On beginnings, overwhelm, and why mindset is the only playbook that matters
There's a particular kind of quiet that happens right before everything changes.
I'm living in that quiet right now.
As Founder and CEO of NOGG, I'm in the middle of building a company from the ground up with a small, scrappy team. I'm trying to keep pace with a technology landscape that moves faster than any team I've ever been part of. And on top of all of that — this summer, we're relocating our family to Los Angeles.
None of these things are happening one at a time. That's rarely how life works.
Overwhelming? Genuinely. But also, and I've had to remind myself of this more than once: this is what a beginning looks like. Not a clean slate. Not a fresh start in a vacuum. A beginning in the middle of everything else — which is the only kind that's ever real.
The Myth of the "Perfect Start"
We have a strange relationship with beginnings. We romanticize them in hindsight and dread them in real time. As a founder, I've learned that the start of anything rarely feels like the cinematic montage we imagined. It feels more like juggling while learning to juggle.
Right now I'm running a company, managing a team, staying sharp on every shift in AI and tech that could reshape what we're building — and somewhere in the background, coordinating a cross-country move with my family. Each of these things on its own is a real undertaking. Together, they create a kind of pressure that doesn't leave much room for doubt.
And that's exactly where sports taught me something that no business book ever could: the conditions are never going to be perfect. The question is whether you can perform inside the imperfection.
What Athletes Know That Founders Often Forget
Allyson Felix is the most decorated female track and field Olympian in U.S. history — eleven Olympic medals, five Games, a career that redefined what longevity in sport looks like. But what she's built off the track might be even more instructive. After Nike tried to cut her pay during her pregnancy, she didn't retreat — she founded Saysh, a shoe company built from the ground up for women, raised over $11 million, and then launched Always Alpha, the first talent management firm dedicated entirely to female athletes. On the lessons of that transition, Felix has been clear: "I've been able to bring all the things that made me reach greatness in my sport now into this new phase. It hasn't been smooth or easy. It has been a lot of learnings and a lot of ups and downs, but I absolutely love it."
That's the translation of athletic mindset into entrepreneurship in real time.
Simone Biles is the most decorated gymnast in history. But some of her most important performances happened when she chose not to compete — stepping back at the Tokyo Olympics to protect her mental health, then returning at Paris more grounded and more deliberate than ever. She reframed what strength looks like: not the absence of struggle, but the clarity to know what you need and the courage to act on it. Her quote that I keep coming back to: "Today, do what others won't so tomorrow you can accomplish what others can't." That's not a sports philosophy. That's a startup philosophy.
Kobe Bryant's "Mamba Mentality" wasn't about being fearless — it was about being afraid and doing the work anyway. He often said that the moment you became comfortable was the moment you stopped growing. As someone trying to keep pace with every new platform, model, and trend that reshapes what's possible in business, I think about this constantly.
And then there's the data point that ties all of this together: according to Ernst & Young, 94% of women in C-suite positions played competitive sports. That's not a coincidence. That's a curriculum.
When the Boardroom Learned from the Field
The connection between sports and executive leadership isn't anecdotal — it's a well-worn path.
Meg Whitman — former CEO of eBay and Hewlett-Packard, and one of the most studied female executives of her generation — was a multi-sport athlete at Princeton, competing in lacrosse, squash, and basketball. She has spoken directly about how sports shaped her approach to building companies: "When I'm pulling a business team together, I still use those basketball aphorisms I learned as a young person." She has credited the "all for one, one for all" mentality, led by a coach, as foundational to how she learned to lead.
Indra Nooyi, who ran PepsiCo for over a decade and was consistently ranked among the most powerful business leaders in the world, played cricket in college — in an era when there was no women's team at her university. She found a way in anyway. That orientation — seeing a gap and not accepting it as an answer — is the same instinct that drives anyone building something from scratch.
Christine Lagarde, who led the International Monetary Fund and later the European Central Bank, was a member of France's national synchronized swimming team. A sport that demands precision, performance under pressure, and making the extraordinarily difficult look effortless in public. Sound familiar?
These women didn't just play sports. They carried the mental architecture of athletic competition directly into the highest levels of business and global leadership.
The Small Team Is the Feature, Not the Bug
One of the quieter anxieties of building a company with a small team is the feeling that you're doing it wrong. Shouldn't there be more people? More infrastructure? More of everything?
Sports gave me a different frame for this.
Billie Jean King — tennis legend, and one of the most consequential advocates for equality in both sports and business — built her entire legacy on the idea that impact doesn't require size, it requires conviction. She fought for equal prize money, equal respect, and equal access, often with far fewer resources than her opponents. What she had in abundance was clarity of purpose and an absolute refusal to let the scale of the opposition determine the scale of her ambition.
A small team isn't a liability when everyone is playing their position at full capacity. At NOGG, we move fast precisely because we're not navigating layers of bureaucracy. Every person carries real weight, and that accountability creates a kind of clarity you simply can't manufacture in a larger org.
The challenge is keeping everyone oriented in the same direction when the landscape is changing weekly — new tools, new models, new ways of building and reaching people. It requires constant recalibration without losing your footing.
Staying Sharp in a World That Won't Slow Down
The tech world right now feels like playing a sport where the rules change between quarters. AI capabilities that seemed futuristic eighteen months ago are now table stakes. Distribution strategies that worked last year need to be completely reimagined. Platforms rise and fall in the time it takes to close a seed round.
This is genuinely hard to hold. I won't pretend otherwise.
But I keep coming back to what Michael Jordan said about failure: "I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
Staying current isn't about knowing everything. It's about being willing to be a beginner, again and again. Being comfortable saying I don't know this yet and treating that as a starting line rather than a finish line.
Serena Williams — 23 Grand Slam titles, four Olympic gold medals, and founder of Serena Ventures, which has invested in hundreds of companies led by founders from underrepresented backgrounds — has talked openly about what it means to operate in territory where no one has gone before. She didn't wait for a roadmap. She built one. And when she launched WYN BEAUTY, she said something that landed for me: "These are products for everyone who knows they don't have to pick between looking and performing their best." That's a product philosophy rooted in the exact same belief system she brought to every match.
The founders I most admire aren't the ones with all the answers. They're the ones who've built a genuine tolerance for not knowing — and an addiction to figuring it out.
Mindset Is Not a Soft Skill
I want to push back on the way we sometimes talk about mindset — as if it's a nice-to-have, a motivational poster, something separate from the "real" work of building a company.
Mindset is the work. It is the foundation everything else is built on.
When you're overwhelmed — truly overwhelmed, the kind where you're not sure where to direct your energy first — the only thing that determines your next move is your mental posture. Are you in contraction or expansion? Are you treating the chaos as evidence that you're failing, or as evidence that you're in motion?
Kobe Bryant called it. Simone Biles lived it. Allyson Felix turned a professional betrayal into a company. Meg Whitman took the vocabulary of team sports and rebuilt how she communicated with every room she ever walked into. Indra Nooyi played a sport with no women's team and found a way in anyway.
None of them waited for calm waters. They trained in the storm. And when business threw its version of the same conditions at them, they already knew how to move.
That skill is transferable. It has to be.
The Beginning Is the Point
Here's what I keep coming back to, across the company build, the team, the tech shifts, and yes — the move on the horizon:
The beginning is not the obstacle. The beginning is the point.
Every championship team has a first practice. Every category-defining company has a first day with no users. Every great athlete has a moment before anyone knew their name. The discomfort of not yet being where you're going isn't a problem to solve — it's the texture of progress.
The conditions right now are full and fast and sometimes heavy. But they're also alive. And in my experience, that's exactly where the most important work gets done.
Mindset is everything. Not because it makes things easier — but because it determines what you do when they're not.
