I had the opportunity to give a talk to a room full of founders last week at Boulder Startup Week. The topic: how founders can use psychedelics, legally, to expand courage, clarity, and capacity. I’ve been asked for the deck and a recap a few times now, so I decided to write this post to share.
A line you may have heard, from Marc Andreessen: “I’ve seen too many founders move to Indonesia and become a surf instructor.”
I’m not a surf instructor.
I started using psychedelics intentionally around Redox’s Series A, in 2015. Over the next eight years, I scaled Redox to 300 people, raised $95M, and led the company toward profitability. When I was ready to move on, I started another venture-backed company with more clarity, not less.
So I want to argue for something Andreessen wouldn’t. One of the most powerful leadership development tools available to founders isn’t in a boardroom, a book, or a coaching program. It’s in a carefully structured, psychedelic experience. But the case is more nuanced than either the boosters or the skeptics tend to admit, so let me try to make the honest version.
Why this matters now
Most public discussion of psychedelics happens through one lens: the mental health story. It’s the most legible. It’s also limiting.
In April of this year, the White House signed an executive order on psychedelics. It fast-tracked FDA approvals, allocated federal funding for state partnerships, and called for real-world evidence generation. It was a meaningful moment for the field. It was also framed almost entirely around mental health.
That framing misses the bigger story. Mental health is the application. Perception and learning are the mechanism. The reason psychedelics help with depression isn’t that they treat symptoms. It’s that they temporarily change how the brain perceives reality and how it learns from that perception. The clinical effects we see are downstream of something more fundamental.
We see this in our own data at Althea. Across more than 2,400 participants in Colorado and Oregon’s state-regulated programs, only about a third are coming for a clinical mental health condition like depression, anxiety, or PTSD. The other two-thirds are coming for wellness, perspective, enlightenment, spiritual growth, and creativity. Sixty-eight percent of people choosing legal psilocybin in the United States today are coming for growth, meaning, or wellness — not a diagnosis.
That’s the conversation we’re not having. And it’s the one that should matter most to founders.
What psychedelics are good at
Psychedelics are particularly good at a specific set of things:
- Loosening rigid identity structures
- Surfacing suppressed emotion or unexamined assumptions
- Creating distance from the narrative voice
- Compressing insight — the kind of epiphany that would otherwise take years of therapy or reflection
- Increasing cognitive flexibility, reducing reliance on default patterns
Look at that list and look at what founder life actually is:
- Identity fusion with the company
- Suppressed emotion required to function under pressure
- Erratic self-talk you learn to believe
- A pace of operation that prevents the slow integration of self-knowledge
- A role that demands unusually high cognitive flexibility
The match isn’t coincidence. The things psychedelics happen to be good at are the exact things founder work makes hard.
How they actually work
Two mechanisms matter most.
The first is what psilocybin does to the default mode network. The DMN is the part of the brain responsible for self-referential thinking and the constant narrative voice that tells you who you are, what you’re supposed to do, and what you’re afraid of. For founders, that voice usually sounds like: you’re not qualified, you should be further along, what if they figure out, everyone else is moving faster, the round won’t close, you’re going to lose them, you’re not the person who, you should already know. For most adults, that voice has been running so constantly, for so long, it has stopped sounding like a voice. It just sounds like you.
Psilocybin temporarily quiets it. Carhart-Harris and colleagues showed this in fMRI studies at Imperial College back in 2012, and it’s been replicated extensively since.
It’s a window, not a silence. You always come back. But while the window is open, you can commune with something greater than yourself, experience awe, examine your assumptions, and remember who you are.
The second mechanism is neuroplasticity. A critical period is a constrained window when the brain learns flexibly from its environment. Most of these windows close after childhood. But a 2023 paper in Nature by Dölen and colleagues at Johns Hopkins demonstrated that psychedelics can reopen them, and that the duration of the open window is proportional to the duration of the trip itself. A six-hour psilocybin experience produces weeks of elevated plasticity afterward.
This is why psychedelics are not the therapy. They’re what makes the therapy work. And why I think this line matters more than any other I’ll write here: psychedelics don’t teach you anything. They help you realize what you’ve already learned, fast.
Three inflection points
I want to give three concrete examples of what this actually looked like for me.
Series A: Imposter syndrome. Early Redox days, fundraising, growing the team faster than I knew how to lead. I was carrying a constant background anxiety that I didn’t belong in the room I was in. A psychedelic session didn’t make that go away. It rearranged my relationship to it. I came out the other side with immense gratitude for the opportunity to make an impact, in a position most people never get to be in. The overwhelm became fuel.
Culture. Redox succeeded because of our culture. Three pillars: give-a-shit, growth mindset, belonging. Each of those was largely informed by epiphanies I had during psychedelic experiences over the years. Strategy decisions get reversed. Cultural decisions compound. The work I did on myself directly shaped the company we built.
Series D and after: Disentangling identity. There came a point where I had to confront a hard truth: Redox didn’t need me anymore. And I didn’t need Redox anymore. Separating who I was from what I had built was one of the hardest things I’ve done. Psychedelics helped me do it cleanly.
Risks and realities
That open critical period I described? It’s an opportunity and a vulnerability. Hyper-suggestibility cuts both ways. You’re more open to new patterns. You’re also more open to the wrong ones if your environment isn’t set up well.
There are also genuine contraindications. Personal or family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder. Certain other medications. Acute crisis or unprocessed trauma without support. And the most important one for this audience: looking for a shortcut, not a tool. This work doesn’t reward people trying to skip something. It rewards people willing to do more. You should work with a professional facilitator to help evaluate if you carry additional risks.
There are three pathways to access. Clinical trials offer narrow access with limited eligibility and only in research settings. State-regulated programs, currently in Colorado and Oregon, offer legal, supervised experiences with licensed facilitators. And the underground, which carries real risks: no integration support, legal exposure, and no quality control. The path I advocate for is the second one. The legal infrastructure exists now in a way it didn’t a few years ago. There’s no reason not to use it.
And I’d be cheating you if I didn’t also say this: founders might also be bad candidates for psychedelics.
The job rewards grandiosity. Psychedelic work doesn’t. Identity fusion can make ego dissolution unusually disorienting. The altered baseline of founder mode isn’t always a stable starting point. And the traits that got most of us to the founder seat — drive, conviction, intolerance for ambiguity — are often the opposite of what this work asks for. This work asks for surrender. The job punishes it.
None of this is fatal. All of it requires structure.
A practical framework
There are three phases to working with psychedelics: prep, journey, integration. Most public conversations focus on the middle one. The first and third are where the work actually happens.
Prep is the work before the work. Block the calendar — a full day for the session, plus the weekend after. Ideally more. Find a facilitator you can be vulnerable with. Set intentions, not expectations. You’re not going in to get an answer. You’re going in to ask better questions.
The journey is the part you have the least control over, and that’s the point. Your facilitator’s job is to keep you anchored when it gets disorienting and to document insights as they emerge. Your job is the opposite of what the founder role usually requires. Don’t perform. Don’t optimize. Surrender.
Integration is the phase most people skip, especially founders. This is where most of the work, and most of the impact, actually lives. The open critical period stays open for weeks. What you do during those weeks — the conversations you have, the patterns you interrupt, the decisions you make differently — is what turns the experience into change.
The metaphor I use: integration is like physical therapy after surgery. Skip it and you have a memory. Do it and you have powerful transformation.
If you’re going to do this, take the third phase as seriously as the first two. More seriously, actually.
What I’m building now
I’m building Althea, the consumer front door for psychedelic care — a trusted place to learn, navigate, and find legal services. We’re a Public Benefit Company based in Colorado and Oregon. The work spans four pieces: care navigation through our directory and marketplace, awareness and education through the Tricycle Day newsletter, a compliance platform with roughly 75% market share across the regulated centers in Colorado and Oregon, and a practice management platform handling intake, scheduling, documentation, outcomes, and payments.
The reason any of this matters here is the data we’re starting to see. Across more than 4,000 documented psilocybin sessions in Colorado and Oregon between 2023 and 2026, real-world effect sizes are exceeding the benchmarks set by clinical trials. Adverse event rate sits at 1.5%, with about 70% of those being nausea. We’re preparing a paper for peer review with the Department of Psychiatry at CU School of Medicine.
That data matters because it suggests something the mental health framing doesn’t capture: the people getting the most out of regulated psychedelic care aren’t always the ones with clinical diagnoses. Many of them are people working on questions of identity, direction, grief, creativity, and meaning. People doing the kind of work I’d argue most founders need to do.
The closing thought
The companies you’ll build are downstream of who you become. This is one tool. Use it well.
