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I’m getting excited about how many business leaders I am seeing that are starting to engage in the inner work and the exploration of consciousness. It seems like there are more and more leaders everyday opening up about parts of their life outside of killin’ it.
Today’s guest, Andy Johns, is someone I have followed since 2016 when I participated in a startup growth program called Reforge where he was a guest lecturer.
In my opinion, Andy is one of the most prolific startup growth executives in the past 10-15 years having been a leader at 8 consecutive billion dollar startups including Facebook, Twitter, Wealthfront, Quora, and others. He’s also helped lots of emergent growth leaders along the way as “growth” started to become a formalized function in startups.
In this conversation, Andy shares his personal experience of working on his mental health and consciousness through the context of being an ambitious person in the world of high growth startups. I admire his courage to share his experience and at a certain point in his journey, step away to focus on this part of his life with all of his energy.
Though I didn’t leave my startup, in many ways I can relate to his story where it felt like my spiritual awakening basically took over my life for a number of years. I was at my startup physically, but somewhere completely different on the inside. It can be a very humbling and difficult to situation to navigate, so I applaud anyone who not only pushes through this path, but is brave enough to talk publicly about it.
This conversation covers lots of meaty topics. Things like:
What do you do when you no longer care about the same things as your peers and even friends?
Trying to figure out what you even like when you realize you’ve just been a ball of conditioned ideas for most of your life
What role do things like psychedelics play in all of this? (Hint, it’s not all just gravy!)
I found the conversation with Andy to be very thought provoking & enjoyable and I think you will too.
If you want to follow more of his work, I recommend checking out his Substack
to stay up to date on his writings and new projects that we talk about in the episode!Big love,
-Scott
If you like reading and listening to this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
The Inner Journey of One of Silicon Valley’s Top Growth Leaders (Andy Johns)