Key Highlights from Our Conversation:

The Wedding Night Excel File
Alex's wake-up call came at a shocking moment - the night before his wedding. Instead of celebrating, he found himself on a video call with his executive team, staring at an Excel spreadsheet deciding which 30 employees to lay off. They had created a point system based on which employees had families and how easily they might find new jobs. This raw, unfiltered look at the human cost of exponential growth became his turning point.

The Billion Dollar Visualization
Once a year, Alex and his co-founders at Happyforce practice a powerful exercise - they close their eyes and visualize their bank accounts suddenly containing one billion euros (tax-free). Then they explore how their lives would change over the next 18 months. After imagining world travel, luxury purchases, and other indulgences, they inevitably realize that what they truly want is exactly what they already have: meaningful work with people they love. This revelation completely reframes the entrepreneurial equation.

The "Until Your Last Day" Philosophy
Perhaps Alex's most transformative insight comes from his martial arts practice: approaching entrepreneurship as if you'll be doing it until the day you die. This "infinite timeline" mindset changes everything. "What if you ask yourself: what I'm doing today, is this what I want to do till the last day of my life?" Alex poses. This eliminates artificial urgency, forces sustainable practices, and redefines success away from exit events and toward building something that brings lasting fulfillment.

The White Belt Mindset
Another powerful concept comes from Alex's lifelong martial arts practice. He's continually drawn to being a white belt - starting over in new disciplines. "When you are a white belt is when you have more things to learn with the least amount of pressure," he explains. This deliberate embrace of the beginner's mindset stands in stark contrast to most achievement-oriented founders who constantly seek to "level up" their status and expertise.

The Unnatural Growth Paradigm
When faced with difficult decisions, Alex turns to nature for answers. His observation that exponential growth in nature occurs only in viruses and cancers led him to question the fundamental startup growth model. "If your company grows at an exponential rate, it turns into a cancer, and people suffer - employees, clients, providers, founders." Instead, he advocates for natural, sustainable growth that allows for adaptation and evolution without the destructive consequences of hypergrowth.

The Founder's Health Triangle
Alex identified three core pillars for founder health: Nutrition (noting the surprising connection between sugar consumption and fear responses), Movement (not just exercise, but varied, complex movement patterns), and Emotional Understanding (learning to work with emotions rather than being controlled by them). For founders accustomed to "fixing" external problems, this internal focus can be particularly challenging but essential.

Entrepreneurship as the Daily Ice Bath
Perhaps most striking was Alex's reframing of entrepreneurship itself: "Entrepreneurship is my daily ice bath," he says, referring to the practice of cold exposure for physiological and mental benefits. In this view, the purpose of entrepreneurship isn't the output—it's the personal growth that comes from facing fears and challenges. "If you already started, you're already a successful entrepreneur," Alex insists. "It has nothing to do with exits or revenue or funding rounds."

My Personal Reflections:

Getting to know Alex in this interview was like meeting an old friend I hadn’t spoken to for a long time. The challenges he went through and the wisdom he developed for himself, and he’s now materializing for his company and client,s is literally mind-blowing. I really felt we knew each other from a previous life, who knows, maybe that’s true.

What impressed me the most was his boldness about how the VC world is corrupted. He clearly points the finger on exponential growth we all are taught to chase at all costs. But in nature, the most optimized system ever built, exponential growth only happens for viruses and cancer. Is this really the way we want to build impactful companies? Definitely a lot of food for thought here…