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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Every founder has their moment of reckoning. For Jonas Muff, it happened alone in a Tel Aviv hotel room, paralyzed during a critical funding round, while his mind spun endlessly and his body refused to move. In this episode, he takes us into the emotional architecture of that collapse, and his learnings from it.

Jonas isn’t just the founder of deep tech health startup Vara. He’s a founder who’s interrogated his drive to the core. In conversation, he speaks openly about identity threats, fear as a hidden engine, the myth of resilience, and the path to what he calls “lucid living.” Exclusively for our newsletter subscribers, Jonas has shared additional insights below.

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How to overcome your inner fears

What you will get out of this episode

In our conversation, Jonas shares:

• How to distinguish between purpose-driven work and fear-fueled obsession

• How to notice when your identity is hijacking your leadership decisions

• How to integrate meditation, journaling, and long-term thinking into startup life

• Why founders overthink - and how to escape the loop of self-story and uncertainty

• and much more!

Our main take away’s

1. Breakdowns can be beginnings: Jonas’ collapse during a funding round wasn't just a low, it was the first moment he saw that the story he’d built his life around might not be real. Facing that opened the door to deeper self-awareness and sustainable leadership.

2. Fear often masquerades as drive: What Jonas thought was purpose was, in fact, fear—the fear of not being enough. Once recognized, that fear didn’t disappear, but it stopped steering the ship. The lesson: your most productive work may start where your ego loosens its grip.

3. Entrepreneurial overthinking is a symptom, not a strategy: Founders often try to think their way through uncertainty to avoid discomfort. But in startup life, uncertainty is a feature, not a bug. Recognizing when your mind is looping instead of solving is a skill worth developing.

4. Input matters more than immediate outcome: Thinking in decades, not quarters, and focusing on commitments over expectations can help separate identity from performance. Jonas reframes decisions as bets—intellectually honest attempts in uncertain terrain.

5. Real leadership requires emotional courage: Jonas now leads with candor, even when it disappoints. From direct conversations with employees to modeling vulnerability in all-hands meetings, he shows how honesty, not ego, builds resilient teams and cultures.

6. Inner work is outer leverage, when it’s not about performance: Meditation, therapy, and even psychedelics helped Jonas confront patterns shaped by childhood trauma. But the key insight? When you do inner work for healing—not productivity—the performance often follows.

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Additional material on the topic

• Jonas’ newsletter: A founder’s search for meaning

• Jonas’ essay we talk about in our conversation:

  • The curse of being driven

  • Why people notoriously compare themselves

  • Why founders should take big bets

How to reach out to Jonas

• LinkedIn

• Vara

Exclusive from Jonas

What’s one thing ambitious founders consistently misunderstand about their own psychology?

Founders don’t suffer from failure or rejection – but from imagining it.

What’s one childhood program or belief you had to consciously rewire and how did it change how you lead today?

That I must be special to be seen and to be valuable. Without the fear of not being enough, I take much better decisions because I don’t connect the risk of bad outcomes to my self-worth. The decisions are consistently better because they are not influenced by what bad outcomes could mean for the story I tell about myself.

What’s one moment in the last 12 months where you chose the ‘lucid’ path instead of the ‘driven’ one?

We debated the future strategic direction for my AI cancer company Vara in the board room and I wanted to push for a profitability-focused direction, which many of the investors did not agree to.

Instead of trying to find a narrative so everyone can eventually stand behind, I decided to confront the board even though it meant disappointing expectations and losing the image of the “ideal founder” that keeps boldly focused on the billion-dollar outcome. Instead of avoiding the emotions, I welcomed the opportunity to lose the obsessive connection with the identity I had built over years out of fear. And I once again learned that we mostly suffer in imagination, and it goes away the moment we get the expected negative reaction.

What’s a hard truth about ambition most founders misunderstand?

Our insecurities and fears, even if they drive us to 80 hours workweeks, will define the upper ceiling of how big our companies can become.

If “Lucid Living” were a leadership principle inside a startup culture deck, what would it sound like?

Work for a cause, not applause. Embrace difficult conversations. Take big long-term bets and own them under our own names. Learn to tolerate uncertainty.

You’ve said that many of the most ambitious people of our generation are driven by ‘a quiet fear of not being enough.’ What convinced you that this isn’t just your story, but something systemic?

Almost all of my employees that were creating 80% of the impact had something to prove. Almost every founder I had a deep conversation with, had a chip on his / her shoulder. So I went deeper and looked into the psychology and neuroscience behind this phenomenon, and found evidence that explains it.

You often write about exposing yourself to emotional intensity instead of numbing it. How can discomfort actually become a tool for growth?

Breakdown leads to breakthrough. In real discomfort, we realize that the story we had told ourselves was mind-made and mainly served the purpose to secure self-worth and attention. Only in discomfort, we can separate ourselves from this self-story. With this separation also goes the insatisfactoriness and anxiety that otherwise is a steady companion (sometimes subtler, sometimes more pronounced). This is a life long practice – by seeking responsibility, we will face discomfort, and that’s when we are reminded easiest what we are not.

What is success for you?

Become an authentic character on the way to success.

What books, podcasts, articles inspired you?

I will name the top three:

• Man’s search for meaning - Viktor Frankl

• Power of Now - Eckhard Tolle

• Siddharta - Hermann Hesse

What’s one advice, founders should actually ignore?

That slowing down will lead to more fulfillment in life. I am absolutely against all the self-help advice around slowing down or withdrawing from responsibility. Of course, we feel better in the comfort zone temporarily, but it is an illusion that life lets us stay in the comfort zone all the time – we have to learn tolerate uncertainty and find fulfillment in the difficulty that only building valuable things in life can teach us (companies, families,...).

What are habits, activities or rituals that keep you sane (while scaling your business)?

Meditation, Writing, Deep talk

What is one “growth hack” (be it business, health or personal-wise) that has a positive impact on you or the company?

Show vulnerability – it builds trust, makes people open up, and removes politics from culture.