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The Founder Exhale
The Founder Exhale
Real conversations with exited founders about what 'success' actually costs, and what it takes to protect your mental health along the way. I also talk with values-aligned investors and mental health leaders who are changing how the startup world treats wellbeing. Welcome to the show shattering the silence around founder mental health.
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The Founder Exhale

The Founder Exhale

Real conversations with exited founders about what 'success' actually costs, and what it takes to protect your mental health along the way. I also talk with values-aligned investors and mental health leaders who are changing how the startup world treats wellbeing.

Welcome to the show shattering the silence around founder mental health.

Recent Episodes

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Shaler Houser: I Burned It All the Way Down
July 20, 2026

Shaler Houser: I Burned It All the Way Down

Shaler Houser built and sold four companies over three decades. He also lost everything more than once, not just financially, but personally. In this episode, I sit down with Shaler Houser, a 4x exited founder and Partner at Founderville VC, who has spent nearly three decades building companies, losing everything, rebuilding, and using every hard-won lesson to invest in and support the founders coming up behind him. This is the most honest conversation I've had about addiction, identity, and w
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Grant Winns: What Four Successful Exits Taught Him About Self-Doubt
July 1, 2026

Grant Winns: What Four Successful Exits Taught Him About Self-Doubt

Every founder deals with self-doubt, but most never tell anyone. In the very first episode of The Founder Exhale, I sit down with Grant Winns, an 8-time founder with 4 successful exits, including the globally recognized brand BYLT Basics, and CEO of Yuna Health, an AI-native mental health platform built to fill the gap between crisis care and traditional therapy. Grant gets real about the mental health challenges across two decades of entrepreneurship, what self-doubt actually looks like from
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Trailer: Welcome to The Founder Exhale
June 12, 2026

Trailer: Welcome to The Founder Exhale

Here's why I started this podcast and what you can expect.
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About the Host

James Oliver, Jr. Profile Photo
James Oliver, Jr.

👋🏽 Hi, I'm James Oliver Jr., cofounder of the world's cutest twins, Zoe and Thaddeus, and husband to an amazing wife, Prudence. I'm also the founder of the Kabila Founder Mental Health Fund, which pays for therapy for founders, and author of Burn Bright, Not Out: Shattering the Silence Around Mental Health in Tech Startups, and a Techstars and gener8tor alum.

I started a company, poured everything into it, and watched it fail. What I wasn't ready for wasn't the failure: it was what that failure did to my mental health. Thankfully, therapy changed my life.

The grants from the Kabila Founder Mental Health Fund are named after my grandmother, Carmen Reid, an entrepreneurial woman who built a life for her family against real odds. She died young from a stroke brought on by years of stress, without ever having access to mental health support. That loss is, in part, the reason I started the Fund, wrote Burn Bright, Not Out, host The Founder Exhale walk series in cities like Atlanta, Manhattan, Redwood City, and Chicago, and now bring you this podcast.

Success is more than the exit. We celebrate it, but we never talk about what it costs founders. The next generation of founders deserves better than suffering in silence. I sit down with exited founders to talk honestly about the mental health journey nobody puts in the press release, along with investors and mental health leaders working to change startup culture from the inside.

Together, let's shatter the silence around founder mental health, one conversation at a time.

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