The Next Mountain Podcast

What if the most important investment you'll ever make isn't in a business plan — it's in people?

In this episode of The Next Mountain Podcast, Patrick Lor, co-founder of iStockPhoto and Managing Partner of Panache Ventures, shares his journey from bootstrapped entrepreneur to seasoned investor and mentor. We explore how leaving a company behind opened the door to something more meaningful: learning to truly connect with people. From building trust fast to understanding why most mentoring conversations fail, Patrick shows how showing up with genuine curiosity changes everything.

✨ Key Themes

• Why the best investments are built on relationships, not business plans
• How ego gets in the way of real connection and how to dissolve it
• The art of having conversations that create trust in minutes
• Why great mentors listen more than they advise
• Building a community of entrepreneurs a decade before they're ready to pitch
  

Learn more about Patrick Lor

• Patrick Lor on Linkedin
• Panache Ventures Website

What if everything you've built was powered by a belief that's now needs to be reexamined?

In this episode of The Next Mountain Podcast, Dr. Anne-Marie King, UK-based performance psychologist and former psychiatrist, unpacks why high achievers feel lost after their biggest wins. We explore the unconscious belief she calls conditional worth, how to move through the emotional aftermath of an exit, and what it actually takes to build a life that feels as good as it looks.

✨ Key Themes

• Why high achievers tie their identity and worth to their output
• The emotional iceberg that surfaces after an exit
• Fulfillment as a felt state, not a destination to reach
• Fear-based vs. alignment-based motivation
• How to widen your capacity for aliveness, not just achievement

Learn More About Anne-Marie

• Dr. Anne-Marie King on LinkedIn
• Anne-MarieKing.com
• Aligned Next Chapter

Natasha Freidus calls herself an "accidental founder." While volunteering with refugees in France around 2015, she went looking for a simple tool to match needs with offers in real time, and when she couldn't find one, she used a wedding registry instead. That improvised fix became the proof of concept for Needslist, a software company that went on to match millions of dollars in aid through crises from Hurricane Dorian to the fall of Kabul to the war in Ukraine, before she exited on New Year's Eve, 2024.

In this conversation, Tasha reimagines what business for good can actually look like. She's candid about the myths she was taught in accelerators (the unicorn model, the hockey stick), why impact investors often made her jump through ten times the hoops for a tenth of the money, and why she now tells early-stage founders not to lead with their impact when they raise.

We talk about her move from global crisis tech to hyper-local, place-based economic development through her work with Shorefast and the Fogo Island Inn. We get into why caring for the places we live is less divisive than the language of "social impact," and the alternative ownership structures (co-ops, employee ownership, steward ownership) that could redistribute wealth instead of concentrating it.

Learn more about Tasha

• Natasha Freidus on Linkedin
• The Shorefast Institute for Place-Based Economics

Colin Beavan is an executive coach, writer, Zen teacher, and self-described "professional quitter." He spent years building a successful PR business in London, then walked away from it on a motorcycle trip he was terrified to take. He went on to write the bestselling No Impact Man, run a nonprofit, and now coaches founders, philanthropists, and leaders through the question that brought him to Zen practice in the first place: how do you actually live?

In this episode, we discuss what Colin calls the Midas Loop, when success stops feeling alive. We chase one success, find the treasure chest empty, and assume we chased the wrong thing, so we chase again. Colin warns that meaning and purpose can become their own version of the loop.

We talk about why the personality that built your success can become the cage you can't leave, how fantasies of escape are diagnostic rather than destination, and why becoming fully alive rarely requires changing your circumstances, but always requires changing your relationship with them.

More about Colin

• Website: colinbeavan.com
• Substack: colinbeavan.substack.com

Jeffrey Hollender spent 20 years building Seventh Generation into a $150 million pioneer of the sustainable products movement, a decade ahead of the market. Today he teaches social entrepreneurship at NYU Stern, sits on Morgan Stanley's Sustainability Advisory Board, and has just published his seventh book, Built for a Better World.

In this episode, Jeffrey makes the case that most of what passes for impact today doesn't go far enough. Sustainability means doing less harm. Regeneration means actively repairing what's been damaged, and that's a much higher bar.

We talk about the line between sustainable and regenerative business, the compromises every purpose-driven founder has to navigate (and the one place you never compromise), why systems thinking is non-negotiable, and why selling your company to your employees may be the most meaningful exit you can design.

🔗 Resources mentioned:

• Built for a Better World by Jeffrey Hollender → builtforabetterworld.com
• Jeffrey Hollender's website → jeffreyhollender.com
• The Big Myth by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
• Bookshop.org (independent bookseller alternative to Amazon)
• The Giving Pledge & The Patriotic Millionaires

Chris Erler built a sales automation company in Berlin, bootstrapped it to 140 employees, and sold a majority stake to a private equity fund after just four years. He hit every target he'd set for himself at 21: financial freedom by 33, a dent in the economy, the works.

Then, an autoimmune condition flared up so badly he couldn't work for three months. His body had been keeping score the whole time.

In this conversation, Chris shares what it felt like to stay on as founder under private equity pressure when his gut was screaming to leave. How his brain kept "running on the old program" even after the exit. Why he forced himself to do nothing for 12 months and how an Ikigai process helped him reconnect with what he'd loved since childhood: history, flying, and helping other founders navigate complexity.

We explore what freedom actually means once money is no longer the issue, why the post-exit void is really an identity crisis in disguise, and how Chris is now channeling his structured engineering brain and his spiritual side into supporting European scale-ups through the AI shift.

What if the most powerful business decision you ever make is to stop analyzing and start listening to your heart?

In this episode of The Next Mountain Podcast, Louis Gagnon shares a career that defies a single label. He left McKinsey in his twenties to build an AIDS prevention program in Rwanda, work that saved an estimated 15,000 lives. He then went on to hold senior leadership roles at Monster, Amazon's Audible, and multiple venture-backed startups, scaling companies from millions to hundreds of millions in revenue.

But in 2021, after two near-death experiences, Louis made a different kind of decision. He stopped optimizing. He stopped strategizing. And he started following what his heart had been telling him all along. Today he dedicates his time to what he calls human regeneration, helping entrepreneurs and systems move from extraction to renewal, one relationship at a time.

We explore why he built a company around three unusual values (compassion, passion, and dispassion), how he dropped weekly KPIs and never missed a number, and what it really takes to shift from leading with your head to living from your heart.

Key Themes in This Conversation

• Leaving McKinsey for Rwanda and the life experience that shaped everything
• The yogi who told him he was already enough
• Compassion, passion, and dispassion as company values
• Why replacing KPI reviews with connection conversations actually works
• The practice of witnessing: meditation, breath, and questioning your beliefs
• Moving from forcing your way through life to letting life flow through you
• Human regeneration and what the entrepreneurial class owes the world

Learn More About Louis

• Louis Gagnon on LinkedIn

What happens when you reach the end of the rainbow and realize you don't know where to go next?

In this episode of The Next Mountain Podcast, Raman Sehgal shares his journey from accidentally starting a marketing agency to raising private equity and navigating the unexpected emptiness that followed. He never set out to be a founder. Two decades later, he'd built a thriving pharmaceutical marketing agency and achieved an exit he never planned for. But after the celebrations came something he didn't see coming: profound loneliness and the realization that the skills that made him great at building made the transition much harder.

We explore why entrepreneurs struggle after reaching the pot of gold, the tension between making money and following your heart, and Raman's evolving vision for youth education and creating real-life skills programs for kids.

✨ Key Themes in This Conversation

• The emptiness and loneliness after reaching the pot of gold
• Why entrepreneurs love the chase more than the destination
• Transitioning from founder to board member in a private equity deal
• The tension between making money and following your heart
• Building something meaningful: youth clubs, education, and real-life skills
• Why post-exit founders need peers, not just coaches

Learn More About Raman

• The Floundering Founder (Raman's book)
• Raman on Linkedin

What if the skills that make you an entrepreneur are exactly what the planet needs right now?

In this episode of The Next Mountain Podcast, Ananda Fitzsimmons shares her unlikely journey from psychotherapist to ag-biotech founder. She built a company that raised $50 million, all while navigating a world that couldn't quite make sense of someone who called herself "just a witch." After her exit in 2017, Ananda didn't retire. She dove deeper into the work that had called her from the beginning: ecosystem restoration and regenerative agriculture.

We explore living systems thinking in soil, in business, and in life. Ananda explains why real climate solutions go far beyond carbon and electric cars. She reveals how the complex web of soil, water, and biodiversity holds the key to planetary regeneration. We also talk about the messy reality of post-exit transition, the courage it takes to follow passion over business logic, and how exited founders are uniquely positioned to become stewards of regenerative systems.

✨ Key Themes in This Conversation

• Following intuition into entrepreneurship without any experience
• Why living soils and ecosystem restoration actually matter for climate
• The three pillars of life: carbon, water, and biodiversity
• How passion attracts what you need, even when the path isn't clear
• The economic system shift we need to truly value nature and life
  

Learn More About Ananda

• Restoring the Pillars of Life (Ananda's book)
• Regeneration Canada
• Ananda's website

What happens when reaching the pinnacle of success turns out to be the most miserable experience and you have to find what actually matters next?

In this episode, Sami Inkinen, CEO of Virta Health and founder of Trulia, shares how he went from post-IPO misery to discovering a mission worth building his life around.

We explore his unconventional path to finding purpose: rowing across the Pacific Ocean, studying metabolic disease out of curiosity, and eventually committing to reverse diabetes in 1 billion people, not because it made business sense, but because he fell unexplainably in love with the problem.

Sami reflects on why the best missions can't be found in spreadsheets, how taking action creates clarity rather than waiting for it, and the difference between building a business with a mission versus a mission disguised as a business.

✨ Key Themes

• The post-exit identity crisis and addiction to being "on"
• Why unlimited optionality has negative value
• Finding your North Star through action, not analysis
• Building a mission disguised as a business
• The power of discomfort in discovering what's next