If you're chasing the startup dream, here's the part no one
talks about the crash that can come after the big win.
Xava Lehmann built AI startup ebot7 into a
130 person rocket ship and sold a gymnastic
listed live person. But behind the headlights, he was falling
apart, grieving, burning out and questioning everything. In
today's episode, we unpack what really happens after the exit,
how Xava found meaning again, and what every
founder needs to hear before scaling the next company.
Welcome to startup Rad IO,
your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German
startup scene with news, interviews and
live events.
Today's guest is a rare voice in the startup world, someone who
has won big and burned out even bigger. Xavier
Lehmann is the co founder and former CEO of Ebol7. By the way,
we have an interview with the co founder that we link here. One
of Europe's fastest growing AI startups, he scaled the company to
130 employees, partnered with major enterprises
and exited to live person, a NASDAQ listed leader
in conversational AI. The company's hybrid AI plus
human agent model pushed the frontier of NLP
driven automation. Xava was recognized by Forbes
30 under 30 Europe and backed by top tier investors.
But the story didn't end there. After the acquisition, he was
forced to lay off much of his team. At the same
time, he lost his mother to cancer. The mental and emotional
toll nearly broke him and made him question everything about startup
success. Today he's rebuilding not a company, but
movement through the honest founder, his fast growing
substack and his work coaching founders.
He's turning pain into perspective and lessons into
leverage. This is a conversation about what happens when the hype
ends and real life begins. It's raw, it's real and
urgently needed in today's startup economy. Xava, welcome to
Startup Radio. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm glad to be here.
That is really an interesting story and
I totally think a lot of people will get a lot out of
that. So let's rewind the tape. What was the
original spark that led to the founding of
ebot7? What did you and your co founders believe about the
world of customer communication that others didn't?
Yeah, good question. I mean, back then, in the days as I was
a child, I wanted to be an investment banker actually. And
so I did an internship in investment banking when I was like 21,
22. And I quickly realized that, you
know, it was kind of exciting, it was dynamic. I loved
capital markets because everything is unpredictable, everything is new
every day. But Somehow, like, getting to the
office every day, seeing my bosses, you know, how they
work, how they live, it kind of, you know,
kind of made me question if I want to pursue that dream. You know,
investment banking is something completely different. It's all about numbers. You go
to the office every day. It is dynamic, but also it's kind
of, you know, the same every day. And so what I did after
the internship, I actually studied again because I didn't know exactly what
to do. So I studied finance and Maastricht in the Netherlands. And there
I met my, you know, oldest friend, actually, who I've known for like
15, 16 years. And he coincidentally also
studied Maastricht. And on the way to Kings Day, we had a
conversation about what we want to do, you know, at some point because he
had done internships at Red Bull and Adobe, and I had done some
internships in M and A and investment banking. And then we thought, to
be honest, like, I can't imagine in life working for someone.
I mean, also my parents have been entrepreneurs their whole life,
and somehow I couldn't really imagine working for someone else above
me. And he had the same feeling. And then on the way to Kings Day,
which is kind of the big celebration once a year in the Netherland where they
celebrate the king, we kind of coincidentally, or like
we just went, we scrolled through his Facebook feed and saw
a Facebook developer conference. Really random because we couldn't
code or something. We just coincidentally saw this. And
what they actually said in that conference was actually that you could,
you know, now is the time to actually integrate bots into Facebook
Messenger. So people could, or actually companies could integrate
into Facebook messenger and then reach their clients through. Through Facebook or
WhatsApp. And we found it a really good idea because, you
know, everyone knows about the bad, you know, customer service
situations where you stuck in a hotline or wait days for reply for an email.
And we thought. Did you say yes? No, no, no.
Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, like everyone had, had. Has
had like an experience with bad customer service, right? And we just thought,
like, if customers can actually reach their clients exactly where
they are, I mean, all of the people are spending time on what.
On all these social media channels, but companies are not present where they actually,
you know, spend most of their time. So that was kind of where we thought,
okay, that might be a good idea actually, to kind of
go to companies, you know, tell them, hey, we have this new
technology where you can actually instantly reach your clients through the
channels they are already using. Instead of opening A new channel or hotline or email.
And that was kind of the initial spark. And to be honest, like,
customer service is just really bad. I
think if you want to change something in departments and companies, it
would have been customer service. Really manual processes, really
recurring questions. Always the same waiting days for
apply for an email getting redirected into the wrong person. I hated
it. And if we can make something better in that kind
of field, we are definitely in for that. And so what we did
is actually we drafted several emails, was like 10 emails, and we
shoot shot them out to different companies like Domino's Pizza in
like bigger companies and smaller companies. And we pretended to have
the technology already and we just said like, hey, we
have this technology. You can create bots. You can link them
and connect them to Facebook messenger and WhatsApp, and you can reach your clients.
And then all of a sudden from these 10 emails, three or four came back
and said like, hey, that's super interesting. And that was kind of the
initial spark that led us to founding the company. Honestly, two days
later. Two days. Well, that's not
a lot for strategic planning. I have to admit.
At the time, conversational AI was still emerging. What
did, like the everyday look back
then for a powered customer support, it
was admittedly the time before LLMs and ChatGPT
was what was broken and how did you fix it? Yeah, I
mean it was back in 2016, so there was no OpenAI, no
ChatGPT, no LLMs in this form. So the technology
was really basic, to be honest. And the thing was customer
support, I always thought like, you know, they have some automation
tools already. They must have, like, if you look at O2
Germany, for example, there's like millions of requests of support
questions coming in every kind of month. So I thought, of course there
must have something. But then once we went into like a
customer support center and looked at how they work, it was
crazy. They, you know, they manually type the answers they
have. You know, sometimes they do copy paste, but then they have to go into
different systems. Then for different questions, they need to go to
different systems and then they needed to copy paste that answer. And in order
to make it work for the client, it was a disaster. So once we
kind of got a feeling of how the current customer support
works, we knew exactly, that's a big pain point.
So we can definitely make something work. And so
the only problem was that AI or the
things that we wanted to build bots were pretty much at the beginning. So
the technology was really early, really not working
well. It Couldn't understand detailed or
complex requests. The only thing that it could do, or at least our
system could do, is actually FAQs. So there was one question from,
from a client and we could deliver the answer. And what we
built because of that, because it could only like not understand
any context in a conversation. It could just do like FAQs.
We kind of build a hybrid solution which means that the
technology is not, you know, automating the whole time,
but it's only automating if a specific threshold is actually met.
So you can set it up yourself. Every company could set it up yourself. You
could say, for example, the system needs to be 95% sure
that this is going to be the right, that answer. And only then it automates.
But if not, then what the system does, it provides a
suggestion to the agents so the agent can actually say, hey, that's the
right answer, that's the wrong answer, that this needs to be edited. And
then the system learns over time through the agent's
input, which is, which was back in the days a really, you
know, good system. Because if you work with Deutsche Bahn or BMW
or something, the big brands, they didn't want any wrong answer
sending out to clients, right? And so with our
system, they could go live instantly. And through the
input of the support agents, the system kind of trained itself automatically,
which was kind of quite new at the time. And I think that was also
one of the reasons we were. Reasons we were successful.
Interesting. What
was your, like, one day moment, the
turning point where you knew this
startup was going to scale really fast? I
think there wasn't a specific one moment
where I knew exactly now it's going to be, you know, scaling. It was
more like, I mean, we were just working day and night. We kind of tried
to make it work. And, you know, I think
if you are stuck in a moment, if you're working day and night, you don't
look left or right. You don't even know what's happening. You don't even know like,
that it's actually going in the right direction, you know,
back. If you look at it from like two years
after that and you look back, then you think, okay, crazy what I
kind of achieved. But if you're in the moment, if you're working day
and night for months, for years, you don't even realize if there was a
specific moment or something. But if you want to pin me down on like a
specific moment, it would definitely be, I think, like the Series A. Like once
we kind of got the Series A We got 6.5 million in US
dollar funding. That was the moment where I thought, okay, now we're going to
have and we can spend a lot of money and hire a lot of people.
You know, that was the time where I could relax a little bit and, you
know, kind of go on holiday also for the first time. So I think
that was kind of the moment where I thought, okay, this is going to be
scaling fast now because we can hire a lot of people, we can get a
lot of clients. So probably in
2019 then three years after we founded the company. I was
actually, when I was looking at this question, I was going
for a picture when you standing there in front
of an Excel sheet, seeing all the data and
realizing, I need a new scale because it's going so well.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, like over the whole
years, over the five years, it, it went pretty well. So we had
really good growth rates in the beginning, 200% and then it went back to
150 and 100% because the, you know, the threshold is
higher. But I mean, it was also,
you know, planned in the business plan. So like if investors expect
something and we expect something from our, like, even
if you get a new client and get like 500k in AR, you
kind of expected it to happen. Right. And this is also kind of the,
the bad thing about it because you need to celebrate more and you need to,
you know, once you get a new client, you know, you need to really like
do a big party. And I don't know, but we didn't do that. We just
expected it to come and we just, once the contract came
in, we just, you know, woke up the next day and worked again
like nothing happened before. So
it's. Yeah, that's the thing. I think in hindsight I would
have done it a little bit, you know, different, like
celebrate the small wins even more and do a little party
or like, you know, do something with the team. But we're just like focused on
making this work and making it successful. So any new deal
wasn't, you know, moving the needle for us in the
sense of now it's actually getting super successful.
Let us talk a little bit about the struggle behind the growth
scaling from 130 employees across five countries.
There's really no joke. What were your toughest operational
or leadership challenges as the team grew? Like
30, then 60, then 100. Yeah,
it's a good question because of course it changes over the time. Right.
So I think once you hit like 20 or 30 employees, it's still
super cool. It's really startup vibey. You have.
Have a couple of people that help you in some directions in some ways,
but it's more about creation, right? So you're really like,
you know, you build something new, you break something, and you just try it
all over again. Once you hit, like, I would say 50,
60 people, it changes a little bit because that's the time
when you need to delegate, right? You need, you know, to hire people.
You know, in my case, I was actually hiring a CFO
that takes over the. Or took over the whole financial and accounting
processes. And so that's where it changes a
little bit. It was still fun, but it was completely different because you
delegated a lot and it wasn't more.
Much more creative anymore. But once you hit 100
people, like 110, 120, the whole game
changes completely because you're kind of, you're maintaining, you're
managing. You have all these people kind of below you.
You're just doing recurring meetings. You have these, you know,
like, kind of weekly calls. That's where it kind of.
It was still fun, but it was completely different than when I
created the company in the first place. So it was kind of a
development, not in the, in the
best way for me because I thought like, you know, I'm not the perfect
manager. I'm a startup founder. I want to be creative. I want to, you know,
break things. And once you hit 100 people, you can't
break things anymore at that level. And you can't be so creative anymore because you
put everything in the hands of your people. But what you get is the
worst problems on earth. Like if your team
can't handle a specific problem, then it lands at your desk.
And it's most likely the worst problems, like the biggest
customer threatens to leave, or the best employees
threatens to leave, or like big salary
negotiations or like, you know, you just
handle and solve big pain points, big problems,
which you need to like. I didn't like it as much as
like building the company from the ground up, to be honest.
I actually know how you feel. It's when you get from a founder to
manager, right? Exactly. Yeah. That's
a big transition, to be honest. And I haven't. Hadn't
planned really with that transition because I've never done it before.
But it's a completely different life, completely different, you know,
kind of working environment. And you also need different kind of people.
Right in the beginning you need like, people that are trying things out, being
creative and stuff like that, and break things and at some point you need kind
of managers, you need people that have, you know, done it before, have done
it perhaps like for the last 10 years, 15 years already. You need experience, you
need skills. It's not only about so much
mindset or attitude anymore. It's more about skills and experience. And that
changes a lot. I think personal opinion, before we get into the next
question, I do believe entrepreneur is part of your
personality. That's what you enjoy. But if you turn into
a manager, then personal feeling, it's
best if you have seen this. If you worked in a corporate environment, if
you've done some jobs there, then the transition can go
smooth. You've raised venture
capital, signed enterprise customers, and scale tech
across borders. What was the first big
pivot you had to make and what did it
teach you about your assumptions in product market
fit? So when we founded a company, we
didn't know exactly if we wanted to actually build a product around it. So
what we set up the company for was actually an agency kind of
system. So we just wanted to be the middleman in
between companies that wanted to connect and
build bots or integrate bots and developers who could actually build
bots. So we just wanted to pay, you know, get a commission and, you know,
to connect them, and then we're out of the game. But then at some point
we thought like, okay, we actually need to kind of create our own
product, because AI is much more difficult to scale
and much more difficult to build. It's not like a setup system where
you can, like a website. You build a website for three weeks, it's finished, you
hand it over to a client and then it's done. With AI, with chatbots, it
was more like a continuous process which you needed to optimize.
You know, every time something broke, every time some, some wrong
answer got out and stuff like that. So the agency problem or
the agency company kind of concept didn't really work. So what we did,
because we didn't have a developer yet, we didn't have a CTO yet, we
kind of transformed it into a consulting company where we did
monthly workshops in different cities across Europe
just to get insights on how customer support actually works. So they
paid for their tickets to spend a day with us talking about AI.
And for us, it was really valuable because we could get their feedback in
order to build a product that's actually worthwhile. So in the
meantime, we hired a CTO who was then also one of our co
founders, and we kind of built a product. So from that point in
time, it was Clear. We wanted to build something in customer support,
but we also had some shift sometimes. You know, at some point, we wanted
to build something in E commerce because we thought it's a better, you know,
kind of vertical. We didn't want to spend too much time in customer support
centers. But, like, at the end of the day, we knew
customer support is the biggest pain point, so we actually went for customer support at
the end. But it taught me that, you know, when you start a
company, it's not only about the first idea that's going to
be successful. You will change it a lot of times, and probably you have
to change it over time because you get more knowledge, you get more, you know,
people that actually test your product, and you will kind
of change it in different directions more than you think
and more than you want to. But it's a good process. It's. It's good actually
for the company. I think if you turn around a little bit and, like, adjust
it on different ends. So for me, it taught me, like,
you know, it's actually good to pivot. I think you should
pivot if you feel like it's. It's worthwhile and gives you
a better direction. And we've done it a couple of times and was really successful.
Successful at the end.
I was. I was wondering, when you
scale that rapidly, if you promise that to investors,
you get some. You get some pressure to scale
rapidly. The faster, the better. How did
this affect you personally as founder and human being?
Was there something like a moment where you felt the
warning signs of a burnout creeping in? I
mean, so the thing is, the first three years we've
worked day and night, to be honest, like, every day, every weekend,
every birthday, you know, every kind of family event.
So we didn't have one time off. But then at some point, after three years,
you know, my body was pretty, pretty bad. So, like,
my kind of. My parents forced me to go on holiday,
and that was the first sign where I thought, okay,
because on holiday I didn't recover. And that is always
a bad sign. Once you go on holiday and you feel like it's actually
getting worse than better, that was kind of the first sign that I needed to
change something. So once I came back, I felt a little bit better. But
I thought. I talked to my co founders and said, hey, I can't do that
anymore. Let's, you know, try to,
you know, break, like, do the weekends off. I can't do it on Saturday, on
Sunday, every week. You know, let's also put in some holidays. For
the next couple of months. And that was the first kind of
change that I did in the company. And
then we kept on working. We did some holidays, we did some take, you
know, some time off on the weekends and was much better.
And then it kind of hit me when we were
actually doing our CSB. So we wanted to raise capital
around US$30 million. And we had done a fundraising
process for a couple of months already. And at the end, we found an investor
who wanted to invest 30 million from the US but then at the same
time, an offer from Life Person, the company that had
bought us at the end, came in. And so we had to decide
what to do now, right? And, you know, at the end of the day, we
had a gut feeling that kind of selling the company was actually a much
better decision than staying and getting that funding in.
And so for a couple of months, we were super
uncertain what to do. And at the end of the day, we kind of
declined the investor. And the investor was gone then, of course, because the
investor didn't want to wait for weeks and months until we decide.
So this investor, who we found after a couple of months was gone.
And so we put everything at stake to make that M and A
happen, to actually sell the company. But of course, we needed money.
That's why we wanted to fundraise in the first place. So it took longer.
And the problem was that we needed extra funding in order to make that M
and A process happen, right? So it was a really uncertain kind
of time because we also needed to come to our old investor and
say, hey, we want to sell the company. But our investors said, like, why do
we actually want to sell the company? So we had kind of an internal conflict.
Our investors wanted to keep moving. We wanted to sell a company. And so
our investors didn't want to really, like, you know, support us, help us in, like,
selling the company. And so it was a little bit of a struggle, but at
the end of the day, they, you know, pushed in some money so we could
actually do the M A. But
honestly, every day we felt like the
acquirer, the potential requirer, he could always, you
know, go, you know, retract from. From kind of
buying us and like, you know, we would have been bankrupt within
a couple of if, if. If they had done it. So having
this uncertainty for months, and then in parallel, my mother
got sick and got worse and worse by the week, and I had to kind
of, you know, kind of take care of her too. And all of this
happened in kind of the same months. And weeks in the same
time. And then my mother died. And like, you know, there
was some time where kind of the life person actually
wanted to get out of the deal and then they went in again. So it
was, was always a back and forth and we almost lost the whole company
having to fire 130 employees at the end of the
day. We were lucky and, and it happened. We actually reached the point where
we went to the notary, but I was completely burned out. Like I was
completely done after, you know, six, seven, eight
months of, you know, fundraising and a process taking care of my mother.
And so after that, after we sold the company, I was just
completely, you know, destroyed. I couldn't like sleep
anymore, I couldn't work anymore, I couldn't read
any books anymore. I was completely destroyed. And
it took ages until I got better. So that was kind of the
burnout, you know, situation. It took me a couple of months to actually feel
better and be able to work in and to work again.
What no one saw was that during the four year of our
acquisition, I was also watching my mother die. That's
not a headline, but that's a real story. You actually wrote very
powerful about losing your mother during the exit and hitting burnout post
acquisition for board members. You'll take us behind the scenes.
What you hid publicly and how did that
disconnect shape your recovery?
I actually know the feeling. It's kind of like all
your energy get drained out when you see somebody getting worse and worse and worse.
Right? Yeah, exactly. It was horrible. To be
honest, it was the worst time in my life because it was almost like
losing like not only my mother, but also the company that
I've been building up for five years. It was also kind of my baby that
I sold. Like it was just horrible, the whole process
and also having this uncertainty around my mother, but also around the company
that it might not happen. And at some point, you know, it felt like it
didn't happen and like they we kind of needed to kind of
decline the deal at some point. But then they came back after a week, but
we didn't know that. So it was an, you know, honestly it
was back and forth, but we were pretty open like with how we
were feeling. I was super open with my co founders, how I'm feeling, how,
you know, the thing is I couldn't really take a time off when my
mother died. So I jumped straight into lawyers calls and
stuff like that. So it wasn't like I could, could some could do some
time off or like I could Recover a little bit. It was in the midst
of. And the M and A process. I couldn't just, like, leave for two or
three weeks. It was crazy. And I'm pretty
open about it because I think that's part of who, you know,
who. Who I am and, like, part of the entrepreneurial journey. Right.
It's not only about the highs and the best things that happen and the good
things and, you know, it's also about the bad things that can happen. And,
like, for me, it's also kind of a relief to talk
about it. The more you talk about it, the more you write it down.
That's why I also started the newsletter. The more,
you know, kind of I can also hear from it. So
I'm. That's why I'm pretty open with it. I'm super happy to talk about
it, and I've been that, you know,
so open from the beginning on, and I think it's a good thing.
Next question would actually be to ask you how you felt
after the exit. But I think we already talked about it.
You've once said that the burnout didn't start after the exit.
It started long before. What were signs you
ignored? What can you give others, other founders,
as a warning system? And what should founders watch for
before it's already too late? Yeah, it's a very good question.
And I've been thinking about this a lot, and my
essence, or my kind of resume is actually that it's not about
the hard and long hours that you work it. That's.
That's not the reason why I got burnout. Burnout you get
once you do something for a long period of time, which you actually
don't like to do. Right. Which is completely against your will, against
your values, against everything you actually stand for.
So for me, that was the M and A process. So that's where it actually
started. I had some burnout symptoms before, too, but
I always could actually recover by making holidays, by, you
know, you know, kind of doing sport and meeting friends and stuff like that.
I was never, you know, kind of, you know, in that
kind of feeling that, oh, I might get burnout now and I need to really
stop. It was actually only when, you know,
the whole fundraising process turned into an M and
A process. My mother on, you know, in parallel. That's
where, you know, the burnout signs actually started. And,
you know, this. The signs are like, you know,
for me, it was like doing something of a month. Like,
anyone who has done a fundraising round knows what I'm
talking about. It's not nice. Like you're talking to a hundred
investors, you always asked or you know,
reply to the same questions. It's always about negative things. Why you.
And look at this competition. And you know, then it's about term sheets and
contracts and it's always about negative things. And also during the M and A
process, it's always about, you know, how can the buyer protect itself from,
like if something happens, how can we protect ourselves? And something bad
happens. You know, it's always about, you know, protection, about
bad things that could happen, about worst case scenarios. So that's,
and if you do that over like nine months or so and
you don't, you're not creative, you're not working on your startup, you're just
purely in these processes, talking to lawyers the whole time, talking to investors
the whole time, you get, you know, really drained from these
conversations and from these processes. So at some point, you
know, I just thought, like, I'm, I'm just a machine. Like I'm, I'm,
I don't live anymore. I just, I'm just running these
processes. On, on the other hand, I had to take care with my mother.
It was horrible. Like it's, you know, and, and the
signs are like, you feel like a machine. You don't recover anymore. You,
you're super drained. You wake up and you have this like
clouds in front of your eyes and you can, you, you can't
breathe. And I had heart problems during that time. I had,
you know, like headaches all the time, but really strong
headaches, which I've never had before. And I had them for months, like
every day for months. So that was pretty, pretty bad. And
so that was the time where I thought, okay, this is definitely going
in the wrong direction. But I couldn't stop. I couldn't just leave the process and
leave everyone behind. I was too much driven. I
wanted to actually then, you know, make it successful and sell the company at some
point. So I couldn't stop, even though I
needed to. But
going a little bit down the road, you once stepped
away from the second company that he founded.
What was your first real step toward
healing and clarity and what began to
change? Yeah, so after the first company, after I
sold it, we were in that company for another two years because of
Arnold and because, you know, they of course wanted to stay. Even though we were
pretty bad in terms of energy levels, we kind
of kept on being in the company. And after two years we felt actually a
lot better. And we thought, what about now? You know, what can we do now.
And we thought like, perhaps we feel better
by, you know, founding the next company just because
we wanted to go somewhere. Like, you know, perhaps that's kind of a way
to heal ourselves. And we kind of were a lot better already
after two years. So we founded the next company which was called
Vidlab 7. And the thing was, we did exactly the same.
We hired people, we built up the product, we got investors
on board like eqt, so really strong company
again. And we did everything from scratch again, kind of similar
playbook than we had in the first company. But then, you
know, during that time my body just really kind of
told me to stop. Like I had headaches again, I had burnout symptoms
again. I was really in a horrible place at some point. And after
round about a year, I just needed to leave. I gave everything
back and I just needed to drop out and do something
completely different because my brain, my, my, my body,
my, my mind was just telling me to stop and not do this any
day further. So it was a tough decision. I talked to my co
founder, I talked to my investors and, and it was really hard to actually make
that decision. But at some point, you know, I just couldn't do it anymore. And
it was the best decision that I've ever taken, to be honest. And
then I went to Africa. I spent a couple of months in
Africa doing social work. So I'm. I support
an organization called Amos where we support animals
in the field and we build fences and so to protect them from
poaching. And then there's other social projects in Cape Town that I support.
So we visited some kindergartens and disability homes which I
support now. So that kind of, you know,
was an eye opener for me because I've, you know, I
was just all of a sudden with people that have nothing, but they were
super happy. And I always thought like, you know, being
successful, having money, being wealthy is like the way to go
and be, you know, to be happy. But then I thought, saw all these
people that had literally nothing. They were living in a shed, like in,
you know, like, like, you know, a tree house or something. Like it
was crazy. And they were super happy, super friendly, super open.
And so that's where kind of my mindset shifted. So I came back from
Africa and then I thought, okay, what could I actually do to
help also people, right? Like not only do something for myself, but also
do something to contribute to the society, to help Hope,
you know, someone actually built something because I have done it
over 10 years. I know how to build A company. I know how to get
investors. And that's where kind of I thought, okay, how about I write a book?
That was kind of my initial idea, but writing a book takes you like one
and a half or two years, and you need to really be motivated to sit
down every day and write a book. You know, 300, 400
pages, even more. And I thought, like, how about, you know, just
sharing quick and small stories every week? Because through that I can
reach more people earlier, but also I can get feedback on
the stories really early, and then at the end, I can actually write
a book about it. Right. And so that's how I started Substack and from
Substack, which is a newsletter where I reach a lot of founders and
CEOs, kind of coaching evolved. So
people would ask me, like, hey, you've done it already a couple of times. You've
scaled companies. You sold your company for 60 million. Could you actually help
me in the M and A process? Could you help me in fundraising? Could you
help me in go to market? So that's when I started to actually consult companies
and then consult founders and actually, you know, making these
transitions or these challenges happen. And from
that, I thought it's nice to help people one on
one. But how about I create products that can actually help a thousand or
million people straight away? So now what I'm doing is actually building
products like frameworks and digital courses, like a
fundraising course to actually help people at scale. And that's what
I'm currently doing. And I'm super happy by, you know, doing that. And
it's been a relief. And, you know, like,
I just want to don't go back anymore into like building a B2B
AI company. It's just not anymore for me.
Many founders talk about reflection, but few were
built as publicly as you did. Why did you choose
to create the actually a newsletter?
And did it help help your own recovery?
Yeah, I mean, it links to the things a little bit that I said, like,
I mean, of course, like, my goal was actually to write a book
because you could put down your thoughts and you can think about
them a couple of weeks and months and you can write down your story and.
But the problem is with a book, you take ages until you write a book,
and it doesn't really like you. You could create.
You create value at the end once you kind of publish the book, but you
can't create value during the process.
So. And all of a sudden substack came up. I think a
friend of mine told me, and I Looked at Substack and what's good about Substack
or in general newsletters is actually that you can just share
tiny stories every week and reach a lot of people. And
that in connection with my LinkedIn where I had already like 15, 000
followers, I could, you know, kind of link all of these
together to actually get a lot of following and then, you know, help a lot
of people through that. So I didn't need to start at zero. I started at
already, you know, quite a, quite a good following. So I just needed
to kind of, you know, tell everyone that I'm
actually, you know, helping them through a newsletter and at the end then
through coaching. And that's why I started all of this. Yeah,
I see that actually. Very interesting choice.
I was wondering for our audience, what was this one success
moment that nearly broke you? Feel free to share it with us
and tag us on X or LinkedIn. Guys,
we will be back after short ad break where Xava
reveals the playbook shift that made him a better coach,
better founder, and a better human.
Hey guys, welcome to our
part of the interview with Xavier Lehman. The
co founder of Ebol7 talked about his
experience with Exit Burnout and a lot of other private stuff.
We are now talking about frameworks, coaching and clarity.
After stepping back, what changed in how
you think about success, team leadership and productivity?
Are there some frameworks that now guide you coaching sessions with
founders? I mean, what
changed was actually I always thought success is about
wealth, is about like, you know, being on stage
and in Forbes 30 under 30 and staying in luxury hotels and having
sporty cars and stuff like that. But actually, like, you know,
my kind of definition of success completely changed
throughout the last years and especially throughout the last couple of months when
I spend a lot of time in Africa. So I think it's much more valuable.
I mean, of course I have, I've had the success and I've, you know, I
think for me it was important to have had success already. So
I know it's actually not the solution. Right. I think what's
more important and what I learned is actually spending a lot of time with your
family, with your friends, you know, doing the things you love, being free,
you know, just waking up and, you know, working on something fulfilling
and, and it doesn't need to be a big startup, it doesn't need to be
a unicorn. It can be anything. Right? And so this is kind
of what changed for me in terms of success. And I'm using
different tools now that I've kind of developed over the last 10
years to help founders on their journey. Right. I
also kind of try to, you know, kind of
get new ideas and more ideas through different coaches. So I
spent some time with Tony Robbins two weeks ago. I spent four
days, actually day and night with the guy. And. Which was
crazy and was a really good experience. And, and you know, also
there a lot of really good concepts can come into
play and I kind of can use them on
my journey and also in my coaching sessions. But it's most of, most
of the stuff that I'm kind of teaching is like,
my stuff is, you know, the things that I learned over the last 10 years.
But also in addition, I take some things from Tony Robbins and other
great coaches actually into it.
You're now also a coach
helping early stage founders
post burnout. What patterns do you see that repeat?
Are there mindset traps specific
to founder? For example, of AI SaaS or tech in general?
I mean, the mindset trap is probably like that you
need to be really quick and need to raise money as much as possible.
I think these kind of. It
changed a little bit. Times changed. So I think today with, you know,
all the vibe code coding tools, like lovable, like, you
don't need to have a big team anymore, right? You can, you know, test
out different technologies, different products, you know,
in within a couple of hours even. So I think the
founder journey, you know, completely changed in a different direction, I
think in a better direction. But like, you know, the
trap is to think that you always have to raise money, you always have to
be successful, you always have to kind of build a unicorn. That's actually not true.
It depends what you actually want in life. Like, you don't even, you
know, of course investors want unicorns because they need to pay back their
fund, right? So they need outliers, like billion companies to
actually return their funds. But as a founder, of course. And that's
why, you know, kind of sometimes the values and
also kind of the goals are different from investors and
you know, like, compared to founders, because founders are happy with, you
know, like a few millions or 10 million or 50 millions or 20
millions. Like, it depends on who you are and what you want to want to
do. Right? But that's where the interests are not really aligned.
So the trap is to think that you always have to build a unicorn, which
is totally not true. It depends on what you want. You
can also build a cool bootstrapped company which is, you
know, successful because you're waking up every day and you feel like,
you know, you're really interested in working for it and are really
thriving and exciting. And so it doesn't
need to be, you know, investors money. It doesn't need to be a
unicorn. It can just be a small kind of company that you're
building over the years. And, you know, I
think that that's, that's kind of the trap that everyone kind of could
go into. I'm
curious, looking back now with us, the most
valuable decision you made during your time, for example, at Ebol
7, that wasn't so obvious at the time.
I mean, perhaps it's obvious, but for me it wasn't.
Back in the days, I was really drowning in work after
like two or three years at working at ebot7 because I'm. I was kind of
the guy for everything. I did finance, I did operations, I did admin, I did
hr, I did sales, I did fundraising. So almost everything kind of.
And what was a big relief for me was actually when
we raised that Series A and I could finally hire
people that could take over my work, which is
redundant, which was kind of repetitive and always the same and didn't
create that much strategic value in our company. So there was the time,
you know, getting the money, but also spending the money on really
strong people who have done it before was. Was a game changer for me
because I. Because back in the days, we didn't have a lot of money and
we needed to find ways to get people on board which were
probably not, you know, the most skilled, the most
experienced people at the beginning because you needed to train them a lot.
But at some point we could just take money, get the best
people on board. And this changed everything for me. Who was
the most impactful customer or partner for
EBIT 7 and why? What made
their relationship really transformative? Definitely O2
Germany, I would say. So they were kind of the first customers we got
on board. They were also the ones that shaped our product. They
kind of offered us also to visit their customer support center. They were
super helpful, super easygoing. They were one
of the best customers. And in connection to that, Vayra,
which is kind of the accelerator of O2 Germany, which
kind of we, yeah, we got into Vayra first and then we got
actually into O2 Germany. That's kind of their vehicle to look
for innovative startups. And so I think Vira, in
connection with O2 Germany, was definitely, you know, kind of
the most important partner for us at the time. I think back in the
days until, you know, five years later, they were the
biggest customer of ours. So yeah.
And whenever there was any problem with the technology, they were the first
ones to tell us, but not in a bad way, in an angry way.
They were super, like productive and just telling us what to do.
And yeah, that was amazing. Actually.
You scale it quite impressively with this company. But
many founders to hit a wall when scaling somewhere between 30
and 100 people would advise that do
we give today for managing culture and energy at that stage?
Yes. I'm a little bit torn between two worlds because on the one hand
you kind of, you need to, to grow the startup into
something like a corporate, right? You need people, you need different kinds
of people for, for a bigger company because you need
skilled people, you need experienced people who have done it before because you add at
another stage you're also working with different kind of companies.
So. But also, on the other hand, you shouldn't lose your
startup vibe culture because that's essentially why
actually people decide to work for your startup, right? To have, you
know, cool people around you who, you know, you can go for
lunch with them and they're not colleagues, but actually friends. So this
is kind of, you know, it's, it's quite hard. You need
hierarchies, but also you don't want that many and too
deep hierarchies. You don't want to be a corporate, but you also want to
kind of keep the startup culture. That was also kind of
a little bit of difficult to find a balance between those two.
So this is what I would actually say, you know,
you know what, I. Personally have always Google in mind
when I saw this, because under the founders, it was big company
with listed companies, was a very successful company, but it still
had some startup vibe to it. But then at one
point under new leadership under Alphabet, it completely changed.
And a lot of the stuff that made the startup feeling at least
watching from the outside disappear, then that's the point where I
thought you cannot keep it for
eternity if you want to be big, if you want to be growing.
Yeah, probably. I don't know if it's possible.
You need to change your startup, your environment a little bit. But, but
I would always suggest not to do it too much and just, you know,
to keep the startup culture. Because I've seen it a lot, founders growing
into like big companies, like having 100 or 200 and 300
people and getting these, you know, corporate structures because they
hire corporate people at some point and corporate people are, you know, kind
of, they expect corporate structures and they establish
corporate structures. So at some point, you know, all of A sudden
you're getting, you, you're becoming a corporate and I think that's
where you have to be careful not to be too much of a
corporate, you know, and have too much processes and too much structures
and. Because at the end of the day that's why you were successful, because
you were quick, you could, you know, break things and you, you could hire
people that, you know, really like a different mindset, different
attitude. So yeah, that's kind of the, the different
balance that you need to keep actually.
Personal experience, personal feeling is you're still a startup. If you
do the management decision at a stand up in the morning, like 10, 15
minutes, you're fixed, everybody's on the same page, we keep going
and you're corporate. If you have to track all your decisions in an Excel
sheet or something like that. Yeah, probably. I mean,
he's smiling. That's one of the things you can, you can say. Yeah, but it's,
it's, it has a lot of different variations to it. Right. So
yeah, but probably if you have a lot of recurring meetings and a lot
of, you know, hierarchies in your companies, then that's a bad,
bad sign. I guess for the vault members.
You walk us through your founder hiring diagnostic and the
early signals that tell somebody's building the wrong team.
Everybody will be able to find the link to the founders Vault
down here in the show notes. We'll start it pretty soon for subscribers only
and we already very excited about it. Looking
now a little bit forward, what excites you most about the
intersection of mental health coaching and
the next generation of founders? Yeah, so
I mentioned it a little bit earlier. So a lot of things have changed
over the years. Right. So you've got LLMs now like ChatGPT where
you can literally build something from nothing. You don't
need big teams. I think you will definitely see unicorns, like
really big companies with just a few people on board.
So it's really exciting. But also I hope that, you know,
founder teams can actually incorporate some of the mental
health strategies and like recoveries into their
daily practice, because that's super important. I didn't do it, I went into
burnout. So I hope, you know, founders will not take the same route.
And because of AI, because it's super dynamic and super fast
past the probability that you go into something like a
burnout and like something like a depression is much, much higher than if
it's like a low passed environment. Right. And so
I would strongly suggest to keep your body and mind in in
balance and you know, kind of try to,
of course try to take advantage of the whole development around AI
because you can build something from nothing. You don't need a big team anymore, you
don't need big fundings anymore. And that's the beauty of it. And at the same
time you have to keep, keep, keep, keep, you know, your body in balance.
A discussion that I had with some friends recently
was one should
move the school into teaching more about mental health, about
meditation practices than actually writing essays. Because right now you
just need to talk to an AI and we'll spit out a perfectly structured
essay. But nobody takes care of your mental health. There's
just food for thought for the people out there. I was
wondering, don't worry. I know predictions are always
difficult, especially concerning the future, but what predictions would you
make about AI startup culture over the next three to five
years? Are we heading for more founder,
Are we heading for more founder attitude or a
healthy research? So I hope,
of course it's going to be a healthy environment, but there's
a high probability that it's going in the, in the other
direction. So the thing is with AI, it's really
fast paced. You know, it's, with technology you
get, you know, not happier, but lonelier I would say,
because you don't meet you, you meet less friends, you are
less in public, in, on the outside. And I think you
can see it already with the current generation now. You
go to a coffee place and then everyone's on their phones and
especially like, you know, seven, eight years old already like with phones. And
you know, back in the days we went playing football and we went,
you know, going out with friends and stuff like that. We didn't have devices.
So there's a lot of things that change and I think it's going to get
worse and I just hope that there's like kind of a
contra movement towards like more, you know,
spending more time in nature, spending more time with family and friends
because at the end of the day it's about, you know, being
healthy and not being lonely, you know, being
happy. And if you just spend your whole time,
your whole life on devices, it's not gonna be, it's not
gonna be good for you. Yeah, I also have
a, something for myself, like my own
rule. I also use all the
information that I put in different AI tools because I've worked with them
for hours and hours because I'm basically here by myself. Chris is in
New York, we're in different time zones and editor and
VA are also in different time zones, who help me with all the publications and
the back office and stuff. So I basically here
just simply with my AI, I'm actually, I made a habit
out of it to ask them what they know about me that will
be useful for me, plus give me regular
reminders and practices to stay mentally healthy, to
stay fit and so on and so forth. So
basically you can also make the AI work for you
in that respect. And there's a lot of stuff out there, what you can do
just food for thought and start your own research,
but not doing research. Asking you here, what's a
popular belief in startup land but you
would firmly disagree with.
I would say it connects to something that I talked about earlier. It's
about like the belief that you have to build a unicorn. And you know,
investors always expect to build a unicorn because of course they need to
return their funds. But like, deep down honesty, it depends on what you
want to do in life. Like for founders, you know, unicorn doesn't need to
be the perfect outcome because there's also a lot of dilution, a lot of funding
rounds. Like, you know, unicorn is something that startup lands kind
of startup land kind of wants and expects and something like
that. But it's actually, you know, something completely
stupid because you don't need to build a startup that's worth a billion or something.
You don't need to do that. Like, I know that, you know, some
founders, like, you know, they, they're trying everything they can
to, to build a startup in that area and then expect like, or actually demand
higher valuations, higher valuation. Then at some point they dilute and they,
you know, they have at the end of the day of like 1 or 2%
on the company and then it's a billion worth. Like it's, it's better to
bootstrap your company to 1 or 2 million. It's. You've got more than
you know if you have a billion and like nothing left. So
I would say that's something like a popular belief, but I would not say
it's true. Only agreeing with you here
without any external investors in startup radio. But
I was wondering when you've been talking about that, is this
a firm belief of startup land or is this a belief of investment
land pushed into startup land?
Yeah, probably the second. Yeah, I
mean they need to return their funds. So they of course expect startups
to perform really well and like, well means higher valuations
and higher exit volumes and stuff like that. Right. So it's
interesting for our audience. I was wondering
if you Guys could redo your startup journey with just one
lesson from today. What would you change? Tag us on social media
startup rate IO and use startup reset.
Sada Final two questions we're talking about almost
for an hour now.
Some final reflection, some final
reflections here. If a first time founder
stopped you at cafe so not playing with his or her device
and asked you what's one thing you wish you knew earlier,
what would you say? I would probably say that
mental health is more important than you think. I mean
I've done the whole journey and always neglected it. I
kind of worked my ass off day and night and I didn't pay
too much attention, you know, towards, you know, meditating
and I mean I did my sport the whole time, I did my workouts but
you know, having enough pauses, you know, doing lunch
breaks, having weekends off, that's super important and I,
that's something I would definitely say, you know, take that more
seriously. Weekends off is also one of my
rules. What's the boldest, most
honest thing you've learned about yourself through
like the complete journey? Everything you went through?
Honestly, I would say that, I would probably say,
and I wouldn't have admitted it back in the days, but
I think I thought that money solves all problems, but
it definitely doesn't and I think freedom solves most
of the problems. Like my values changed a little bit in the sense
of first I wanted money, I wanted to be, you know,
financially free and now it's about freedom of work,
freedom, whatever I can do whenever I can with whom I want.
So my kind of feeling of like
my values changed a little bit in that direction. So
I thought money was kind of the answer, but it's not.
Awesome closing words. Ksava, thank you very much. Was such a
pleasure talking to you. Actually we had such an intense and long
conversation. We need to have a second interview
session just for you to give to give us your wisdom
in the founders world. Everybody would like to learn more. Go down here in the
show notes and subscribe to the Founders World and we'll see you back
shortly. Answering a few questions for our
audience there, Sara, was a pleasure having you as a guest. Thank you very
much. Best of luck and keep us updated and of course everybody will
find your substack newsletter down here in the show notes as well.
Perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure and
see you next time. See you next time. Bye bye, bye bye
bye.
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