October 2026

Europe trains excellent AI researchers, and then watches a disproportionate share of them build their companies in the United States. The reasons aren’t mysterious once you look at the numbers, and the last few weeks gave us an unusually clear picture of what Europe is actually competing with.

I’m an AI engineer building ChatMakr, an AI-powered platform that creates multi-agent chatbots in seconds, from France. I also spent two years at an innovation financing firm, working closely with hundreds of Parisian tech founders. Here is what I’ve learned.

Why the European talent keeps leaving

Europe doesn’t have a talent problem. One mapping of global AI professionals estimates that it has roughly 30% more AI talent per capita than the United States. What it has is a capital and customer problem.

The first half of 2026 made that gap concrete: according to AI Weekly, American AI companies attracted $355.9 billion of the $412.7 billion invested by U.S. venture capital, about 86% of all U.S. venture dollars deployed during the period, while Europe’s entire AI venture haul for the same period was roughly $42 billion, about 8% of the global AI funding total.

Even European success stories bend toward the U.S. eventually: Klarna had to rebuild its product “nearly from the ground up” for the American market before its US revenue grew 58% year over year. Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in early September, and the deal represents an extraordinary exit for its three French founders, but Hugging Face was founded in 2016 in New York City, not Paris. Swedish startup Lovable is one of the rare exceptions, reaching a $6.6 billion valuation and $400 million in revenue without restructuring around a U.S. move.

The tax cost

Funding is only half the story. What happens once a company actually succeeds matters just as much, and this is where France in particular becomes a concern for founders. In the latest OECD data, covering 2024, France had a tax-to-GDP ratio of 43.5%, the second-highest in the OECD.

Then there’s the exit tax itself. If a founder has been a French tax resident for at least 6 of the previous 10 years and holds shares with an aggregate value exceeding €800,000, or shares representing at least 50% of a company’s profit rights, moving their tax residence out of France triggers taxation of the unrealized gain on those shares. A founder sitting on millions in paper gains can therefore face a potentially six- or seven-figure tax liability triggered by the move, even without having sold the shares.

A different funding mix

The funding that does exist in Europe also looks structurally different from what’s available in the U.S. Y Combinator and the broader American VC system give founders relatively fast equity financing in exchange for ownership and the expectation of rapid growth.

Europe, by contrast, has a much larger ecosystem of public and non-dilutive funding. In France, Bpifrance’s Prêt d’Amorçage can provide €50,000 to €100,000, rising to €300,000 where a regional guarantee is involved; the EIC Accelerator offers grants of up to €2.5 million without requiring equity if a company applies for grant-only support; and Germany’s ZIM programme provides substantial R&D subsidies, with eligible costs for individual projects now reaching €690,000. These programmes can help founders preserve their equity, but they generally come with more eligibility requirements, documentation and application processes than a VC round, and they don’t provide the same investor network or direct pressure to scale that an equity investor does.

Two French tax mechanisms are genuinely generous on paper. The Crédit d’Impôt Recherche gives companies a 30% tax credit on eligible R&D spending, with immediate reimbursement available to qualifying SMEs and other eligible companies, and the IP Box also offers a 10% preferential regime for qualifying IP income, including income from certain copyright-protected software, something the U.S. has no direct equivalent for. In practice, however, they can be difficult to use. R&D tax claims face detailed eligibility rules and scrutiny, and plenty of founders I’ve worked with either underclaim out of caution or skip these programs entirely because they don’t know the filing process well enough to trust it.

Mistral is betting beyond the frontier-model race

On Sept. 8, Mistral raised €3 billion in a Series D round led by Samsung at a post-money valuation over €21 billion, described as the largest equity funding round in European tech history. That’s genuinely a record, and it should be treated as one.

But read past the headline number and the strategy shift is just as notable. Mistral is no longer consistently at the top of the raw model benchmarks. On SWE-bench Verified, a widely used coding benchmark, DeepSeek V4 Pro leads at 80.6% and Qwen 3.6-27B scores 77.2%, while Mistral isn’t competitive at that tier. The strategy is broadening beyond the race to build a single best-in-class model. Mistral is investing heavily in compute, infrastructure and sovereign AI, while opening its platform to third-party models. The first one Mistral added wasn’t a European model: GLM-5.2, built by the Chinese lab Z.ai. The strategy suggests that Mistral sees owning the sovereign infrastructure layer as potentially as strategically valuable as competing at the model layer, even if that means hosting a Chinese competitor’s weights.

The bottom line

None of this means Europe is out of the race. Mistral’s move toward sovereign infrastructure is a genuinely different bet than trying to out-model OpenAI or Anthropic, and it might be the smarter one long term if European governments actually prioritize data control the way they say they do. The Hugging Face outcome shows that European founders can build category-defining companies. If Europe wants that story to end differently next time, the fix isn’t more talent. It’s more capital willing to bet on that talent before it boards a flight to San Francisco.

Europe trains excellent AI researchers, and then watches a disproportionate share of them build their companies in the United States. The reasons aren’t mysterious once you look at the numbers, and the last few weeks gave us an unusually clear picture of what Europe is actually competing with.

I’m an AI engineer building ChatMakr, an AI-powered platform that creates multi-agent chatbots in seconds, from France. I also spent two years at an innovation financing firm, working closely with hundreds of Parisian tech founders. Here is what I’ve learned.

Why the European talent keeps leaving

Europe doesn’t have a talent problem. One mapping of global AI professionals estimates that it has roughly 30% more AI talent per capita than the United States. What it has is a capital and customer problem.

Before Megan Thee Stallion made it big and signed her first record deal, she thought that rappers made a tremendous amount of money. She saw the social media posts they made sporting new cars and fancy clothes. She couldn’t wait to become a rapper and take care of her whole family.

However, the three-time Grammy Award-winning star, whose real name is Megan Pete, said that the reality of her first record deal was that she wasn’t getting paid what she was worth. 

At Entrepreneur’s Overcoming Impossible event last week, Pete said that when she signed her first deal, she knew “it wasn’t the best deal.” What pushed her to sign it was the knowledge that she was going to be able to take care of her mom and pay the bills with the money. She was excited to “take care of her people.”

However, the bigger she got, the more she realized how much her likeness and sound were worth.

“I started realizing I’m not making as much money as I should be making because I kind of just gave my life away to somebody else,” Pete said. “I had to take a step back and think, Okay, let me see what’s going on with my contracts. Let me figure out how I can be my own boss.”

Her biggest mistake

Pete said that her biggest mistake early on was being scared to ask questions about her contract.

“I was a little bit nervous about asking questions,” she said. “I feel like that is one of the biggest things that hold people back, being afraid of sounding stupid.”

Pete said that now, if she doesn’t understand something, she asks.

She added that she didn’t just want to be famous; she wanted to own her own music. Ownership became important to her because she was putting in all the work and felt like she wasn’t receiving anything back.

Asking questions and trying to figure out how she could be her own boss paid off. In 2024, Pete signed a deal with Warner Music Group that allowed her to have full ownership of her masters and publishing. She retains her independence as a musician while tapping into Warner Music for promotion and marketing.

“I do own my masters,” Pete said. “It was important to me, coming out of a situation where I didn’t own anything and I didn’t have control of my career. I just didn’t want to ever be in that position again.”

Her motivations

Only one topic made Pete tear up on stage. 

It happened when she was talking about her “North Star,” or the guiding light that keeps her focused and shows her the way forward.

For Pete, her North Star is her family. Her mom, dad, grandmother and great-grandmother are her foundation.

“I do things that I feel like they would have wanted to see me do,” she said. “I just keep them in mind, and I just know that my mom is proud of me, my dad is proud of me.”

Wiping away tears, Pete said that her responsibility is bigger than herself. She wants to make her family proud and give her fans “little pieces” of her to incorporate into their everyday lives. She filters decisions by how her family would respond to them.

Pete also said that anyone in any career path can achieve success. They just have to follow one principle: Be true to themselves.

“When they’re being authentic to themselves, that’s when they win,” Pete said. “That’s when they’re most successful.”

Before Megan Thee Stallion made it big and signed her first record deal, she thought that rappers made a tremendous amount of money. She saw the social media posts they made sporting new cars and fancy clothes. She couldn’t wait to become a rapper and take care of her whole family.

However, the three-time Grammy Award-winning star, whose real name is Megan Pete, said that the reality of her first record deal was that she wasn’t getting paid what she was worth. 

At Entrepreneur’s Overcoming Impossible event last week, Pete said that when she signed her first deal, she knew “it wasn’t the best deal.” What pushed her to sign it was the knowledge that she was going to be able to take care of her mom and pay the bills with the money. She was excited to “take care of her people.”

Open your favorite movie streaming platform tonight, and you’ll choose from something like 100,000 titles. Open your inbox tomorrow morning, and you’ll find five urgent, unrelated projects. Open social media, and you’ll feel, for a few seconds, faintly stupid for not being a multimillionaire yet, because somehow dozens of people your age already are, or say they are.

Open your other social account, and there it is again, the ad for the 60-day calisthenics transformation program, and with it a small shame you’ve watched it three times now and still haven’t started. Scroll for another minute, and you’re no longer sure if what you just read was real or manufactured to look real, and there’s no obvious way to check.

Deadlines, comparison and information movement existed before. What’s new is the volume, the speed, and the fact that it all now arrives at once. Technology moved communication and access faster than anything before it. Organizations got better at generating priorities and initiatives than they ever got at resolving them. The result is a level of input that would have been unthinkable to someone doing your job 20 years ago.

We’ve built an entire industry of tools to sharpen our performance, automate tasks and jobs, even calm us down when it gets to be too much, and many of them are genuinely extraordinary. But they’re built to optimize the load, not to understand it. We say we’re “under pressure” and treat the phrase itself as the explanation, when it’s really just a label for something we’ve never actually looked at closely. Mostly, we default to calling all of it information overload, or to no name at all, just proof that we’re amazing multitaskers, or that we urgently need to become one.

None of this resolves by accident. Two things have to happen. First, you need to know which kind of overload you’re actually dealing with: cognitive, emotional or social, instead of calling all of it “too much” and stopping there. Second, you need a real plan for that specific kind, not just a vague hope to “handle it better.” At first, that plan takes real effort; it feels hard because it’s new. Do it enough times, and it stops feeling like effort. It just becomes how you operate.

Cognitive overload

Start with the one most people already think they know. Cognitive overload is what happens when your mind loses its ability to sort. Long lists are just long lists. The damage starts when everything on it starts looking equally important, so nothing gets the weight it actually deserves.

It takes several recognizable forms, different faces of the same problem. Sometimes it’s an information flood, more data than you can absorb, arriving with no filter attached to decide what matters and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s the dashboard problem: metrics piled on metrics, numbers updating in real time, and somehow less clarity than you had before you opened the tab.

Sometimes it’s competing priorities, the trickiest version, because they’re often genuinely important, all of them, with no honest way to do justice to more than one or two. Sometimes it’s tech and AI overload — another tool, another notification, another feature promising to save you time that somehow costs you time to learn.

And sometimes it’s strategic distraction: the interesting tangent, the adjacent opportunity, just compelling enough to quietly steal focus from the thing that was actually supposed to matter today.

Emotional overload

Emotional overload develops when emotional demands exceed a person’s capacity to regulate them, through repeated emotional input that never fully clears, until the moment a feeling stops informing your decision and starts making it for you, quietly, without asking permission first.

It has its own set of shapes. There’s emotional contagion, walking into a room and picking up someone else’s stress or bad mood as if it had originated in you. There’s the weight of life-defining choices: education, career, relationships, all of them feeling like a fork in the road you can’t afford to get wrong.

There’s lifestyle performance anxiety, a low, constant hum of pressure to optimize every part of your life at once — your body, your relationships, your morning routine, as if falling behind on any one of them means falling behind on all of them. And at the far end, there’s another real thing: the emotional, financial and reputational fallout of something actually going wrong, a failure that doesn’t stay contained to the one part of your life it started in.

Social overload

This is the one that hides best. From the outside, it doesn’t look like a problem; it looks like being a good colleague, a reliable friend, someone people can count on.

It shows up as communication chaos: chats and emails and calls, all marked urgent, arriving all day without pause. It shows up as endless meetings — too many, too vague, rarely landing anywhere near an actual decision. It shows up as connection overload, the slow accumulation of digital and personal relationships, each one reasonable on its own, all of them expecting a response at the same time.

It shows up as truth distortion, that nagging feeling that what you just read might not even be real. It shows up as verbal exhaustion, conversations that generate plenty of heat and almost no clarity. And it shows up in something smaller and easy to miss: the constant churn of micro-choices, what to watch, what to buy, what to read, what to follow, each one trivial, each one still quietly costing you something.

Modern pressure crowded out the space thinking actually requires, until reacting started to look and feel like competence. It doesn’t always look like speed. Sometimes it looks like rushing forward on the nearest available option, and sometimes it looks like its opposite — endless scanning that never resolves into an actual decision.

Non-reaction

Non-reaction isn’t the opposite of reaction, and it isn’t slowness for its own sake. At its core, it creates a deliberate space between what lands on you and what you do about it, a pause just long enough to interrupt reflex.

Inside that space, something practical happens: Signal gets separated from noise, and competing demands stop being treated as equally important by default. From there, judgment comes back, attention narrows to what actually matters, and decisions regain their proportion.

In practice, it looks like:

• Observing more and speaking less

• Choosing deliberately when to engage instead of by reflex

• Letting an unnecessary argument pass without needing the last word

• Pursuing the right opportunity instead of every available one

• Committing to a decision instead of keeping every option open indefinitely, just in case.

• Focusing on progress and impact, not motion, noise or visible busyness

That’s the shift I explore in full in The Art of Non-Reaction: a structured way to progressively take back control, built around four connected domains. First, leading your inner world — learning to regulate emotion and thinking patterns before they regulate you. Second, anchoring yourself — clarifying the purpose and internal direction that overload is so good at scrambling. Third, creating space, making room, deliberately, for better decisions. Fourth, shaping your surroundings — structuring how the world is allowed to reach you in the first place, instead of absorbing it exactly as it arrives.

Inside those four domains sit actual techniques such as cognitive anchoring, finding strength in solitude, focus frameworks, building real wins into confidence, cultivating observation, cutting the clutter, building resistance to noise and learning to spot what’s fake before it shapes a decision.

The waves haven’t stopped coming; they aren’t going to. But you’re no longer required to meet every one of them the same way.

Open your favorite movie streaming platform tonight, and you’ll choose from something like 100,000 titles. Open your inbox tomorrow morning, and you’ll find five urgent, unrelated projects. Open social media, and you’ll feel, for a few seconds, faintly stupid for not being a multimillionaire yet, because somehow dozens of people your age already are, or say they are.

Open your other social account, and there it is again, the ad for the 60-day calisthenics transformation program, and with it a small shame you’ve watched it three times now and still haven’t started. Scroll for another minute, and you’re no longer sure if what you just read was real or manufactured to look real, and there’s no obvious way to check.

Deadlines, comparison and information movement existed before. What’s new is the volume, the speed, and the fact that it all now arrives at once. Technology moved communication and access faster than anything before it. Organizations got better at generating priorities and initiatives than they ever got at resolving them. The result is a level of input that would have been unthinkable to someone doing your job 20 years ago.

“Growing up in Queens, I could never quite find clothes that felt like me. So I started making them. First for myself, mixing my mother’s saris with denim and leather. Then for friends and family. Then somehow, a whole community,” says Megha Rao, founder of holiCHIC.  “The dream grew into something I could have never imagined. From Queens to Nordstrom, people are wearing holiCHIC blazers, saris, dresses and more around the world.”

As a former finance sales professional, Rao had built a successful business on her own for close to 10 years. As a customer of Nordstrom, she couldn’t shake the feeling that holiCHIC and the retailer could be amazing partners. After months and months of cold calling, she was able to secure a pop-up shop opportunity at Nordstrom’s New York Flagship location in 2023, right before Diwali.

“The pop-up show was a massive success, and we exceeded our expectations over those three days,” Rao says. “The opportunity led us to a meeting with the buyer, and then we went into an online partnership with Nordstrom.” 

After bootstrapping holiCHIC for years, and building it into a seven-figure business, the brand raised their first $1.5 million seed round in May 2026. Since then, sales are up 47%.  Here are three questions Megha Rao encourages other founders to ask as they consider raising a seed round:

1. Does the business have momentum?

“My biggest fear was that we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the momentum after the success we have seen with Nordstrom,” Rao says. “After my team and I looked at the data, we saw that there was a growing segment of customers who identified as non-South Asian. They were wearing holiCHIC because they appreciated the style and quality.”

Rao wanted financial resources available when more opportunities arrived. She was right about the momentum; Amazon Fashion came calling. Rao was open to working with them because she had decided to raise money.

2. Who do you want to partner with?

“Being bootstrapped is a rollercoaster ride,” says Rao. “You have one great month, and then next month there’s a lull, and your profit is eaten up. At the same time, it’s your business. You take inputs from others but you make the final call.”

Rao was open to bringing on more than one investor. She was introduced to an angel investor, who after two meetings with Rao, wrote a check for the entire $1.5 million seed round. Rao says for her, partnering with one investor has been the best decision. If she had multiple investors, that may have given her access to more networks, and she would have had to manage lots of different opinions.

“Our angel investor understands our vision. They respect and appreciate how we have grown our business steadily. It was really the right fit,” Rao says. 

3. How will you use the money?

Rao wanted to raise a seed round to scale holiCHIC.  “I didn’t want to take outside funding to test and burn through investors’ cash,” says Rao. “I made plenty of mistakes early on when it came to product fit, shipping and more. We were ready to take on investors to grow different parts of the business.”

Rao had a clear vision of how holiCHIC will use the money. She plans to invest more in marketing and an influencer strategy. She’s focused on Amazon fashion and TikTok shop. “We know we have a huge audience with women, and they usually have a plus one for events they are attending,” Rao shares. “We are doubling down on holiCHIC Men and concentrating on fit and style.”

Rao also has her sights set on becoming a globally recognized brand, with the U.K., India and the Middle East on her list. But first comes the work in the U.S. and Canada. She’ll consider raising again once revenue hits over five times, and until then, her focus is on consistent results and growing holiCHIC’s retail presence, team and product lines.

Rao’s advice to founders is simple: “Don’t raise money to find momentum. Raise money to fuel it.”

“Growing up in Queens, I could never quite find clothes that felt like me. So I started making them. First for myself, mixing my mother’s saris with denim and leather. Then for friends and family. Then somehow, a whole community,” says Megha Rao, founder of holiCHIC.  “The dream grew into something I could have never imagined. From Queens to Nordstrom, people are wearing holiCHIC blazers, saris, dresses and more around the world.”

As a former finance sales professional, Rao had built a successful business on her own for close to 10 years. As a customer of Nordstrom, she couldn’t shake the feeling that holiCHIC and the retailer could be amazing partners. After months and months of cold calling, she was able to secure a pop-up shop opportunity at Nordstrom’s New York Flagship location in 2023, right before Diwali.

“The pop-up show was a massive success, and we exceeded our expectations over those three days,” Rao says. “The opportunity led us to a meeting with the buyer, and then we went into an online partnership with Nordstrom.” 

A key metric for a franchise brand’s health is how profitable the franchisees in the system are. Sales growth and unit economics are also key indicators, but owner profitability largely determines whether the brand will succeed. Forward-thinking franchisors understand that not all growth is created equal, and that revenue alone only tells one side of the story.

Franchisees can post record-breaking sales and still not turn a profit. Left unchecked, this can lead to closures and slower expansion, even when the numbers look good on paper. The inverse is true when franchisees are profitable. They add stability to the system by reinvesting in the brand, referring prospects and, in the best-case scenario, becoming multi-unit operators themselves.  

But at the franchise system level, how can franchisors determine profit at the unit level?

Sure, financial statements can provide a sense of how a unit is performing. Yet, experienced franchisors know that using them to evaluate unit-level performance is like comparing apples to oranges. At best, franchisors water down their Item 19 statements, hurting their competitive position. So, if franchisee profitability is vital to the brand’s success and health, why do franchisors operate blindly?

Uncovering the profitability blind spot

The problem with understanding profitability at the unit level is that you need comparable data to determine performance across locations. While franchisors have access to standardized sales data, the same doesn’t apply to the expense and profit side of the equation.

Unlike sales data, which consistently runs through a centralized POS system, expense data is decentralized. The raw data comes from several sources: banks, payroll systems, credit cards, suppliers, payment platforms, etc. When it comes in, missing information makes it hard to categorize the expense.   

Banks, for example, often provide cryptic transaction descriptions. Descriptions are short, and the same types of transactions and vendors can appear differently across banks. The bookkeeper at the unit level must decipher and categorize those expenses using their best judgment.

Additionally, the accounting treatment of taxes, insurance, tips, payroll, owner’s compensation and other expenses is often open to legitimate differences in recording. Which accounts are recorded on a cash basis, and which are accrued using some method? Did the accountant actually perform a full bank reconciliation after the period?

While there is plenty of sub-standard bookkeeping done, that isn’t the biggest issue. The point is that it’s invariably inconsistent, and that is what blinds the franchisor.

The downstream impact of inconsistent data

Without a standardized framework for expense data, benchmarking across the system to understand the drivers behind unit-level profitability is unreliable. It makes evaluating relative performance across operators difficult and compounds the complexity of coaching franchisees to improve unit profitability.

Without apples-to-apples data, no one can trust what they’re looking at. That’s how underperforming locations can fly under the radar until months later, when the numbers start painting a different picture. Is that the best franchisors can do?

Solving the root cause of the problem

As an industry, all franchisors have a “brand chart-of-accounts,” which they expect all franchisees to use. Easier said than practically implemented, maintained and controlled. Even with unit differences in bookkeeping within the brand standard, mapping from one to the other is tedious and error-prone. Most franchisors therefore report a dismal compliance rate — even at this level.

Mapping also doesn’t account for whether a unit’s books are closed or reconciled and whether the expense has been consistently categorized in the financial statement. One solution is to create a mandated Point-of-Profit system, similar to a POS on the sales side.  

The Point-of-Profit system doesn’t replace the local bookkeeper or produce all the detailed financial statements the owner will need. Instead, its purpose is to normalize the operational P&L, enabling consistency, trustworthy benchmarks and better advice for operators.

After a simple, one-time setup by the franchisee, raw transactions from banks and credit cards, plus consistent data from the POS and payroll system, flow through an AI or automation solution built on franchise-specific accounting rules and norms. This approach helps ensure consistency at the transaction and account level.

The key is not to aim for perfection across the system. The goal is to treat source data consistently across locations, enabling apples-to-apples comparisons that, when paired with POS data, empower business coaches to do their jobs more effectively and give franchisors a clearer picture of system health.

All boats rise when the focus is on profitability

The premise of a franchise is that everyone in the system wins through consistency and leverage, but franchisors and franchisees can’t win together without comparable unit-level data to determine franchisee profitability.

When financial data is clean and reliable, development teams get more credible information to expand the system, franchisees get better support from business coaches and a clearer view of their performance against their peer segment, and the quality of Item 19 in the FDD becomes defensible.

A key metric for a franchise brand’s health is how profitable the franchisees in the system are. Sales growth and unit economics are also key indicators, but owner profitability largely determines whether the brand will succeed. Forward-thinking franchisors understand that not all growth is created equal, and that revenue alone only tells one side of the story.

Franchisees can post record-breaking sales and still not turn a profit. Left unchecked, this can lead to closures and slower expansion, even when the numbers look good on paper. The inverse is true when franchisees are profitable. They add stability to the system by reinvesting in the brand, referring prospects and, in the best-case scenario, becoming multi-unit operators themselves.  

But at the franchise system level, how can franchisors determine profit at the unit level?

Entrepreneurs succeed by following their passion. If a leader is not deeply inspired by the vision and goal, rarely do they put in the energy, make the sacrifices and take the risks that real success often demands. Among coaches, it has become almost synonymous with the premise of entrepreneurship itself. Passion is what convinces us to leave secure jobs, chase unlikely ideas and keep going long after common sense tells us to stop. It gives us the fire for the extra mile, the resolve to find the next solution and the conviction to inspire teams and build something that didn’t exist before.

But over the years, I’ve realized that not only is passion alone not enough; in fact, the same fire that drives you can burn you, and it can become one of the greatest obstacles to sustainable success. The same drive that pushes us to build can also leave us exhausted, attached to outcomes and unable to separate our identity from our business. I’ve experienced both sides of that equation, repeatedly. There were seasons when passion made everything feel possible and others when it became difficult to distinguish commitment from attachment.

3 qualities must work together

Years of running a range of ventures taught me many lessons, but my real shift in perspective came through my work volunteering with the Art of Living Foundation, where I was introduced to a simple idea from Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. He teaches that a meaningful and successful life is achieved with three qualities working together: passion, dispassion and compassion. So simple and pithy, and in application, so profound.

Passion was simple for me; I was driven. Compassion immediately resonates, even if not always achieved. But dispassion? This was a weakness and a wonder. I pondered what exactly it was and if it was something I genuinely wanted to address. I had to make sense of it. How does “not caring” fit into a deeply purposeful life or venture? Well, the same way alertness follows rest or digestion follows a good meal.

We can not always be on. Focus requires relaxation. Making decisions requires trust. Only an open hand can receive. To receive more, do more and stretch further, I realized I had to learn to let go, do less and master turning off and trusting. Passion wants to run. Dispassion learns to walk — and sit — with awareness. Combined, one becomes powerful and present instead of preoccupied.

The more I reflected on this, the more I saw how critical these qualities, moving together, were in entrepreneurship. I began thinking of these qualities as the three wheels of a tricycle. Passion provides the drive, dispassion keeps us balanced, and compassion allows us to keep moving without losing ourselves or the people around us.

Balance creates better leaders

Clearly, passion is essential because it gives us the courage to put the mission first, even when it’s challenging. It fuels long hours, difficult decisions and the resilience to keep going when progress is slow. Without it, most businesses would never make it past the idea stage.

The challenge begins when passion quietly becomes attachment. We start measuring our value by quarterly numbers, investor meetings or product launches. Passion can become ego replacing servant leadership, wins become validation, and setbacks feel deeply personal. Decisions become harder because we’re protecting our identity instead of solving the problem in front of us.

That’s where dispassion becomes a leadership skill rather than a philosophical concept. Dispassion doesn’t mean caring less about the business. It means caring deeply about the work and the company, without becoming consumed by every outcome or caught in one’s identity. As Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says, “One who is only thinking about the result of the action is poor. One who is focused in the action and he does it 100%, is free.” That single idea has changed the way I approach both business and life. When we’re less attached to the outcome, we think more clearly, adapt more quickly and recover faster when things don’t go according to plan.

The third wheel is compassion, and I believe it’s the layer of balance and stability that turns success into something sustainable. We have to admit, entrepreneurs have a reputation. Passion and the pursuit of perfection have a price, and not only leaders carry the load. Often the vision can overshadow the people, and far too often, for too many, the end starts to justify the means. Compassion, putting the people on par with, or ahead of, output, brings critical balance and perspective.

When the journey becomes the destination, and how the business achieves its goals matters, integrity becomes a foundation, and culture thrives. There is also the all-too-common scenario where leaders extend patience and understanding to everyone on their team, except themselves. That mindset eventually affects our leadership. Teams reflect the emotional state of their leaders, and our modeling matters more than our declarations. Cultures are shaped far more by how people feel and their psychological safety than by what’s written on the company values page.

Compassion isn’t about lowering standards or avoiding difficult conversations. It’s about recognizing that people perform at their best when they feel trusted, respected, supported and safe to express concerns. The same is true for us. Leaders who can acknowledge mistakes without crumbling, obsessing or defending are far more resilient than those who treat every failure as a verdict on their worth.

Business will always involve uncertainty. Markets change, opportunities disappear, and new challenges emerge just as old ones are solved. The entrepreneurs who thrive over the long term aren’t simply the ones with the most passion. They’re the ones who know how to balance passion with perspective and ambition with humanity. The unicycle of passion becomes a steady bicycle with dispassion. With compassion, we achieve the tricycle of successful leadership and become a vehicle with the drive, balance and harmony to take our company both fast and far.

Entrepreneurs succeed by following their passion. If a leader is not deeply inspired by the vision and goal, rarely do they put in the energy, make the sacrifices and take the risks that real success often demands. Among coaches, it has become almost synonymous with the premise of entrepreneurship itself. Passion is what convinces us to leave secure jobs, chase unlikely ideas and keep going long after common sense tells us to stop. It gives us the fire for the extra mile, the resolve to find the next solution and the conviction to inspire teams and build something that didn’t exist before.

But over the years, I’ve realized that not only is passion alone not enough; in fact, the same fire that drives you can burn you, and it can become one of the greatest obstacles to sustainable success. The same drive that pushes us to build can also leave us exhausted, attached to outcomes and unable to separate our identity from our business. I’ve experienced both sides of that equation, repeatedly. There were seasons when passion made everything feel possible and others when it became difficult to distinguish commitment from attachment.

3 qualities must work together

Years of running a range of ventures taught me many lessons, but my real shift in perspective came through my work volunteering with the Art of Living Foundation, where I was introduced to a simple idea from Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. He teaches that a meaningful and successful life is achieved with three qualities working together: passion, dispassion and compassion. So simple and pithy, and in application, so profound.

She started with a wooden tray from Bed Bath & Beyond, a handful of protein bars and a simple proposition for local businesses: Put these on the counter, and see if customers buy them.

They did. Then the small businesses ordered more.

That scrappy test would become the foundation of Trubar, the better-for-you snack company Erica Groussman built into a business now in 32,000 U.S. retail locations. The company’s journey has included early retail wins, a stint under the umbrella of a public company and an eventual $173 million acquisition. Trubar has shipped nearly 46 million protein bars in 2026, and the business grossed about $100 million in 2025. 

Through it all, Groussman says that her secret is hard work. 

“I think that one of the biggest secrets is working your butt off,” Groussman says. “Really getting it into every hand that you can possibly get it into.”

The origins of a better protein bar

Groussman didn’t start out in the food industry. Early in her childhood, her mother gave her a newspaper route, an early lesson in earning money and showing up for work. 

Groussman ended up studying communications at UCLA, then worked in film finance and real estate before getting married and having children. She was a stay-at-home mom raising two children when she got the idea for Trubar.

It all began during a family trip to Disney. Groussman had packed snacks, including a protein bar from an established brand. It tasted good, she recalls, but it did not make her feel good afterward.

“I remember just feeling very ucky,” she says. “My belly was very distended and uncomfortable. That was my epiphany. There has to be a better way.”

Her goal was not merely to develop a protein bar with a health-forward label. It had to satisfy a more difficult standard: tasting like a dessert while avoiding the unpleasant aftermath she associated with other bars on the market.

To create it, Groussman worked with a food scientist, relying on research, conversations and people in her personal network to find the right collaborator. The work was iterative and sensory. She still approaches product development by tasting, evaluating texture and diagnosing aftertastes.

“We’ll taste the bar, and I’ll say what I taste,” she says. “What am I getting afterwards? What’s the aftertaste? What do I want to see more of? Do I want more crunchy?”

Getting products to customers

After developing the concept, Groussman raised funds from family and friends and partnered with a food scientist and co-manufacturer to bring the product to life. Trubar officially launched in 2018, with Groussman serving as CEO.

The earliest flavors included Daydreaming About Donuts, Oh Oh Cookie Dough, Saltylicious Almond Love and Smother Fudger Peanut Butter. The cookie dough flavor was an early bestseller. 

Groussman’s early proof of demand came from getting products into people’s hands. She placed bars on counters wherever local businesses would let her. Juice shops, delis, beauty salons and independent stores became her first sales channels.

“I put it on any counter I could possibly get, and I would just be like, ‘Here, sell these,’” she says.

The shops set their own prices, generally around $3 to $4 a bar, and ordered more when the initial stock sold through. For Groussman, that simple loop validated the concept.

“That’s how I knew it was good because they were selling,” she says. “People were buying them and then asking to buy more.”

Making a costly mistake

Groussman felt it was time to expand beyond small stores. She says she initially sought help from an individual she believed had more experience running a protein bar business. At the time, she was balancing running the company with raising her children and building a home.

Groussman brought the individual on to help manage Trubar, though she remained CEO. The arrangement ultimately proved costly; the person’s spending outpaced the company’s early sales.

In retrospect, she says, she underestimated her own capabilities.

“I knew more than I thought I knew,” Groussman says. “We always doubt ourselves.”

The outside operator, she says, “ran it into the ground,” leaving the business with $7 million in debt. Trubar had made some early sales to smaller retailers, but that paled in comparison to the millions of dollars of debt the business had accrued.

Groussman’s husband urged her to view the venture as a loss and move on. But she could not let it go.

“It’s a part of me,” she recalls telling him. “I really want to keep it going.”

Expanding into Whole Foods and Costco

Groussman turned to scrappy tactics to get Trubar into bigger retailers. One pivotal breakthrough came at Whole Foods. Groussman says she reached out persistently to a contact on LinkedIn and secured a trial in 30 locations around 2020. With no marketing budget, Trubar became the top-selling bar in those stores, she says, competing alongside established brands such as RXBAR and Kind.

Costco was another early milestone, though not an immediate victory. Trubar first entered Costco in Canada with a single truckload during the Covid-19 period, Groussman says. The brand struggled there, partly because it was less established in the Canadian market and may have faced a pricing disadvantage as a U.S. brand.

The U.S. rollout came later and proved far more successful. That experience reinforced a practical point for CPG founders: A difficult launch in one market does not necessarily invalidate the product. Distribution strategy, brand familiarity, price positioning and timing all matter.

Becoming the CEO of a public company

While Trubar was expanding into larger retailers, Groussman was simultaneously making behind-the-scenes changes.

In 2021, Trubar was acquired by a publicly traded holding company as part of a broader corporate transaction. Groussman agreed to this structure because it allowed the business to expand and her to remain CEO without taking on personal debt.

The holding company had a portfolio that included a skincare brand and a CBD company. Eventually, the other businesses failed while Trubar emerged as the strongest brand in the group.

Groussman says the experience was frustrating. She describes a period when money generated by Trubar was used to support other businesses in the portfolio, even as her own brand was gaining traction.

But the upheaval also reshaped her role. She remained founder and CEO of Trubar, a title she had held since the brand’s inception. In 2024, she added an additional role. She became CEO of the publicly traded company, which was renamed around the Trubar business and included Trubar alongside other businesses in its portfolio.

“I was the only one standing,” she says. “I was a CEO of a publicly traded company.”

A hands-on CEO

Today, Groussman says Trubar has approximately 28 employees. Her management approach is deliberately hands-on. Rather than positioning herself as a distant executive with a high-level view of the business, she stays closely involved in operations, product decisions and emergencies.

She says employees can come to her when they need help, and she tries to lead by example. “I will not ask you to do something that I wouldn’t do myself,” she says.

That philosophy recently played out during a new product launch for Walmart. One of the shipments was expected to arrive late, threatening the timeline. Groussman began calling packaging contacts outside the company’s normal supplier network and found a provider that could complete the job in two weeks.

“I like to make sure the wheels are moving,” she says. “When anything is slightly going wrong, I’m like mama bear. What do I gotta do? Who do I need to talk to?”

Another issue involved a mislabeled product box. The products and ingredient list were correct, she says, but a front-facing element incorrectly referred to cashews instead of almonds, or vice versa. The team immediately sourced green circular stickers from nearby Staples stores and applied them on-site to correct the error before delivery.

The immediate response mattered, but so did the follow-up investigation. “The next week after we fixed it all and it’s all okay, that’s when you go back, and you say, ‘Where did this mistake happen?’” she says. “What is broken in our path?”

Advice for CEOs

Groussman’s larger operating philosophy is to solve first and diagnose problems second. She says teams can become paralyzed by a desire to have every detail in place before acting. She says that instinct can become a liability for founders.

“Just get 80%, just go,” she says. “Just start, just do what you can do and just start etching away and moving in the direction.”

She has a similarly pragmatic view of hiring. “You interview for your resume; you hire for chemistry,” Groussman says. In a fast-moving and sometimes chaotic environment, she looks for people who can make decisions, take initiative and thrive. 

“I want my team to be able to make decisions and to grow,” she says. “If they come up with an idea, try it. What’s the harm?”

Scaling after an acquisition 

Earlier this year, Trubar was acquired by Eti Gida, a Turkish snack company, for $173 million, according to Groussman. She remains at the helm as CEO and continues to run day-to-day operations. Her team is also still intact, a condition she viewed as essential in evaluating potential partners.

For Groussman, the acquisition marks a new stage rather than an ending. Trubar launched Trubar Kids last year and recently introduced Trubar Pro. She also sees room to extend the brand into other categories. 

“It was always known that they wanted to keep me as well as my team,” she says. “I’m not done. It’s my baby.”