Learning the Mechanics: Startup Scrappiness vs. Corporate Operations

15:20 - The Ramen Dinner: Finding the Courage to Start Together

19:50 - The Financial Reality: Adjusting to Life Without a Corporate Safety Net

25:10 - Evolving Sales: Moving from Outbound Spam to Inbound Relationships

35:10 - The In-House Advantage: How Their Past Roles Became Their Biggest Differentiator

38:30 - The Quarterly Wrap: A Founder’s Guide to Reflection and Alignment

54:10 - Scaling Beyond the Founders: Building a Team and Exploring Products

55:12 - AI and the Future: Designing for Humans in an Automated World

01:00:25 - Outro: The Future Vision for Koi Studios

Follow Little Pursuits for more stories from founders, leaders, and experts!

Host:

Dar Patel, Founder of Little Pursuits

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darpatel/

Join Our Founder Circle: https://luma.com/84tq1a6c

Newsletter: https://littlepursuits.substack.com/

Guests:

Anyi Sun & Andrea Nguyen, Co-Founders of Koi Studios

Connect Anyi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anyisun/

Connect Andrea: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreanguyen10/

Website: https://www.koistudios.co/

#entrepreneurship #podcast #uxdesign #productstrategy #leadership #founders

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In this episode, we dig into the reality of career navigation, strategic visibility, and the transition from VP to founder. From the "squeaky wheel" philosophy to finding service-market signal in coaching, we cover:

→ The Early Days: How Dani’s interest in psychology and communications formed the foundation for her career.

→ Navigating Corporate: Why working hard isn’t enough and how to build the "web" of relationships needed for growth.

→ The Identity Shift: The raw reality of transitioning from a VP-level title to the messy experimentation of a first-time founder.

→ Redefining Success: Why achievement is often a "made-up" structure and how to define success on your own terms.

→ Founder Mindset: Overcoming the vulnerability of visibility and the importance of self-coaching and somatic work.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro: The Illusion of Security and Messy Experimentation

01:13 - Early Interests: Psychology, Teaching, and Finding the "Root"

07:10 - Moving to New York: Networking into the Fashion Industry

14:35 - The "Squeaky Wheel" Strategy: 4 Promotions in 6 Years

25:20 - Reaching the VP Level: Negotiations and High-Stakes Buy-In

31:15 - The Identity Crisis: Feeling Like a Phony Despite the Title

35:10 - Pivoting to Coaching: Finding Passion in First-Gen Mentorship

50:40 - The First Client: How One LinkedIn Update Changed Everything

01:03:00 - Final Advice: Taking the Step Closer to What You’ve Been Sitting On

Subscribe to Little Pursuits for more stories from founders, leaders, and experts!

Watch Next: https://youtu.be/YXTLisl0EDQ

Host:

Dar Patel, Founder of Little Pursuits

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darpatel/

Join Our Founder Circle: https://luma.com/84tq1a6c

Newsletter: https://littlepursuits.substack.com/

Guest:

Dani Tan, Leadership & Career Coach

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danitan/

Website: https://www.danitan.com/

#entrepreneurship #podcast #career #leadership #founders

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In this episode, we dig into the reality of startup building, early traction, and founder decision-making.

From testing ideas manually to finding product-market signal, we cover:

→ The Early Days: How Celine’s interests in tech, sustainability, and entrepreneurship started to come together.

→ Building the First MVP: Why the first version of a product doesn’t need to be polished to be useful.

→ Fundraising Lessons: What early investors are really looking for in founders and startup opportunities.

→ Distribution and Growth: Why reducing time to value matters and how Beni evolved its product strategy.

→ Founder Mindset: Hiring, feedback, coaching, and the inner work of building a company.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro: Celine’s Journey into Tech and Entrepreneurship

05:17 - Sustainability, Startups, and Early Interests

10:17 - Building the Technical Tool Belt

22:43 - Why She Started Beni

30:56 - Testing the MVP and Finding Early Signal

40:14 - What Investors Look for in Early-Stage Startups

53:57 - Distribution, Growth, and Time to Value

01:05:07 - Hiring, Culture, and Scaling the Team

01:16:32 - Founder Mindset, Coaching, and Inner Growth

01:21:52 - Connecting the Dots Across a Nonlinear Career

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for the latest stories from founders, leaders, and experts!

Watch Next: https://youtu.be/Fhycrbiz5v0

Host: Dar Patel, Founder of Little Pursuits

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darpatel/

Join Our Founder Circle: https://luma.com/84tq1a6c

Newsletter: https://littlepursuits.substack.com/

Guest: Celine Lightfoot

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/celinemol/

Website: https://www.joinbeni.com/

#entrepreneurship #podcast #founders #startups

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In this episode, we dig into the reality of technical leadership and product strategy. From startup growth to executive decision-making, we cover:

→ The Early Days: Scaling product at Notion and Square.

→ VP of Product: Navigating rapid growth at ClickUp.

→ Technical Leadership: How to build and manage world-class teams.

→ The Product Framework: Identifying high-impact problems to solve.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro: Scaling Notion, Square, and ClickUp

08:20 - Lessons from the Early Days of Notion

15:45 - Building Product Culture at Square

28:30 - The Transition to VP of Product at ClickUp

42:10 - Founder Mindset: Decisions that Drive GrowthSubscribe for more stories from founders, leaders, and experts!

Watch Next: https://youtu.be/bRyxC1xlmHEHost:

Dar Patel, Founder of Little Pursuits

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darpatel/

Join Our Founder Circle: https://luma.com/84tq1a6c

Newsletter: https://littlepursuits.substack.com/

Guests: Haris Butt, Former VP of Product, ClickUp

Connect: https://x.com/probablyharis?lang=en

Website: https://haris.computer/home

#entrepreneurship #podcast #founders

Every week you’ll get one core idea, one tiny experiment, or one founder insight you can apply now.

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What does it actually take to leave a 6-figure job as a non-technical founder? Hit subscribe to join our community of builders!

In this episode, we dig into the reality of building efficientSC. From operator frustration to a $1B hospital supply chain solution, we cover:

→ Customer Discovery: How to validate a $1B problem.

→ Finding a CTO: Building as a non-technical founder.

→ Techstars & Accelerators: Is the advice worth it?

→ Willingness-to-Pay: Testing if people will actually buy.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro: Solving Hospital Supply Chain Burnout

14:15 - Validating the Problem & Customer Discovery

17:11 - Building a “Circle of Trust” as a Solo Founder

24:08 - Navigating Technical Challenges as a CEO

45:46 - Founder Mindset: Protecting Your Energy

Subscribe for more stories from founder, leaders, and experts!

Host:

Dar Patel, Founder of Little Pursuits

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darpatel/

Join Our Founder Circle: https://luma.com/84tq1a6c

Newsletter: https://littlepursuits.substack.com/

Guests:

Sarah Kerin, Founder & CEO, efficientSC

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-kerin-mba-67487059/

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Every week you’ll get one core idea, one tiny experiment, or one founder insight you can apply now.

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Host:
Dar Patel, Founder of Little Pursuits
Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darpatel/
Join Our Founder Circle: https://98sg03uup7d.typeform.com/to/T...
Upcoming Events: https://luma.com/calendar/manage/cal-...
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Guests:
Mona Jawad, Co-Founder & CEO, ASL Aspire
Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mona-jawad-6b7606186/
Ayesha Kazi, Co-Founder & COO, ASL Aspire
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