AJ is a serial entrepreneur and passionate student of startups.
After a decade of spending countless hours and money building companies, most of which failed, he went back to basics and surrounded himself with entrepreneurs decades further ahead of him.
He ran a deeply connected community of 400 entrepreneurs in the UK and realised how little he knew about the art and science of company building.
At this intersection of relationships and company building is where AJ has found the key to success.
If we don't understand people, we don't understand business.
But people are hard to understand....
Which is why this show exists!
scale with soul is a deep dive intro how the best entrepreneurs alive build and manage the relationships that lead to startup success.
AJ is a serial entrepreneur and passionate student of startups.
After a decade of spending countless hours and money building companies, most of which failed, he went back to basics and surrounded himself with entrepreneurs decades further ahead of him.
He ran a deeply connected community of 400 entrepreneurs in the UK and realised how little he knew about the art and science of company building.
At this intersection of relationships and company building is where AJ has found the key to success.
If we don't understand people, we don't understand business.
But people are hard to understand....
Which is why this show exists!
scale with soul is a deep dive intro how the best entrepreneurs alive build and manage the relationships that lead to startup success.
Most founders talk about near-death experiences, but few admit the brutal truth: sometimes the company survives, but you lose pieces of yourself you can never get back.
James Lo had 2 weeks left before bankruptcy, watched a team member become a stalker after layoffs, and wrestled with whether building venture-scale companies requires abandoning your deepest values.
This is his unfiltered reckoning with what it really costs to build.
🧠 What You'll Learn
▪️ How to survive the 48-hour countdown to bankruptcy
▪️ Why consensus-building will destroy your startup - and the conflict framework that saves it
▪️ The hidden psychology of why deep friendships at work become emotional time bombs
▪️ How Sequoia plays a 10-year game most founders never see coming
▪️ Why the "spend money to grow" VC playbook is fundamentally broken in 2025
▪️ The automation-first hiring philosophy that could revolutionise early-stage companies
📖 Chapters
0:00 - Intro
1:24 - Two Weeks From Bankruptcy
4:58 - "We Were Completely Wrong..."
7:45 - The Portuguese Holiday That Nearly Killed Us
10:21 - When Deep Friendships Become Toxic at Work
15:17 - From Hong Kong Activism to Silicon Valley
22:13 - "You Look Down at Your Footsteps, Walk Upward in Flow"
25:16 - Why Activism and Entrepreneurship Are the Same (And Different)
30:47 - The Guilt of Abandoning the Movement
35:20 - How We Pivoted After Raising (And Why Antonio Still Backed Us)
40:04 - How Sequoia Scouted Me for 2 Years Before I Knew It
46:18 - The 30-Person Founder Speed Dating Experiment
50:12 - How to Test Co-Founder Chemistry in Crisis
55:46 - From Consensus Builder to Conflict Embracer
60:21 - Why "Hire Your Way Out of Problems" Will Kill You
65:16 - The Controversial Truth About VC Growth Mentality
70:19 - Building Vision from Personal Problems (Not Top-Down Idealism)
78:53 - How Simplicity Reveals Unexpected Vision
88:00 - The Team Member Who Became a Stalker
95:17 - Balancing Ruthlessness with Humanity
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