It's Been A Weird Year

Resetting my calendar and mind, to prepare for what's next in my founder's life

I’ll be in comparable wilderness for the next two weeks, with no phone or computer. Image generated by Leonardo AI

On Sunday, I’m heading off to a meditation retreat. A few days of working onsite, doing menial tasks and being of service to the community; then ten days of silence, ten hours of meditation each day.

Sounds like madness, or the typical founder-style vacation (it’s likely both). I did it last year, and while getting up at 4 a.m. (literally) to meditate for 10 hours that day, consume two meals (no eating after noon), and doing little else (maybe a gentle walk if your knees don’t give out from the long sits) is not for the faint of heart, it’s worked wonders for me. I did that last year in August and I’d go as far as saying that it has shaped the way that Wangari has developed, especially in the weeks and months immediately after the retreat.

There’s a hope in me that if I just “purify” my mind enough of limiting beliefs, unprocessed emotions, et cetera, then the business will just take off (and also the rest of my life, although I’m pretty content with my practical life circumstances). It kind of worked last year… The transition was pretty rough, frankly speaking, because the team I’d handpicked in the months prior to the retreat wasn’t positioned to deploy the enterprise pilot we’d just landed — leaving me in a scramble to recruit the people I needed to fulfill that contract. That meant six 14-hour workdays in a row to transition the old team out, identify the right hires for the pilot (and, as it turned out, the next stage of the company) and getting those people signed, plus starting pilot work while smoothening optics for the client because an unstable team doesn’t look great at all and I really wanted to do that pilot, and do it well.

All that was not exactly gentle for the soul but, looking back, it was indeed a huge upgrade because the people that were right in the earliest stages of Wangari were different from the people that were needed in that next stage. It was really a transition from ideation and some prototyping to deploying proper pilots and professionalizing a bit more, and going far beyond simply having a legal entity and a bunch of people with good ideas.

Given that I’m the solo founder of Wangari, I’m convinced that this outer business shift has everything to do with that mental reset I got from deep meditation. Despite my best efforts and doing everything that the books and advisors were saying, I just didn’t manage to land a sizable contract prior to the retreat; then, afterwards, an enterprise pilot contract just landed in my lap without me even doing much sales to “get” them.

That one contract changed everything. It was about automating actuarial reporting with agentic AI and augmenting it with causal insights. Beforehand, I’d been more focused on ESG analytics (yes, with causal insights). I never fully left the ESG / sustainability space behind, because it’s too dear to my heart. But I recognized that people are buying AI and not ESG, so I doubled down on what I can do in that space.

That pilot led to us joining several high-prestige accelerator- and mentoring programs, such as Plug and Play InsurTech, CORE12.01 (backed by Horizon Europe), and EU SCALE. Frankly speaking, I’m still evaluating all I’ve learned — the insights have been priceless.

It also led to several co-selling opportunities, because other vendors to that same enterprise pilot client wanted to join forces to sell to others. Which was beyond brilliant and I while I’d tried that route prior to getting that first highly visible pilot, it hadn’t worked out for me — and now it was coming to me without me searching.

And, needless to say, it lead to much more visibility and credibility in our ideal client base. That makes sales a lot easier because I’m no longer just a smart guy with a cool idea.

When I founded Wangari, I honestly thought that having the right credentials (a PhD in machine learning for dark matter physics, an MBA from a very prestigious school) and years of exposure and networking in the startup and VC landscape would bring me a good part of the way, but in hindsight it seems that these assets have mostly been table stakes. They do demonstrate achievement, don’t get me wrong; and my contacts and friends in the startup space are incredibly dear to me; but none of this will land you a client contract. This I’d underestimated.

It was only once I went and cleared my mind enough that I got to that place where I (a) became attractive to an enterprise pilot client and (b) became teachable enough to become attractive to mentors and absorbing what they have to say. In spiritual circles, people say “when the student is ready, the teacher appears.” This was certainly true for me.

In hindsight, I think the following mental blocks were weakened enough for me to get to that place, following last year’s retreat:

• Downplaying my background and past achievements in order to seem relatable to others

• Talking about the achievements but downplaying skill and effort that it took to get there — thus devaluing them, especially commercially

• Overcommitting my time and energy to please others, rather than focusing on demanding fair value for the business

• Being shy or closed-off from others because I believe that they were born to more money or higher social backgrounds

• Believing that I do not deserve success because if I took it, I would be taking it away from others and that this would be selfish

I’m not saying that these beliefs are fully gone — they’re not — but the outer layers of them have been shed. Their still show up in subtle tendencies here and there, professionally and privately, but through continued inner work post-retreat they’ve become more and more subtle.

There are many ways to dis-entangle old mental habits, but all of them require honest dedication, and, in my experience, some are more efficient than others. This retreat I went to is great for dedication, with 9 days of complete silence (on day ten the silence is lifted), no phones, and not even books or note-taking allowed since it’s all mentally distracting from the inner work. The technique itself is called Vipassana (Sanskrit for “insight”), and it’s purportedly the technique by which the Buddha got his enlightenment — efficiency thus proved.

In case you’re curious, these retreats are run by the Dhamma organization, and they’re actually free of charge: you can only donate in order to help finance future students after you’ve completed your first retreat and have experienced the benefits for yourself. That being said, the schedule requires some honest dedication, with 4 a.m. wake-ups, simple food and accommodation, and a total of 10 hours of meditation on a simple mat on the floor. You’re not paying (though you might be donating voluntarily), but you’re doing some serious inner work on yourself. You do get paid: by God or the universe (whatever you believe in, it’s non-sectarian), with the indescribable peace of mind that comes from this personal work.

I found that after the initial couple of months, the immediate benefits of the retreat ebbed off a bit. I was still doing my two hours’ daily practice, but I found it much harder to concentrate and clear my mind after a busy day, or on the morning after a busy day / week / month. Nevertheless, the deletion of mental blocks, as far as the retreat went, feels permanent; it’s just so that continuing to delete them by myself, in daily life and outside of a retreat setting, has been more challenging to me.

That tallies with the way the business went after a few months: The pilot continued and wrapped up all right, the mentoring programs kicked off and concluded, the sales conversations happened. But, honestly, there wasn’t a continuation of the seismic shift like just after the retreat. Just the consequences of that one post-retreat shift. I’d kind of hoped that if I kept up my practice, the shifts would keep going and Wangari would soar much higher — but alas. Keeping up my practice, I think, has helped solidify the inner and outer progress I made, but I’m not yet (inside and outside) in the zone where continued efforts start to compound in a big way.

Vipassana meditation is not the only thing I practice in daily life (though it’ll be the only thing I’ll be doing, aside from eating, sleeping, washing, and a little walking, in the coming weeks). I’ve found a variety of yoga practices to be effective even on a busy mind, specifically Vinyasa, Yin, and Yoga Nidra. And lately I’ve been exploring Ashtanga Yoga and the foundations of Kriya Yoga to take my practice further. Let’s see how that evolves after the retreat, or if my mind will be calm enough to efficiently practice Vipassana in daily life this time around.

Whether or not I end up in that place post-retreat where continued effort really starts compounding inside and outside, whether one or more seismic shifts happen again or not, or whether any limiting belief or inner blockage gets lifted at all is really none of my concern. That doesn’t mean that I’m free from the hope, hunger and desire for all my inner blockages to be deleted, so that I may enjoy life at its fullest. I very much experience those desires, hungers, and hopes. It just means that I can’t control the results — only the effort I put in. So rather than putting my energy into hope, I try to put it into the practice itself.

It’s the same with the more visible, outer work: Rather than bouncing ideas, I try to build stuff that works. Rather than dreaming about how Wangari could flourish, I open Excel and make a financial plan. That sounds drab, but it really isn’t: Those are the bricks that a house of joy is made of.

I’ll be busy building those bricks for the next couple of weeks in a more invisible way. You can expect me back here (probably with a shorter note in order to not unnecessarily busy my mind) on Tuesday August 25.

Until then, I hope that you, too, continue to thrive and enjoy peace of mind!

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Meanwhile, at Wangari

There’s not much more to say here — I’ll be hard at work on the insides of the machine (uh, I mean, soul), while the outer part stays dormant. I’ll be back here on August 25, renewed and refreshed; literally from the inside.

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Reads of the Week

An extra-long edition, to keep you busy until I’m back.

• The Hardest Battle Is the One Within: Kartik Hosanagar recounts his own experience with a Vipassana retreat. It sounds quite grueling, and the inner stress he goes through forces him regularly to use the one hour per day where you’re allowed to talk to a teacher. It makes my experience look like an exercise in serenity — I later heard of other participants in my course experiencing intense anxiety and not sleeping; meanwhile I slept like a baby and emotions kind of just came and went.

• Stillness & Scale: Building a Startup from a Place of Peace: Reece Griffiths argues that self-realization and self-actualization don’t have to be at odds with one another. One can meditate and read spiritual texts while building a company. Beautifully grounded in literature that I recognize, and deeply relatable to me. I think it’s a great starting point for curious folks.

• You can’t argue your way out of a limiting belief: It would be so nice, wouldn’t it? The number of arguments I’ve fought (and lost) in my head! Danny Kenny enlightens us to why those battles are inevitably lost — and what to do instead: out-evidencing them. He breaks down the neuroscience of belief and offers a two-step framework for shifting your identity. For those who are not up to long and patient silent sits, this seems like a brilliant alternative.

• You Forgot to Exhale: In another brilliant crossover between AI and consciousness, Siosi (Si-O-Si) posits that the modern obsession with consuming more AI tokens is like a form of irregular breathing — all inhalation, no exhalation (asthma, anyone?). Drawing on the Hawaiian concept of hā (the breath of life), he makes the case that cognitive overload is a structural problem, not a personal failure, and that conscious use of technology starts with learning to close circuits as deliberately as we open them. Interesting thought- and breath-piece.

• AI Is Not Conscious, But It Is Becoming Our Unconscious: L. M. Sacasas draws on Hannah Arendt and Alfred North Whitehead to argue that as we outsource more cognitive activity to AI, we generate a growing layer of action in the world that is functionally severed from human judgment and awareness. The analogy to the unconscious is provocative and precise: AI is not thinking for us so much as it is becoming the part of us that acts without our knowing. Ouch. That’s a warning by a philosopher that I might take seriously.

• The inner life we’re trading away: In this interview for Big Think, neuroscientist Christof Koch argues that our culture’s obsession with doing has made us dangerously confused about the difference between intelligence and consciousness. Machines can replicate behavior; they cannot replicate experience. Koch’s warning — that a world organized around output will struggle to value the felt sense of being alive — lands with particular force for anyone who has ever sat in silence and noticed what happens when the “doing” stops.

• Your Identity Is Your Thermostat (and It’s Sabotaging Your Future): Aamer Janbey argues that lasting transformation is impossible without first changing the identity set-point that regulates your external reality back to its baseline. Drawing on neuropsychology and hard personal experience, he maps the four-layer architecture of the inner world and explains why willpower alone will always lose to the thermostat. Vibes with my own limiting beliefs.

• The Identity Transition Framework: Next up, how you actually shift your identity. Liz Pavese, Ph.D. offers a four-phase map for navigating the psychological reorientation that precedes any meaningful change in how you lead or build. Her central insight is that you cannot optimize a transition: trying to skip any one of these phases is how founders end up repainting a crumbling foundation. Precise, compassionate, and immediately applicable to anyone mid-update.

• The 7 Pillars of Inner Peace: Yung Pueblo lays out the internal scaffolding required for peace that lasts — not as the lofty goal of a permanent blissful state, but just as a less turbulent frame of mind built through deliberate practice. From releasing the need to control how others perceive you to finding gratitude in difficult times, each pillar maps closely onto the kind of inner work that makes outer progress possible. A short but grounding read to sit with slowly.