Background:

I owe much of my spiritual and entrepreneurial fulfillment to psychedelics. In my essay “The Curse of Being Driven” I wrote about my experience with psychedelic therapy in my own mental health journey.

In this conversation, I had the exclusive opportunity to interview one of the most influential entrepreneurs in the psychedelic ecosystem. Florian Brand is one of the founders of AtaiBeckley, which got sold to Eli Lilly for $3.8bn just last week.

This new flagship deal is the culmination point of a long journey for Florian and the entire industry. They had to fight the stigma around psychedelics as party drug to create a portfolio of FDA-approved substances ready to be deployed against depression, trauma or addiction.

Our conversation follows exactly that evolution. It starts with Florian’s personal motivation to get into the space. As the case for psychedelic therapy now is made – and big pharma starts to get involved – the conversation ends with Florian’s next big bet.

The conversation was a full circle moment for me. It happened at START Summit in Switzerland, which happens to be the conference I organized as President of START exactly 10 years before the conversation.

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Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Why psychedelics belong at a tech conference

• 01:44 - Florian's path into psychedelic biotech

• 05:12 - The history and stigma of psychedelic research

• 07:41 - Raising $1 billion for Atai/Beckley

• 09:26 - How drug development works and its economics

• 10:42 - Proof it works: J&J's Spravato and the market gap

• 11:45 - The three generations of psychedelics explained

• 13:21 - The risks and the ecosystem needed to scale

• 15:32 - Commercial paths and pharma interest

• 17:28 - Investing in precision mental health

• 19:08 - Europe vs the US — where to build

• 20:58 - Closing: approvals coming, immediate outlook on the field

That’s what people say about the icons of the game.

The Venture Capital industry has made us glorify founders that keep believing the impossible through a decade of rejections. VC as an entire asset class depends on a few outliers being right when everyone else is wrong.

But that level of drive is often rooted in the founder’s pain. The ego that’s designed to overshadow this pain, will become the biggest threat to the company and the VC’s future return.

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The VC game depends on founder’s lack of self-worth

The legitimation of venture capital as an asset class is that the world’s biggest problems require high-risk R&D and massive distribution scale, both of which demand upfront risk capital that traditional financing won’t provide. Most portfolio companies will fail. That’s priced in. Each one must have the potential to reach billion-dollar valuations for the model to work.

The founders must be willing to go all-in on an idea nearly everyone dismisses and sustain that conviction for a decade. Sometimes, they prove everyone right. But the chances are very high that they will fail, often after years of 70-80 hours work weeks.

Building a bootstrapped small, profitable business has a much higher expected return. But most founders aren’t in for the money.

The real currency is admiration.

As I know today, that is the ultimate symptom of a phenomenon I call the Curse of Being Driven. Psychologists will call it vulnerable narcissism: Highly driven people don’t feel valuable by default. Rather, they have learned in early childhood that they must stand out.

Without it, there wouldn’t be many founders left that would start, and fewer that would refuse to believe any of the 100 reasons why their vision is unrealistic.

For the world’s biggest problems to be solved, some people have to suffer. The startup economy doesn’t just tolerate the founder’s ego. It depends on it.

The founder ego defines the company’s upper ceiling

Unfortunately for the industry, the same fuel that starts great companies also prevents them from scaling.

The Curse of Being Driven can fuel audacious vision and resilience. It is impossible to be exceptionally driven only for good reasons, entirely from a place of genuine purpose. Fear drives the most ambitious of us.

Fear itself is strength. The problem is being unconsciousness of fear. When it runs on autopilot, and we are unaware that we tie our self-worth to outcomes.

I’ve watched this pattern in myself and in founders around me.

I have heard founders justify raging at employees because they “need to be edgy”. But this is just weak character. It’s insecurity performing confidence, the ego lashing out because it felt diminished.

Similarly, founders struggle to admit a strategic mistake for months (mostly to themselves). That’s not necessarily resilience, but protecting the story of the visionary who always gets it right.

Other founders micromanage their strongest people on implementation decisions and technical details. Delegating feels like becoming dispensable, and being dispensable is something the ego can’t easily tolerate.

The dangerous part is that leaders are often unaware of what’s driving their behavior – the ego becomes a massive blind spot.

It may start great companies, but the ego won’t scale them.

The real founder edge

At Vara, I had to confront this myself — layoffs, buying out investors, reinventing the strategy from scratch. But the hardest part was letting go of an identity I had spent a decade defending.

It starts with becoming aware of the pattern. That board meeting where you feel the impulse to spin bad numbers into a better story – noticing that impulse before it becomes a sentence. That conversation where a direct report challenges your strategy, recognizing your defense mechanism as the ego’s alarm system and not as evidence that they’re wrong.

Over time, practices like meditation build the “habit” to catch such moments. The goal isn’t to eliminate fear. That’s not possible and probably not desirable. The intention is to create a gap between the trigger and the reaction. A gap wide enough so that we can choose the reaction.

Most good founders have something to prove. But the founders who build lasting companies are the ones who learn to see their ego clearly enough to stop it from becoming the company’s ceiling. Most learn it through crisis and subsequent contemplative practice – from automatic defense of the ego to conscious engagement with the daily ups and downs of building.

I believe the world urgently needs a new generation of driven minds whose edge is their authenticity and self-awareness.

That’s who I’m trying to become, too.

But in every gold rush, people also chase the feeling of not being left behind.

AI rewrites the rules of the game of startup building. New companies emerge weekly, with €10-20 million in seed (!) funding, building commercial products within weeks, hitting 1M ARR in a few months.

Endless possibilities for those that love building.
But also a never-ending feeling that we can fall behind any time.

Am I moving fast enough compared to others?
Am I missing the opportunity of a lifetime?

The obsession with not missing out made me blind to what I already had.

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Unlimited Possibilities

I’ve been building Vara for 7 years. But right now, it feels like starting from scratch all over again.

The rules of the game have been re-written in the last few months. The AI tools available right now are mind-blowing. Last weekend, I’ve built a custom CRM to orchestrate all our KOL engagement and an AI agent to review complex commercial contracts, benchmark against market standards, and draft lawyer-grade markups (all in 5mins).

Almost every night, I can’t stop working because I’m too excited about the new possibilities. I have never been similarly excited to play, experiment, automate and build ever in my 10 years as an entrepreneur.

After all, I am an entrepreneur because I love building things.

But excitement often has a shadow.

Not Fast Enough

It may be the biggest opportunity of a lifetime. What if I miss it, maintaining something rather than building from zero?

We have raised €25 million and there are expectations from shareholders, business partners, customers and a 30 person team. And we operate in a heavily regulated industry.

We were always considered very agile compared to anyone else in the industry. But the fundamental assumptions with which companies are built today don’t hold true anymore. What was considered fast just a few months ago, simply isn’t good enough anymore.

Every week, new tools and paradigms emerge. Staying on top of the game while running a company with real patients and regulatory requirements demands incredible mental headspace.

You feel like you’re falling behind even on the days you’re moving fast.

Chasing The Greenfield

So I did what many driven people would do.

I spent weekends building prototypes, just to stay sharp, and to prove to myself that I can still build fast. I considered making investments in AI startups. If I couldn’t capture the opportunity directly, I could at least have financial exposure to the value being created around me.

It felt productive. But underneath, the weekend prototypes and investment ideas were symptoms. They were meant to quiet the voices that tell me I must do more, faster, better — because what I have isn’t enough, doesn’t count.

Over the years, I have learned to listen to these voices. Driven people always want to be somewhere else. We compare ourselves, chasing what we can’t have.

But when I actually looked at what to build with AI, the picture was different from what the anxiety was telling me.

The Value of Depth

Over those years, Vara hasn’t only accumulated technical debt, processes and deeply ingrained assumptions.

We have also built a strong brand and clinical evidence that can’t be “vibe coded.” Most importantly, we’ve built ourselves an entire market and a customer base that depends on us every day.

With long-term partners and a good business, we don’t have to raise money. We are surrounded by a team that is eager to grow and learn. The greenfield of starting something new may look great from the outside, but what we’ve built doesn’t have to hold us back — it can be a foundation to create real value.

Only very few companies compete with us for more and more deals. We’re both a credible healthcare institution and a startup with builder mentality. It may be easier for us to embrace AI fully than for anyone else in the industry.

Rebuilding my established company with AI is the opportunity.

Doubling Down

So instead of getting lost in side projects, I am doubling down on what I have. I am rebuilding Vara into an AI-native organization.

The itch to start new things is deeply ingrained in an entrepreneur. But the pull toward something new is almost never only about the new thing. It’s about what the new thing promises to make you feel.

The opportunity isn’t somewhere else.
It’s here. And it comes with responsibility.

Everyone’s journey is different. But for driven minds, the patterns are often identical.

Below is the 6-stage journey I experienced when moving from chronic anxiety to what I call “Lucid Living.” It includes the turning points and the 20 essential resources (books, podcasts, papers) that guided me.

(Full read time is 5mins, scroll down to the reading list if you’re in a hurry)

The full story “The Curse of Being Driven” can be downloaded here. It is the full essay (20mins read) published in September and downloaded >1.500 times.

#1: Breakdown

My entire life, I needed to be special.

I loved the story of the “business graduate turned deep tech entrepreneur,” while others were still back at university. Doubt was answered with harder work and bolder ambition.

Then I faced more than 100 investor rejections during our first bigger investment round. And I took them personally.

My cognitive mind could no longer uphold the story of inevitable success. My body reacted with depression. In the middle of my company’s biggest crisis, I couldn’t even get out of bed anymore before 11am. Yet, I refused the idea that I could have a mental problem.

Because suffering meant weakness.

But at least, for the first time, I asked whether it was possible to build meaningful, generational companies without that kind of suffering — and committed to finding out.

#2: From Performance Coach to Therapy

I became interested in life philosophy – ancient frameworks for how life should be lived. Stoicism particularly resonated: a philosophy that responds to hardship with cognition and willpower, practiced by successful figures like Marcus Aurelius.

In that same spirit of cognitive performance, I opened up to external help, but initially with a clear outcome-oriented mandate too: mental sharpness, preparation for the next funding round.

But the work with my “coach” quickly revealed deeper patterns. For example, I began to see how notorious comparison (article here), situations of awaiting bad news (article here) or uncertainty created deep suffering.

Using cognitive behavioral therapy, especially ACT-based frameworks, I learned to interrupt avoidance patterns and act in line with values rather than fear.

This helped. But only at the surface.

(I am currently writing a deep dive on the specific ACT framework and my experience with it)

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#3: Recognizing My Mind As Source of Suffering

Through therapy, I began to notice how my mind reacts under pressure: obsessive thinking, especially around imagined rejection, failure, or loss of admiration.

I went deeper into the neurosciences behind depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions and took away why driven minds really seem to suffer (article here).

Overthinking is avoidance behavior, not that different from any addiction. And depression has little to do with “being sad”, but everything with suppressing authenticity and emotions.

Around the same time, I stumbled upon The Power of Now. Ironically, I found it among my ex-girlfriend’s belongings after we separated in the aftermath of my struggles. The book articulated something painfully familiar:

I had reduced every moment of life into an obstacle on the way to a better future.

This time, I committed to meditation — not to feel better quickly, but to observe my mind honestly. Meditation is tragically misunderstood, especially by busy people in leadership positions.

Meditation revealed recurring, subconscious patterns with shocking clarity. Almost all of them pointed to the same fear: Not being enough.

That I must perform to be valuable.
That I must stand out to be accepted.

#4: Reliving Challenging Experiences To Understand Childhood Programs

At some point, it became obvious: the cognitive tools from therapy thus far (behavioral therapy) were only crisis management.

Through books and research, I learned about psychedelics and their growing scientific track record in treating mental health disorders.

After months of preparation, I joined a retreat designed for therapeutic depth and careful integration (here is the link, I am happy to introduce you). My intention was simple: to understand where this feeling of never being enough comes from.

(I am currently writing a step-by-step experience report on psychedelic therapy incl. the do’s and don’ts and the checklist to find the right retreat)

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The experience led me back to early childhood — a doctor’s verdict that I might not survive, parental hyper-attention, competition with my sister.

I saw how deeply childhood shapes identity, ambition and self-worth (article here) and was able to back it up with psychology that resonated deeply.

• Attachment theory

• Vulnerable narcissism / Grandiosity theory,

• Internal family systems

Psychedelics didn’t replace therapy. They added a layer that proved crucial in retrospect: psychoanalysis.

#5: Allowing Emotions and Spiritual Peak Experiences

Something else changed in the integration phase of psychedelics therapy.

For most of my life, I had suppressed emotions as weakness and escaped into thinking — the very place my suffering originated.

Meditation shifted from observing thoughts to allowing emotions. To deepen this, I organized two silent retreats: five days each, no talking, no books, no devices, 10-12 hours of meditation per day.

During these retreats, I experienced states of consciousness previously inaccessible to me. They were my first spiritual experiences — which I later partially explained through neuroscience.

To my surprise, the deepest answers emerged at the intersection of science and spirituality: The ego, the stories we defend about who we are, is the primary source of suffering.

#6: Giving Up the Ego – The Life Long Practice

Spiritual peak experiences don’t scale to everyday life — especially not while leading a company through layoffs, growth, and VC expectations.

But they leave traces. Neuroscience shows that such experiences can durably alter perception and behavior (neuroplasticity). Over time, I cultivated an ability to rise above thoughts and emotions. And the triggers for it, I started to find in life, not only in silence.

I began formulating the Commitments of Lucid Living — anchors for a fundamentally different way of engaging with life. For example: I want to take big bets as an entrepreneur (article here) and keep building companies, and I want to live to express, not impress (article here).

This also changed how I lead. The most important step: Letting go of my ego allowed a giant pivot that created an entirely new life cycle for my now fast-growing company (article here).

The seven-year journey may well have saved my company.

Building companies became a way of rebuilding myself.

(Scroll down to learn what I will write about next here on Substack)

The 20 Essential Reading (and Listening-) List

The following lists only the pivotal resources (cutted the list down to 20), in the exact chronological order I encountered them in my journey. I believe those are all must-reads if you find yourself in a similar journey.

1. William Irvine, “Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer and More Resilient” [Stoic Philosophy]

2. Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations” [Stoic Philosophy]

3. Victor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning” [Stoic Philosophy]

4. Eckhardt Tolle, “The Power of Now” [Spirituality]

5. Eckhard Tolle, “Silence Speaks” [Spirituality]

6. Michael Singer, “The Untethered Soul” [Spirituality]

7. Sam Harris, “Waking up” [Spirituality]

8. Sam Harris, Waking up-App, all long meditations [Guided Meditations]

9. Tara Brach, “Listening to Life” (18.8.2022) [Guided Meditations]

10. Michael Pollan, “How To Change Your Mind” [Psychedelics]

11. Tim Ferris Show, with Michal Pollan (#313) [Psychedelics]

12. Alice Miller, “The Drama Of The Gifted Child” [Childhood Psychology]

13. Tim Ferris Show (Podcast) with Gabor Mate (#298) [Childhood Psychology]

14. Hermann Hesse, “Siddharta” [Spirituality]

15. Alan Watts, “Wisdom of Insecurity” [Spirituality]

16. Huberman Lab (Podcast), “The Science of Psychedelics for Mental Health” (22.5.2023) [Psychedelics]

17. Robin Carhart Harris, “The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs” [Psychedelics]

18. “Modern Psychedelics” (Podcast), episode #3 called “The Science of Psychedelics, Consciousness, and Mystical Experiences with the Psychedelic Scientist” [Psychedelics]

19. Huberman Lab (Podcast), “Understanding and Conquering Depression” (23.8.2021) [Neuroscience]

20. Know Thyself (Podcast), “A Rational Mystics Guide to Consciousness & Awakening” (#47) [Spirituality]

Next Frontiers

A a follow-up of my essay The Curse of Being Driven I want to publish bigger pieces on:

1. My leadership philosophy and how it creates successful companies

2. Why psychedelics will change the way we treat mental health

3. Why a society in meaning crisis needs a renaissance of religious values

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Companies are no exception.

Right now, Vara is entering a phase unlike any we have known.

Revenues have tripled. We have brought an independent AI for breast cancer screening to market – from initial idea to regulatory approval and commercial roll-out in a single idea.

Twelve months ago, none of this seemed possible.
We were, by all conventional measures, on steep decline.

The lesson: a new life cycle begins only when the old one is allowed to end.

For something meaningful to be born, something else must die.

In our case, it was the founder’s egos – the versions of ourselves that believed willpower alone could bend the market to our vision.

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Running out of time

Some VC-backed companies simply aren’t meant to follow a typical VC trajectory. Many important businesses with enormous societal value die because founders and shareholders refuse to accept that truth.

When we founded Vara, we had little choice but to follow that path.
We needed venture capital to fund the immense R&D, regulatory challenges, and clinical trials required to build AI that autonomously diagnoses cancer.

Our ambition was endless: to become the vertically integrated screening provider – selling not the AI, but the diagnosis itself. And that story carried us far. It took us into the boardrooms of iconic Silicon Valley investors and into partnerships with major insurers and pharma companies. At the height of that cycle, we had multiple offices and local entities, and a dozen screening centers running on our full-stack technology.

But healthcare isn’t easy to turn upside down. Healthcare systems differ, from country to country. Incentives clash. Behavior changes very slowly.

So, eventually, we ran out of the one resource no startup has: time.

Growth wasn’t steep enough. Bridge rounds replaced true financing. Key employees started to look elsewhere. We were holding the company together only through willpower, not momentum.

You tell yourself you can still steer the wheel.
But some wheels turn on their own.

Accepting who we are

For a founder, acknowledging that a life cycle is ending feels like defeat.

We confuse surrender with giving up. We assume that if we just push harder, the next breakthrough is one corner away. But life cycles don’t listen to effort. And clinging to the old one only postpones the beginning of the next.

Eventually, our choices narrowed down to a dramatic decision:
Sell everything cheaply or rebuild from the ground up.

Either option required letting go of the identity we had wrapped around the company – the polished narrative of the deep-tech founders who raised €30m to change cancer care. That story needed to dissolve so something clearer and truer could grow in its place.

So we restructured.
We let go of 40% of the team.
We shed everything non-essential and returned to our core: world-class AI and a strong foothold in Germany. We stopped maintaining most of our product portfolio and integrated into existing healthcare IT – accepting a smaller market and the risk of commoditization.

The result: no longer a VC case, at least not in the traditional way.

But that’s where new cycles begin.

From resistance to momentum

Over the past year, we rebuilt with a new generation of talent – and saw 100% employee retention in 2025. We adopted incentives and a cost structure aligned with what the company actually is: 2-3x growth in the next years, compounding steadily rather than exploding.

And here’s the irony:

In the quiet of this new cycle, we began to notice that the world was finally catching up.

Radiologists are buying AI. National screening programs are considering AI as a second reader replacement. And contrary to the old narrative, algorithms are not becoming commodities. Only a handful of companies have validated their technology in large clinical trials – and even fewer will still be standing a few years from now.

Just when we stopped trying to be what we weren’t, the world opened a path for what we actually are.

This is what life cycles teach us, if we let them.
That endings are not failures.
That surrender is not the opposite of ambition.
That a company, like a person, renews itself the moment it stops clinging to the story of how things were supposed to go.

Whenever something dies – an ego, a narrative, a trajectory – it leaves behind the only thing that ever creates the next beginning:
space for something true to grow.

* I wrote this in collaboration with my co-founder, Stefan.

The surprising conclusion:

We don’t suffer from failure or rejection itself, but from imagining it.

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When I raised the first larger round for Vara, we were awaiting final feedback from the last investor still in the race.

The days between the final presentation and the decision were among the worst of my life — one of the most dreadful episodes of overthinking I had ever experienced.

When we finally received the rejection, I expected I would be devastated for days. Instead, I woke up with more energy and clarity than at any point in the long fundraising campaign.

Failure felt like relief.

This repeated again and again:

The key employee who schedules a surprising 1:1 for a “personal update.” The suffering stops the moment he finally communicates his resignation.

Or the strategy shift investors won’t like. Days of rewriting the narrative — and the instant their outrage hits in the board meeting, the mind quiets.

What is going on here?

Identity Under Threat

Amid a difficult fundraising round, the deepest threat is not that the round will fail. Insolvency and layoffs are terrible outcomes.

But the real fear is what this failure would mean for who we believe we are.

Raising big rounds has become a proxy for greatness. We’re afraid of losing the image of being the one who never gives up. We’re terrified of no longer being special.

And this dynamic appears everywhere:
waiting for a publisher’s verdict, the unexpected calendar invite from a key employee, the moment you’re unsure whether a setback is temporary or the beginning of a downfall — of a company, an idea, even a relationship.

Driven people build their identity on outcomes. Achievement becomes worth. Admiration becomes love.

So they evaluate situations like the above through the lens of identity. And when that identity is endangered, the mind defends it.

That’s where suffering begins.

The Attempt to Control the Uncontrollable

It’s our job to do everything we can to prevent failure.

But there comes a point where we’ve done everything possible. After that, the outcome depends on timing, luck, other people — forces outside our control.

Because we confuse achievement with worth, this lack of control becomes intolerable. So the mind shifts to the one thing it believes it can still influence:

The story we tell ourselves.

Awaiting critical feedback, potential failure or rejection, we start rehearsing every possible explanation:

“If another founder closes their round, does that mean I’m not good enough?”
“If the key employee leaves, does that mean he doesn’t believe in me anymore?”

This becomes a job without end — and one the brain cannot sustain.

The Neural Machinery of Suffering

People with depression, anxiety, and burnout share a common pattern:

Heightened activity in the brain’s default mode network (DMN) — the system responsible for maintaining our sense of identity.

When we mentally suffer, attention gets stuck on ourselves. DMN hyperactivity is the neural correlate of overthinking — the mind’s attempt to preserve a coherent identity and defend self-worth.

But this keeps cortisol chronically elevated. Short spikes are essential. Chronic elevation suppresses serotonin uptake. Low serotonin is a well-known pathway into mental health disorders.

If the identity threat persists long enough, ambition turns from fuel into misery.

That’s why even failure can feel strangely liberating.

The Illusion of Relief

Suffering stops the moment failure or rejection becomes fact.

As long as failure exists only in imagination, the mind has unlimited scenarios to obsess over. Once we know the outcome, we can rebuild the story we tell ourselves.

“It’s not surprising the round failed — healthcare startups are struggling everywhere.”
“The other founder succeeded because B2B SaaS grows faster than regulated deep tech.”

With certainty, the mind reconstructs identity and restores a sense of worth.

But for driven people, the relief is only temporary. Every new pursuit, decision, and next step opens fresh uncertainty.

Around every corner lies a new threat to identity.

So we spend our lives defending ourselves — with catastrophic consequences for the nervous system.

An Underrated Skill: Tolerance for Uncertainty

The only way out of the Curse of Being Driven is to decouple self-worth from the story of achievement.

We have to learn to first endure, and eventually even enjoy, uncertainty.

The path to building truly great companies begins when we stop begging the future to prove we’re worthy — and learn to stand unshaken in the unknown that comes with creating something from nothing.

A really dark rabbit hole

Highly driven people often compare themselves to others.

“Others raised larger rounds than I have. They hit €1M ARR within months, while my startup is still searching for product market fit.”

“Just months ago, younger founders asked me for advice — now they’ve closed a round with a top-tier SF-based VC fund.”

We ask ourselves what’s so special about them. And what’s missing in us.

Years earlier, at the prestigious university: exams aced, top of class, leading a major university club and earning extracurricular prestige. All the internships paid off: a job at McKinsey, as the first from the peer group. But a year later, others followed, and now climb faster.

It can go so far that, deep down, without ever telling anyone, we hope others fail. Even friends. Then comes the guilt – for not being more genuine, because that’s what society expects from us.

That’s one of the darkest rabbit holes an overthinking mind can fall into: the need to stand out, colliding with the desire to belong.

A powerful framework

The good news: I’ve found a way to deal with that rabbit hole.
The bad news: a deeper shift is still required. But the positive first:

We must train ourselves to focus less on outcomes, more on what we can control.

I’m a terrible surfer, but even I know: the best surfers can’t ride a perfect wave if there are no waves. If there’s no momentum in the market, even the best founders won’t build a billion-dollar company.

Sometimes another founder just catches a better wave. But that doesn’t mean they’re more talented. Sometimes all a surfer can do is paddle hard and wait.

Only blaming the waves is victimhood. But sometimes the best surfers stand out not by paddling harder — but by switching beaches altogether. Letting go of a wave doesn’t automatically make you a bad surfer.

Hard work, patience, and the ability to accept bad momentum are all within our control. We can control how we paddle — but not the waves, not the market, not the competition.

It is very important to separate input from outcome.

Why we really compare ourselves

The metaphor helped me because it’s a cognitive framework that reframes a situation. As an analytically wired person, I like frameworks like that. They are actionable and safe, because I am used to solving my problems in my head.

But all they do is reframe, not heal what’s fundamentally missing.

Anything addressed only on the cognitive level will always be a “band-aid.”

Because beneath the fear of being “less than others” lie old emotions and rigid programs: Our nervous system still carries childhood wounds, when we learned how to behave to be loved and seen (see When Childhood Writes Our Story).

My drive to be exceptional, for example, came from a fear of not being seen after my younger sister was born. The possibility of not standing out is a threat — because I had learned that invisibility could mean neglect.

The constant need for validation is an addiction. Like any addiction, it comes from injury: the mind constantly trying to reassure us that we’re valuable and loved, because we once learned we’re not – unless we do, possess, or become something special.

The “Lucid Living” way

Focusing on input rather than outcome is a good start. But no framework can overwrite those deep-seated patterns for good.

There will always be moments when it breaks. And yes, sometimes others are simply better — more talented, more charismatic, more skilled. The path therefore can’t be to depend on frameworks.

Even worse is to lower our ambition to avoid comparison. The “slow down” advice from the mental health bubble misses the point. You can quit the race, but the pattern stays. And you can’t hide from comparison forever.

The only long-term path is to understand and live with what’s missing deep within — not by numbing the emotion or explaining it away, but by feeling it.

Expose yourself to comparison until the emotions grow so loud that the framework breaks, until you stand unguarded. Only then you’ll see: the emotions are not that bad. The obsessive urge to set ourselves apart serves an old story. When there are better surfers out there, it does not mean that you are not valuable.

Before, the pain was unspecified, unfamiliar. With more exposure to the pain and the willingness to understand where it really comes from, the pain turns into familiar emotions. Then, emotions lose their momentum, until we’re okay with being worse than others. Paradoxically, through that acceptance, by overcoming the limiting belief born from fear, we’ll have a much higher ceiling, and achieve much more.

In conclusion, Lucid Living means taking big bets, building things that truly matter — and even actively finding situations where we’re worse than others.

Because those moments are invitations to break free from patterns that quietly hurt us, our relationships, and the world we live in.

For almost a decade, I’ve put everything behind the goal of building a legacy as a deep tech founder. Now, I’ve gone public about the years I spent facing the curse behind that drive – and finding answers in unexpected places.

Since sharing my essay and posting regularly on social media, many people have asked why I decided to write in public — as if there must be a greater purpose behind it.

“Is this your new business? Aren’t you still building Vara?”

“Are you trying to build a personal brand?”

At first, I felt deeply misunderstood by these questions, because they assumed a transactional motive behind my writing.

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Of course, I’m still running Vara as its CEO. I’m writing not despite being an active founder, but because I am still in the trenches. Writing has become a way to process the everyday pressures of leading a company.

I also write because I’ve always been drawn to questions about meaning – ever since debating with the Catholic priest in my Swiss village at 18 years old. The suffering that came with building a deep tech company right after business school has given me deeper perspectives on those questions. But there aren’t many people in my life I can share them with. So I write to find likeminded minds – people whose thinking I can absorb and with whom I can explore spirituality at the edge of high-performance business culture.

And finally, I went public with my essay because I genuinely believe it’s the most important work I’ve done so far – perhaps even more important than the cancers we help detect every day with Vara. The world urgently needs a generation of entrepreneurs, creators, and builders who confront the curse of their drive – who lead from values, not fear or trauma. We’re living through a crisis of meaning that has become an epidemic of mental health disorders. What we need is nothing less than a renaissance of spirituality and religious values.

Whenever someone asked about my “motive” – implying there must be a commercial reason behind it – I wanted to shout all of this back.

But as I reflected, I realized I had indeed lost track of my authentic motivation. Before I knew it, I had slipped into the same metric-driven mindset I was writing about. I found myself nervous on the days I published a new Substack or LinkedIn post, watching the numbers, comparing myself to other creators. During meditation, I caught my mind obsessing over how to grow faster, how to optimize performance.

If I’m brutally honest, I wasn’t upset because people misunderstood me. I was upset because their assumptions contained a truth I didn’t want to face: an inconsistency between my values and what I still carry within me.

Once again, I had surrendered to my own “Curse of Being Driven” — while publishing an essay by the same name.

A key anchor of my life philosophy, Lucid Living, is to “live to express, not impress.” A few weeks after launching the essay, I had already lost sight of that.

But as I wrote in the essay, Lucid Living isn’t a light switch you flip once. It’s an ongoing practice – a commitment to stay mindful of our thoughts and emotions. It seeks emotional intensity precisely so we can confront our fears and the old childhood patterns that still drive much of our ambition.

Publishing such a personal, vulnerable essay brought exactly that intensity. It has, in an unexpected way, become a great test for my life philosophy – a reminder of how easy it is to fall back into the curse, and how necessary it is to keep showing up in public, precisely because that’s where growth happens.

And that, I now remember, is the real reason I’m writing in public.

I moved to Berlin almost a decade ago. I loved the story I was living.

While my peers were still at university, I was already raising millions, building technology to save lives.

That story carried me forward — until it collapsed during our first fundraising round in 2019. Investors expect resilience. I couldn’t get out of bed at 11 a.m.

To understand why, I had to go back to childhood.

Echoes of Childhood

After the breakdown in late 2019, I started therapy. Then meditation.

Until one day I lay on a mattress with eye shades and earphones — at a psychedelic therapy retreat.

Under the impact of LSD, I relived my premature birth. Doctors weren’t sure I would survive. I was kept in an incubator, separated from my mother.

As the first-born, surviving made me the focus of my parents’ full attention. At the retreat, my guide’s presence felt like that same undivided attention — until she had to help someone else.

I had felt that before. My younger sister wasn’t in the room, but the scenes mirrored her birth: attention shifting away. She passed through those early years more lightly, soon outpacing me.

Someone else had stepped into the light. I was left with the sense of being overtaken, carrying the weight of proving myself.

Just like my sister, other retreat participants were suddenly ahead of me — dancing to the music — while I was still lying there. Trying to escape the competition, I moved to the balcony, then to the garden. Always a step ahead.

Behind it all was the same anxiety that haunted me as a founder: the fear that my worth depended on being first, on doing something special.

Even “Happy” Childhoods Leave Traces

Those scenes revealed something I had never understood: much of what drives us comes from patterns we never chose.

When studying childhood trauma, psychologists point to “adverse childhood experiences” — abuse, neglect, loss. But there’s another kind of trauma, quieter but much more common.

When children explore the world, they experience strong impulses and emotions. Those with secure attachment learn it’s safe to be themselves. But when feelings aren’t met with acceptance, they adapt. Love seems conditional. Certain behaviors win attention, others don’t.

In those early years, the brain’s extreme plasticity turns experience into lasting patterns — programs that define how we believe the world works. Suppressing authentic impulses becomes the default operating system. Because it’s ultimately about a child’s emotional survival.

That’s how even happy childhoods leave deep traces. These programs don’t vanish in adulthood. They keep us searching for value in success, relationships, perfectionism, or big dreams — substitutes for the fulfillment we can’t get from simply being ourselves.

We dedicate our lives to them, not realizing they’re running the show.

The Downfall of Grandiosity

In my case, nothing dramatic had gone wrong. I grew up in a loving family. And yet, the programs had already begun to run.

My drive to be exceptional shaped an identity, a story. Meaning in life depended on whether the “business graduated turn entrepreneur” succeeded. Starting a company straight from university, ahead of my peers, came from the same energy that once pushed me to that balcony at the retreat.

Psychology has a word for it: grandiosity — the pursuit of achievement and admiration to fill the absence of genuine self-worth. Clinically, it often appears as vulnerable narcissism: a fragile sense of self seeking protection in constant striving and recognition.

Among ambitious people I’ve met — entrepreneurs, politicians, athletes, creatives — the pattern is so often the same. When we don’t feel valuable by default, we look for worth in what we achieve. Admiration becomes love. Progress becomes fulfillment. Life turns into a quest for accomplishment, every moment a hurdle between us and meaning.

But life is full of hurdles — especially for the ambitious. When grandiosity starts to collapse — say, during a fundraising round with a hundred rejections — the buried fear resurfaces. There’s always the threat that love can be taken away. That fear can keep even the most driven founders in bed at 11 a.m. during their company’s biggest crisis.

That’s the Curse of Being Driven: the bigger the hole inside, the stronger the drive — and the more threatening the uncertain future feels. Exceptional drive originates from, and circles back to, suffering.

To understand our drive, we must first face the threat it tries to hide.

Paradoxically, even with what I know now about the suffering throughout these years, I wouldn’t take fewer big bets.

Lucid Living is an appeal for audacious ambition – but for the right reasons.

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A decade in the VC hamster wheel

In 2019, I raised the first major round for my company Vara – back when computer vision was the first big AI wave, before today’s LLM hype.

Other founders around me were raising big rounds, capital was available. Some of the best tech VCs still wanted to get an AI deal in radiology. Our round had to be not just a capital injection – but a statement.

To build a great VC company, you need a $100M ARR business within a decade. The market must be big enough, the moats high enough. Back then, radiology AI was already crowded, so we followed a contrarian vision. Multiple trips to San Francisco, meetings with Silicon Valley giants like Keith Rabois – this was the peak of my entrepreneurial grandiosity.

In health tech AI, you need heavy upfront investment: years of foundational research, regulatory hurdles, prospective clinical evidence. What takes decades in healthcare must fit into 10 year VC fund cycles. But radiologists wouldn’t buy so quickly. To unlock willingness to pay, you must go very deep on a specific problem – and you end up with smaller markets in return.

By this time, you’re already locked into high valuations. The next round must be even bigger. We pivoted toward a different model in very different markets: building screening programs in emerging countries where women aren’t screened yet, going B2C and B2B, building data products for pharma. It was a big bet, and the burn rate exploded.

And when traction didn’t come fast enough, the spiral began: multiple rounds of layoffs, the loss of key talent who still wanted to play “Champions League.” From the outside: a company in decline.

Breakdown as breakthrough – on many levels

The point is not to warn against VC money or big bets. That would be too easy – and the opposite of my philosophy, Lucid Living.

Without the wrong bets, we also wouldn’t have had the right ones – and those did create lasting value.

Today Vara covers 40% of Germany’s national screening program. We published the world’s largest prospective AI study – with half a million women. And every single day, cancers are caught which would otherwise be missed. We’re on the way to profitability, while pushing for the first reimbursement of autonomous AI in radiology.

None of this would exist without bold bets, because we wouldn’t have gotten the capital to build all of this.

In hindsight, it’s tempting to call some choices “mistakes.” But often the decision wasn’t wrong – only the outcome. There’s a razor’s edge between persistence and delusion. In the middle of a crisis, you never know if you’re facing a dip (temporary pain before the upswing) or a drop (time to quit). Many founders quit too soon. Some of the biggest companies were almost “dead” before they became household names.

That’s the irony of the curse of being driven. Our drive keeps us going through dips – and sometimes that endurance is what changes industries. But if it’s a drop, the same drive can destroy both founder and company.

Meanwhile, on a very personal level, even though I did suffer a lot in the “hamster wheel,” I wouldn’t trade the suffering. Without it, I wouldn’t have discovered an entirely different dimension of human experience, the Lucid State – where emotions are no longer enemies but doorways into deep meaning.

The last-minute investment committees when everything is at stake, the all-hands when desperate questions require clear and compassionate answers, the emergency meetings with co-founders where emotions run as deep as in marriage – those moments weren’t just painful. They were the very texture of intensity where real depth emerges.

Lucid Living means taking bets, but for different reasons

No, I don’t regret the bets. But today, I take big decisions differently.

Too often I acted from fear: fear of letting down investors, fear of being ordinary, fear of being left behind. At the time I didn’t see that fear was running the show, imprinted since childhood.

Today, I still want Vara to be the first AI company with nationwide reimbursement for autonomous AI. I want to build a business that lasts generations, profitable and steady. I want to lead with a family-entrepreneur spirit, shaping lives and caring for people along the way.

This still requires big decisions and audacious vision. But not to quiet fear. Not to earn love or avoid guilt. I take big bets because I want to live them fully. They are no longer a reaction to fear. They are a conscious choice.

That’s Lucid Living as an entrepreneur: exposing myself to emotional intensity, but grounded in values instead of fear.

I wrote an essay (download possible here) on why drive often turns into suffering and how to build with more meaning.

Many of the most ambitious people of our generation are driven by a quiet fear of not being enough.

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Autumn 2019. I was raising funds for my first startup and had reached a breaking point. I flew to Israel to meet three investors. It was the last chance to still convince them and secure a term sheet before we ran out of money at Christmas. It was “all or nothing”.

But I missed two of the three meetings because I couldn’t get out of bed until 11 a.m. I canceled them from my hotel room, wide awake for hours, fully aware I’d flown to Tel Aviv for exactly those meetings, yet more exhausted than I had ever been.

The past decade, my entire twenties, has been devoted to building a legacy as a founder. I put everything behind the goal of creating a billion-dollar company. We did raise that round in 2019, the first of several to follow. Today, my company provides AI-based cancer screenings to far over a million women a year, reached 40% of all screening centers in Germany, and completed the world’s largest prospective trial for AI in healthcare with half a million participants.

But in the shadows of those achievements was a decade ruled by anxiety. I could barely remember what it felt like not to worry.

After that near-breakdown in Tel Aviv, I began to question the true cost of my drive and discovered that I started my journey as an entrepreneur for the wrong reasons.

The engine behind my achievements wasn’t purpose, but fear.

Why This Journey Matters

Last week, I published an essay called “The Curse of Being Driven”.

Read the Essay

The reactions to the essay confirmed what I’ve heard in countless conversations over the past 10 years: many of the most ambitious people of our generation are driven by a quiet fear of not being enough.

The Curse of Being Driven gives language to that phenomenon.

I write for those who, like me, are obsessed with progress and achievement – founders, builders, high achievers – yet live with an inner restlessness that no milestone seems to quiet.

The essay is a deep inquiry into the nature of drive – told through my own story, informed by psychology, neuroscience, and Eastern philosophy. It is an attempt to understand what fuels us, and why it so often turns into suffering. At the heart of this inquiry lies one question: is it possible to live with ambition but without being ruled by it? Or is anxiety the unavoidable price of drive?

Out of my own search grew a perspective I call Lucid Living. It is not about abandoning ambition or withdrawing from responsibility. It is about engaging differently with life’s intensity – whether that’s a fundraising crisis, a failing relationship, or a painful goodbye. Lucid Living suggests that breakdowns can become breakthroughs, and that the weight of our commitments can be the path into meaning and peace rather than threat.

Where This Goes Next

This is just the beginning of a longer journey. I want to connect with others who also think often about the meaning behind building – and, ultimately, behind life. I hope to meet the most talented, most driven but also most reflected entrepreneurs, creators, executives and shapers out there.

That’s why I’m writing here: to go deeper in public.

On this Substack, I’ll share in-depth articles once a month, plus shorter reflections and tools (the most personal of which will be for subscribers only).

On the roadmap:

• Tools and frameworks for founders and ambitious people – how I practice “Lucid Living” as a startup CEO

• Reflections on childhood and generational trauma – and how invisible “programs” shape our adult lives

• The science-backed promise of psychedelics in mental health

• What secular spiritual experiences can teach us about faith and meaning

• The Western meaning crisis – and why a virtue-based system may help us reconnect

The essay was just the start. What comes next is a deeper excavation into what it means to build with meaning – and I’d be honored if you joined me.

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The Curse Of Being Driven

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An attempt to understand what fuels us, and why it so often turns into suffering. Based on psychology, neuroscience and Eastern philosophy, it introduces a new attitude to a life with ambition, responsibility and difficulty.

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What comes next:

This is only the beginning. In the months ahead, I’ll share:

1. Concrete tools, experiences and frameworks for founders and highly ambitious people – how I apply Lucid Living as a startup CEO.

2. Childhood and generational trauma – how even the most loving households pass on invisible “programs” that define how we go through life as adults.

3. The science-backed promise of psychedelics – why and how they may become a cornerstone of mental health treatment.

4. The role of faith and spirituality – what secular spiritual experiences taught me about the divine, and its potential contribution to the growing mental health epidemic.

5. The meaning crisis of the Western society — why we lack orientation, and how a virtue-based value system may help us re-connect with each other.