The Paradigm-Shifting Founder Loop

Every visionary founder that is on the brink of something transformational comes to a moment in time that I’ve come to recognize instantly, even before they do. It doesn’t announce itself with drama. It slips in quietly at the precipice of a breakthrough, when traditional R&D, like MTV's Real World, "stops being polite and starts getting real." It's the point when the idea is finally real enough to touch and therefore real enough to lose.

Beautiful futuristic African American inventor from behind walking on a path toward beautiful lush optimistic future.

Most advisors and investors I've met assume founders freeze because they lack clarity, or discipline, or the mythical “grit” the tech world loves to romanticize. But for me that's not really it. The founders who freeze are the ones carrying the biggest and most transformative visions. They’re the ones who can already sense the weight of what they’re about to midwife into the world. And they are petrified. Rightfully so.

I’ve watched the pattern unfold so many times it feels like a Jungian archetype. A founder sees a future the rest of the world doesn’t yet have the receptors for. It's a shift in reality more than it is a product. The moment they try to articulate it, something shifts. The idea stops being a private ecstasy, a delicious secret between them and the cosmos. It instead becomes something that demands shape, language, and accountability. Once it has form, it can be challenged. Once they raise money for it, it can disappoint. Once they share it, it can fail. No one wants to be told that their baby is ugly.

So instead of stepping outward, they turn inward. They become overwhelmed by the magnitude of what they’re here to steward.

You see, this is the part nobody warns them about. The psychic vestibule. The liminal hallway between vision and embodiment. In this age of LLMs and chatting with personal AI collaboration tools, it masquerades as productivity. These founders create more frameworks, more writing, more reimagining of what was already clear the first time. I’ve seen inventors produce entire libraries of beautiful, unnecessary documents simply because clarity is safer on the page than it is in the world.

On the outside, it looks like indecision. To me, it looks like fear wearing the mask of genius.

The deeper the idea, the deeper the spiral. I’ve seen the body become the battleground, where sleep evaporates, appetite disappears, and immune systems cave under the pressure of an identity that hasn’t yet caught up with the scale of vision that is the calling. I’ve witnessed founders cry not because they doubt the idea, but because they feel the future pressing up against them faster than their nervous system knows how to hold.

I understand this part of the journey intimately both professionally and personally. My own life has taught me again and again that before we cross an important threshold, the psyche demands pause. Sometimes gentle. Sometimes dramatic. But always necessary. I wrote about this pause in my reflections on integration, when I realized how much shedding and shapeshifting had to happen before my own next chapter could arrive.

Founders go through the same metamorphosis. The world just gives them fewer places to talk about it. What I’ve learned through years of watching these loops, and through my work in AI, is that nothing is wrong when a founder collapses. It is not failure. It is not a flaw. It is the moment before the moment. It is the deep inhale before the big leap.

The loop is distracting the founder from the question that must be answered in order to continue forward with integrity and resolve. Are you willing to become someone new in order to bring this into the world?

In any initiative that intends to change us this is the real task. It's not the product, pitch or roadmap. It's the founder's identity.

Visionaries love the infinite but execution requires the finite. And shifting from one to the other feels like defeat. You must surrender the boundless self for the sake of something that demands form.

When founders invite me into walk with them in this intimate space, my role is rarely what they or I think it will be. I’m not there to co-sign their spirals or get lost in the labyrinth of their brilliance. I’m there to hold the charge. To ground the storm. To sense the moment when the spiraling is no longer generative but protective, and gently, clearly, help them move.

Sometimes this looks like naming what’s happening, so they don’t feel alone inside the fog. Sometimes it’s reclaiming the pen when the vision has become too heavy for them to hold alone. Sometimes it’s reminding their body that it’s safe to proceed, that the future won’t collapse if they rest. And sometimes it’s simply sitting with them in the quiet until the next true step emerges from presence instead of from panic.

Over time, I’ve realized this is the work that keeps returning to me, like a tide that knows exactly where I live. It’s the work I’ve been preparing for through every system I’ve built, every creative experiment, every spiritual practice, every piece of my own unraveling and reconstitution.

This is why founders come to me at the edge. For truth over thinking and stewardship over strategy. Sometimes courage trumps optimization.

If you’re a founder reading this and finding yourself in this beautiful, terrifying, disorienting loop, I see you. You aren't stuck. You’re standing at a doorway that only opens from the inside. And you don’t have to cross it alone.

The future needs your visions, yes. But it also needs you whole, grounded, and willing to become the person your idea requires. If you’re there now, hovering at the threshold, reach out. This is the part of the journey I’m built for. Let’s walk through it together.