Tom McAuley spent 15 years building companies and drinking through the pressure, until it all came apart during COVID.

Tom is a social entrepreneur, and in this conversation he and Vlada don't skip the hard parts. They go back to the kid who felt uncomfortable in his own skin, the performance anxiety that started with one missed shot, the years he drank to quiet it, and the collapse that nearly ended things. What he found on the other side wasn't a five-year plan. It was running, sobriety one night at a time, and learning to trust that life is happening for him, not to him.

In this episode:
• Why you can't think your way into feeling better, and what actually shifts it
• Choosing faith over fear as a daily practice, not a one-time decision
• The reframe that changes everything: that life is happening for you, not to you
• Hitting rock bottom, addiction, and the first small steps back to yourself
• Letting go of doing it all, and the relief of trusting life
• How a single moment of performance anxiety can shape decades
• Learning to be seen while building something no one else can see yet
• The "divine irony" of building a conscious alternative to sports betting after his own recovery

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:48 The unconscious journey and "the perfection of it all"
05:52 The basketball story: uncomfortable in his own skin
10:48 How drinking became the solution
22:56 Letting go of doing it all
34:53 Hitting bottom and the reframe that changed everything
40:30 His niece, and deciding to change

▶️ Watch the full episode now.
Subscribe to Heartful Wonders for new conversations every other Tuesday about following your heart when the path isn't clear.

👤 About Tom McAuley:
Tom McAuley is the founder of Upside, building a conscious alternative to existing sports betting apps. He's spent 15 years as an entrepreneur, came through addiction and the hardest chapter of his life, and now channels everything he learned into helping people struggling with mental health and addiction.

💻 Tom can be found:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-mcauley-b7942838/

✨ About Vlada Bortnik:
Vlada Bortnik arrived in the U.S. from Ukraine as a refugee at 11. She went on to co-found Marco Polo, a video messaging app that helps people feel close, with 10 million+ downloads, 2.5 million five-star reviews, and a Webby Award. It remains independent and profitable with no ads. Newsweek named her to its Most Loved CEOs list. Anthem named her Product Leader of the Year. She built the company alongside her husband Michał while raising two young children, and she's open about what it takes to do both.

💻 Vlada can be found:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlada
- Substack: https://heartfulwonders.substack.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vladabortnik
- Marco Polo: https://www.marcopolo.me/

📎 Resources mentioned:
• Rich Roll on Overcoming the Uncertainty of 2020, Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais (the "within struggle lies opportunity" reframe): https://findingmastery.com/podcasts/rich-roll-3/
• Clip: "Within Struggle Lies Opportunity" (Rich Roll x Michael Gervais): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LbEvMsb7VTs

Episode is produced by:
Mun Yee Kelly: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mun-yee-kelly-769868/

#HeartfulWonders #PersonalGrowth #AddictionRecovery #SpiritualAwakening #FaithOverFear #Sobriety

If you're barely keeping it together, you're probably operating from fear. Rebecca Arora on what to do about it.

Rebecca Arora is an executive coach and the author of Somatic Intelligence. She's a former tech co-founder turned somatic-intelligence coach to leaders at Google, Salesforce, and IDEO. She was in her late 20s when she found herself crying in the office bathroom, building the career she was "supposed to" build. Her body knew before her mind did. She left for Esalen, trained in structural bodywork with William "Dub" Lay, and built a practice around the insight that "keeping it together" is often fear in disguise.

In this episode:

• The 4:35 AM bathroom moment that ended Rebecca's tech career
• What structural bodywork reveals about stored trauma (and why the pain isn't being done to you)
• Three patterns of how high-achievers operate from fear at work
• Why "keeping it together" usually means fear is running you
• Marshall Goldsmith's "what got you here won't get you there," applied to drive
• Living in technicolor versus driven-from-trauma life
• Pace, posture, pliability as everyday somatic on-ramps

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccaarora/
• Website: https://www.accessalignment.com/
• Book: https://www.somaticintelligence.com/
• Substack: https://accessalignment.substack.com/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlada
• Substack: https://heartfulwonders.substack.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vladabortnik
• Marco Polo: https://www.marcopolo.me/

• Somatic Intelligence (book): https://www.somaticintelligence.com/
• Access Alignment: https://www.accessalignment.com/

Gary Vaynerchuk wrote Sehreen Noor Ali a check after a 5-minute meeting, and President Biden heard her pitch. Sleuth still didn't make it.

Sehreen Noor Ali co-founded Sleuth, a venture-backed pediatric AI platform Fast Company recognized as a World-Changing App in 2024. The startup eventually closed. The reckoning that followed shaped what she now teaches senior leaders through Te Cura Labs about positioning and identity. In this conversation she traces the hospital moment that opened her up, the years of inner work that followed, and the reframe of purpose that emerged on the other side.

In this episode:

• The moment in her daughter's hospital room when she chose meaning-making over collapse
• Why "every cosmic sign said yes" didn't mean Sleuth would succeed
• The reframe: life is more interesting than chasing one purpose
• How anger becomes a teacher when you let it move through you instead of holding it
• The shift from measuring success by what you produce to how present you can be
• Recalibrating to yourself as the filter for what's true, instead of outsourcing it to experts

Derek Haswell co-founded 10% Happier, and even on day 8 of a silent retreat, he was still performing for no one.

Derek built 10% Happier over a decade, working with the best meditation teachers in the world. He'd been doing inner work all along. Eight years ago, sobbing in bed next to his sleeping three-year-old, he saw his own proving-yourself wound already showing up in his son's body. Then in 2020, day 8 of a silent retreat, sitting in the sun and holding his belly in for nobody, the same wound cracked open at a different level. The years that followed reshaped his life: he saw the shield he'd been using in his marriage (a hypothetical husband he was always beating in his head), left 10% Happier to coach mission-driven founders, and a year and a half ago had a five-minute conversation with his wife about what the next nine years should look like. They both already knew the answer was a farm. Their hearts had been pulling them there for years, and now they're building it in Upstate NY together.

In this episode:

• The silent-retreat moment that exposed the unworthiness wound underneath a decade of meditation work
• Why "falling in love with yourself" does what willpower can't (and how a late-night snack proves it)
• The "hypothetical American husband" shield that was recycling the same fights in his marriage
• What he saw in his sleeping 3-year-old that cracked open his parenting frame
• Why awakening doesn't have to look like Eckhart Tolle's bench moment
• The five-minute conversation with his wife that ended with them choosing to build a farm together

Jane Chen founded Embrace, the nonprofit behind life-saving infant warmers that have helped save over a million premature babies in underserved communities. She's also a TED speaker and the author of Like a Wave We Break. In this conversation, Jane traces the childhood violence she didn't connect to her work for a decade, the burnout that forced the reckoning, and what it took to feel worthy of her own life again. They go all the way back to Jane's early-20s career pivot, when one New York Times article moved her enough to quit consulting for unpaid work in central China. From there, the conversation tracks the decade she spent building Embrace, the moment the company shut down, and the healing journey that followed.

In this episode:

• Why high achievers are often running from something they haven't named yet
• The childhood pattern that shapes whose pain you're drawn to fix
• What 13 years of secret beta blockers before every public talk really cost
• The "ideal father" exercise that didn't work, and the photo that did
• Why no one else can give you the words "you are enough"
• The Diana Chapman question that took years to grow into
• Quitting a cushy consulting job for unpaid work in China, and why her body knew first
• Parts work, inner-child healing, and the Indonesia healing journey after Embrace shut down

Eric Ries spent a decade building LTSE. The night it almost died, his body responded like it was dying too.

Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup and the new book Incorruptible, founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange) sits down with Vlada to walk through the part of founder life that almost never gets published: what happens to your body when the company you built starts to fail, and how naming what therapists call ego identification changed the work he's done since.

In this episode:

• Growing up in a family of doctors, and the IBM XT computer his father brought home that changed everything• The night LTSE almost died, and what ego identification feels like in the body• The board meeting Eric was sure would end his career, and how it became Lean Startup• Why he calls VC forecasts "a kabuki ritual"• How Costco's founder Jim Sinegal predicted Groupon's collapse with one phrase: "taking heroin"• Cloudflare's "be principled" value and the encryption decision it cost them• Why shareholder primacy isn't actually law, and how one conversation with one friend can puncture it• Eric's zero-courage tactic for changing any company from the inside

Subscribe to Heartful Wonders — conversations about following your heart when the path isn't clear. New episodes every other Tuesday.

👤 About Eric Ries:

Over the last two decades, Eric Ries's ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices. He is the creator of the Lean Startup method, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup; The Leader's Guide; and The Startup Way.

As a founder, he has put his own ideas into practice with The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab; Virgil, a legal services startup; and IMVU. On The Eric Ries Show, he talks with world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives building for the long-term. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children.

💻 Eric can be found:

Website: https://www.ericries.coLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericriesactual/X: https://x.com/ericriesNewsletter: https://news.theleanstartup.com/Podcast: https://www.ericriesshow.com/Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theericriesshowNew Book — Incorruptible: https://www.amazon.com/Incorruptible-Shape-Companies-That-Stand/dp/B0FWZZBPZB

✨ About Vlada Bortnik:

Vlada Bortnik is the CEO and co-founder of Marco Polo, the video messaging app designed to help people feel close without sacrificing time, privacy, or wellbeing. A Ukrainian refugee who arrived in the U.S. at 11, she built the company alongside her husband Michał while raising two young children, guided by her belief that technology should strengthen human connection, not exploit it. Today, she leads Marco Polo as a profitable, mission-driven company and speaks candidly about balancing parenthood and entrepreneurship while building ethical technology that scales.

💻 Vlada can be found:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladaSubstack: https://heartfulwonders.substack.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vladabortnikMarco Polo: https://www.marcopolo.me/

📎 Resources mentioned:

Answer.AI: https://www.answer.ai/

Mun Yee Kelly: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mun-yee-kelly-769868/

#HeartfulWonders #LeanStartup #EricRies #Founders #MissionDriven

Cheyanne Donald was born on a gold mine in Alaska. Her parents were hippies. Their nearest neighbors lived eight miles away. She grew up skiing under full moons, building a house, and believing there was no wrong decision. Just a decision.

At a young age she moved to California with fifty dollars in a duffel bag and a phone number for a Taekwondo instructor. From there, she built a life that didn't follow anyone's plan. She taught herself bodywork by reading every book her dad threw on a shelf for her. She studied every modality she could find. She raised her daughter alone, worked four jobs at a time when she needed to, and built a 30-year practice entirely by word of mouth. She also became an artist who runs festivals in Santa Cruz under a business she calls White Rabbit.

In this episode, Cheyanne and Vlada Bortnik talk about what it takes to build a life on your own terms. The ego trap of trying to be the magic. The discipline of staying out of your own way. And what changes when you stop treating society's path as the only one.

▶️ Watch the full episode now.

👤 About Cheyanne Donald:

Cheyanne Donald is a Bay Area artist and creative force whose work blends art-making, community building, and thoughtful curation. She is the creative mind behind White Rabbit Social Club, a community-oriented art and vendor collective she built from the ground up to give makers and artists the space, support, and audience she wished she had when she started vending her own work.

💻 Cheyanne can be found:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/white_rabbit_ink_/
• Website: https://wearethewhiterabbit.com/

✨ About Vlada Bortnik:

Vlada Bortnik is the CEO and co-founder of Marco Polo, the video messaging app designed to help people feel close without sacrificing time, privacy, or wellbeing. A Ukrainian refugee who arrived in the U.S. at 11, she built the company alongside her husband Michał while raising two young children, guided by her belief that technology should strengthen human connection, not exploit it. Today, she leads Marco Polo as a profitable, mission-driven company and speaks candidly about balancing parenthood and entrepreneurship while building ethical technology that scales.

💻 Vlada can be found:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlada
• Substack: https://heartfulwonders.substack.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vladabortnik
• Marco Polo: https://www.marcopolo.me/

📎 Resources mentioned:

• White Rabbit Social Club: https://wearethewhiterabbit.com/

Dr. Nseyo spent years fighting to become the doctor she always dreamed of being.

Then she got there, and she burned out.

Ono Nseyo is an OB-GYN, women's health advocate, and podcast host who grew up watching her Nigerian immigrant father change lives in his community. Literally!

That image of her dad shaped everything for her. She pushed through Stanford, organic chemistry, pre-med haters, eight years of training, and the systemic racism that still exists in medicine, all to show up for her patients.

And then one day she realized she wasn't really showing up, not the way she wanted.

In this episode, we talk about what burnout actually feels like from the inside, how she found her way back, and the moment in a college lecture that told her exactly why she was put on this earth.

We also get into the maternal health crisis that still doesn't get enough attention: Black women are still 3 to 4 times more likely to die in childbirth. The statistics haven't improved. And Ono is one of the people fighting to change that.

Key takeaways:

• How you know something is actually your calling. Dr. Nseyo didn't decide to go into women's health. Something "ignited" her. There's a difference .. and she names it.

• What burnout actually feels like from the inside. Not just tired. Not stressed. Muted. Like someone put a filter on your life and turned the color down.

• Why she started a podcast when she already had a full career.
  The exam room couldn't hold everything she wanted and needed to say. So she built something that could.

• The importance of community showing up. Dr. Nseyo shares the moment she almost quit medicine and who flew across the country to stop her? Her mom!

• What happens when you stop chasing the numbers. Dr. Nseyo got obsessed with metrics and it nearly killed the thing she loved. Letting go of that is what saved it.

• The statistic that ignited her life's work (and had me fuming). Black women in America are still three to four times more likely to die in childbirth. Decades of effort. The number hasn't moved.

• Impact of being loved by someone who won't give up on you. She says she's a better person because of her husband. Not in a cheesy, greeting card way. In a very real way.

▶️ Watch the full episode now and subscribe.

👤 About Ono Nseyo:
Ono Nseyo, MD FACOG is a board-certified OB/GYN and former Medical Director of Women's Health for Sutter East Bay Medical Group, where she led strategic initiatives to expand access and equity in care. Based in Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond, she serves a diverse patient population with a focus on compassionate, equitable care. She earned her undergraduate degree in Human Biology from Stanford University and completed her medical training at UCSF, with a career shaped by her commitment to addressing health disparities. Passionate about maternal health and matrescence, she founded the Hour.FM podcast to elevate women's voices and experiences across the health spectrum.

💻 Ono can be found:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goldenhour.fm
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@goldenhour.fm
Golden Hour FM Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@GoldenHourFM

✨ About Vlada Bortnik:
Vlada Bortnik is the CEO and co-founder of Marco Polo, the video messaging app designed to help people feel close without sacrificing time, privacy, or wellbeing. A Ukrainian refugee who arrived in the U.S. at 11, she built the company alongside her husband Michał while raising two young children, guided by her belief that technology should strengthen human connection, not exploit it. Today, she leads Marco Polo as a profitable, mission-driven company and speaks candidly about balancing parenthood and entrepreneurship while building ethical technology that scales.

💻 Vlada can be found:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlada
Substack: https://heartfulwonders.substack.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vladabortnik

Most of us have a voice in our heads that sounds like wisdom.Mun Yee Kelly spent years listening to hers, and it told her that being herself was the problem.So she stopped. She changed her hair, her personality, her city. Twice. And it worked, until it didn't.

In this conversation, we go deep on the moment she finally stopped believing everything she thought, and what happened when she started following her heart instead.If you've ever talked yourself out of something that felt right, this one's for you.

Key takeaways:

• The belief that kept Mun stuck for years, and how she uncovered it

• Her journey through an eating disorder, therapy, and building businesses she loved

• Why following your heart isn't always a choice

• "Be suspicious of your own suspicions" — the mindset shift that changed everything

#mentalhealth #healing #selfworth

📹 Watch the full episode now.

👤 About Mun Yee Kelly:

Mun Yee Kelly is an entrepreneur, community builder, and lifelong student of what it means to follow your heart, even when it's inconvenient or hard to explain. She believes that fostering genuine human connection is a form of activism, and that building community isn't separate from the work; it is the work. She lives in Oakland, California, where she hosts a weekly dinner table open to all and is working to expand that spirit into a larger space where more people can gather and connect.

💻 Mun can be found:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mun-yee-kelly-769868/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mun_the_bun/

X/Twitter: https://x.com/erischan

✨ About Vlada Bortnik:

Vlada Bortnik is the CEO and co-founder of Marco Polo, the video messaging app designed to help people feel close without sacrificing time, privacy, or wellbeing. A Ukrainian refugee who arrived in the U.S. at 11, she built the company alongside her husband Michał while raising two young children, guided by her belief that technology should strengthen human connection, not exploit it. Today, she leads Marco Polo as a profitable, mission-driven company and speaks candidly about balancing parenthood and entrepreneurship while building ethical technology that scales.

💻 Vlada can be found:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlada

Substack: https://heartfulwonders.substack.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vladabortnik

📎 Resources mentioned:

Groundbreakers: https://www.groundbreakers.co/

Byron Katie – The Work: https://thework.com/

Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/