Memorable Quotes:
“I felt the purpose being sucked out of me for the first time. I was having a quarter-life crisis. I was 24 at the time. I felt like something was off because I didn’t feel I could change anything significant in my life. I felt this, yeah, it was an emptiness. And I remember wanting to hit my head on the Excel tables before me because I didn’t feel that I had any significant impact.” – Christian Fenner
“The one thing that you definitely have as a founder is having agency. And I think that really attracted us to becoming founders.” – Mathias Tholey
“We were bold. We were really bold and going for it. And fueled by this purpose and the initial success, we made decisions to grow the company further and further. And we were young and inexperienced. And in hindsight, we then started to make mistakes because we hadn’t experienced failure. And revenue grew, but the losses also grew. Our awareness of human beings, and this was all before the School of Founders, didn’t grow at all. We were just stressed out.” – Christian Fenner
“I think there are very few people that ever lived who have burned 10 million euros as fast as we did. And now looking back, I’m really happy it didn’t go that way because the roller coaster we had was the only way for me to really hit the wall and learn from it. And I think it would have been detrimental to my character and my growth, as a person, if everything had gone well. So I’m thankful that we were these inexperienced founders. We’ve eaten so much shit and we’ve, you know, we’ve heard so many times that at one point we had, like it forced us to become really humble about our opinions. It almost broke our boldness. – Mathias Tholey
“The inner game runs the outer game. We were a typical overhyped startup that almost crashed because all our non-reflected parts were just scaled into the company. And this, for me, was game-changing and also going to the observer’s position, right? To look at yourself as a human being, as a young guy, and also being more gentle. And because I think we were just warriors with a strong back, like running like crazy, but there was no open heart. There was no soft heart, empathy. There was empathy for our employees, but not really empathy for us.” – Christian Fenner
“I was like a bloody beginner. And I think any founder is probably triggered by that. And you want to catch up on the others. If you feel like somebody, somebody else is already doing great, and you recognize these people as amazing leaders, you want to get there too. And this kind of triggered an insatiable curiosity to look into my shadows.” – Mathias Tholey
“It doesn’t take much for us to fall back into old patterns. But now what happens is we have the vocabulary to reflect on what just happened, and we can clear things and sort things out for ourselves. And that’s the amazing thing. That’s the consciousness that we gained from taking this course with Sebas.” – Mathias Tholey
“This is not a science. It’s an art. It’s an imprecise art. And it’s a practice. And we are daily, regularly, this is the point of leadership, we are daily confronted with the parts of ourselves that need to grow. That’s the gift of leadership. That’s the gift of entrepreneurship.” – Jerry Colonna
“Whatever organization you lead or whatever family you lead or whatever activity in your life, these leadership skills are useful 360, 24/7. People come for the recipes and then they leave us grateful for the transformation that happened with them and how that exactly happens.” – Sebastian Ross
“I burned a belief that I held deeply. It was this belief of not being enough, and this, I think typical founder belief system of being an imposter. And this is a show I’m putting on. And this led to me being a people pleaser, a perfectionist, micromanaging founder. These are examples of how this goes into the company, which made the whole culture not ideal. But the core was actually me being super insecure. And this is what we worked on together to find out where does that come from? And this is still something I’m working on.” – Christian Fenner
“I think how the company does, how people feel in the office, how they show up, is a reflection of the inner game of the founders.” – Mathias Tholey
“It was in that retreat that it came upon me, and I understood why I was allowing myself to be an ogre towards other people and thinking that that was okay. And it came down to this belief that I wasn’t welcome in this world. And it was like, was an explosion, and it all made sense. It’s something that I’m conscious about now, but it doesn’t mean it’s gone. It’s still there, and I have to really work on it. And then there are weeks where I have more space to think about it and consider it and work on it and against it. And there are other weeks where you’re just overwhelmed by work, something kind of like got messed up, and you need to fix it.” – Mathias Tholey
