The company picked Palmetto on purpose, describing it as “a community built around game days,” including local high school football and Pittsburgh Pirates spring training. The restaurant will share an entrance and seating area, with each brand running its own kitchen. Jimmy John’s will keep its drive-thru.
It’s part of a bigger co-branding trend. Inspire already runs Dunkin’/Jimmy John’s and Jimmy John’s/Baskin Robbins locations, and other chains are joining forces for the same strategy, including Dine Brands with Applebee’s and IHOP, and MTY Food Group with Papa Murphy’s and Famous Dave’s.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Jake Fleshner and Michael Axman didn’t build The Nucleus Network to start another advisory firm or venture fund. They built it because they couldn’t ignore a pattern. Jake’s background spans entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan, working with Gary Vaynerchuk, and serving as the right-hand to a figure he calls the “real‑life Jerry Maguire.” Michael’s path began as an early growth hire at a tech company in the music, travel, and entertainment space, a company that raised hundreds of millions before he left to build his own consulting agency. Together, their skill sets form a complete spectrum: Jake brings brand instinct, operator discipline, and storytelling; Michael brings financial architecture, strategic rigor, and scalable systems. Between them, they’ve made 10,000+ warm introductions, each intentional, double-opt-in, and designed to reduce the time it takes a founder to reach the right person.
Everywhere they looked, talented founders were stuck not because their product wasn’t good enough, but because they couldn’t get in front of the right person. Meanwhile, Jake and Michael were constantly asked, “Do you know anyone who…?” And they almost always did. Their ability to connect people wasn’t a side skill; it was the most valuable thing they offered. That realization became the foundation of a company built on one belief: the warm introduction is the most powerful force in business.
Photo credit: Nucleus Network
Their partnership works because they share a core philosophy: everything is figure‑out‑able. It’s the mindset that drives their company, their leadership style, and their approach to solving problems for founders. They don’t believe in waiting for perfect conditions; they believe in building momentum through action, judgment, and trust.
Use Warm Introductions as a Strategic Growth Engine
The Nucleus Network operates across three interconnected pillars: Advisory, Ventures, and Community, all designed to connect the right people at the right moment and turn trust into opportunity. Advisory is their retainer “warm intros as a service” practice where venture-backed founders and agencies receive targeted warm introductions to customers, partners, talent, advisors, and more without ever sending a cold email. Instead of “spray and pray” outreach, Nucleus delivers curated, double-opt-in introductions that condense months of effort into a single trusted connection. Their clients rely on them not just for access, but for judgment, the ability to know who should meet, when, and why.
Ventures is their deal‑by‑deal SPV syndicate backed by 400+ LPs, in which they’ve invested in 29 companies and deployed $54M. Their portfolio reflects their thesis that the best opportunities travel through relationships, not advertisements. It includes emerging consumer and tech‑enabled brands such as Othership, Hot Girl Pickles, Packsmith, Drizzy, Ammortal, Siegelman Stable, and Culture Mediacompanies that represent cultural momentum, strong storytelling, and founders who benefit from Nucleus’s ability to open doors that would otherwise remain closed. Their LP base trusts them because they don’t chase hype; they chase founders who are building something real and need the right people around them to accelerate.
Community is their invite‑only events arm, and it has become one of the most distinctive parts of the Nucleus ecosystem. They’ve hosted 100+ events across New York City, LA, Miami, San Francisco, Vegas, Chicago, and Europe, partnering with companies like Morgan Stanley, Cash App, MongoDB, Alliance Bernstein, Rho, Boardy, Sydecar, DraftKings, and more. These aren’t typical networking mixers; they’re curated experiences designed to deepen trust and create real relationships. Sauna and cold‑plunge sessions, tennis tournaments, backgammon nights, founder dinners, investor salons, and ecosystem meetups all serve the same purpose: get the right people in the right room and let trust do what it does. Their events have become known for their warmth, intentionality, and ability to create connections that actually lead somewhere.
Together, these three pillars form a compounding system. Advisory drives introductions, Ventures opens doors to private deals, and Community deepens trust in person. Each pillar strengthens the others, creating a network that grows not through volume, but through quality.
Protect Trust Like It’s Your Most Valuable Asset
The biggest challenge in their industry is noise. Founders and executives are buried under cold emails, automated LinkedIn messages, and outreach that treats them like a number instead of a person. Access has never been easier, but meaningful access has never been harder.
Technology optimized for volume instead of quality, and genuine relationships became collateral damage.
Jake and Michael built the opposite. Every introduction is intentional, double opt‑in, and rooted in judgment. They don’t connect people who shouldn’t be connected. They don’t “spray and pray.” They protect the quality of every introduction because one bad connection can torch credibility earned over years. Their discipline is exactly why their introductions convert into deals, customers, and partnerships instead of dying in an inbox.
Their approach is a direct response to a market that automated its way into disconnection. While others chased speed, scale, and mass outreach, Nucleus doubled down on warmth, trust, and human curation. They believe the winners of the next decade won’t be the ones with the biggest lists; they’ll be the ones with the deepest trust.
A Mission Rooted in Trust and the Future It’s Building
The Nucleus Network’s mission is to make warm introductions the currency of business. Jake and Michael built the company on the belief that trust, intentionality, and human connection are the most valuable assets in a world drowning in cold outreach and automated noise. Every introduction they make is double-opt-in, curated with judgment, and designed to reduce the time it takes a founder, investor, or operator to reach the right person.
That mission is shaping the future they’re building. Over the next few years, they see The Nucleus Network becoming the default destination for anyone who needs meaningful access to the place where founders, investors, and operators go to reach the right person without the noise. Advisory will continue to expand, Ventures will scale beyond its current 29 companies and $54M in deployed capital, and Community will grow into new markets with even more curated gatherings across major cities.
Photo credit: Nucleus Network
They’re also building technology that makes warm introductions dramatically easier to source, match, and track, proving that human trust and smart systems aren’t at odds; when done right, they multiply each other. Their goal is to create a future where warmth is the standard, trust is the currency, and intentionality is the norm across an entire ecosystem.
Zoom out, and their mission is bigger than the company itself. They want to change how business gets done to make the warm introduction the default, not the exception. If they succeed, “figure‑out‑able” won’t just be their motto. It will be the operating system for a network built on human connection.
Jake Fleshner and Michael Axman didn’t build The Nucleus Network to start another advisory firm or venture fund. They built it because they couldn’t ignore a pattern. Jake’s background spans entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan, working with Gary Vaynerchuk, and serving as the right-hand to a figure he calls the “real‑life Jerry Maguire.” Michael’s path began as an early growth hire at a tech company in the music, travel, and entertainment space, a company that raised hundreds of millions before he left to build his own consulting agency. Together, their skill sets form a complete spectrum: Jake brings brand instinct, operator discipline, and storytelling; Michael brings financial architecture, strategic rigor, and scalable systems. Between them, they’ve made 10,000+ warm introductions, each intentional, double-opt-in, and designed to reduce the time it takes a founder to reach the right person.
Everywhere they looked, talented founders were stuck not because their product wasn’t good enough, but because they couldn’t get in front of the right person. Meanwhile, Jake and Michael were constantly asked, “Do you know anyone who…?” And they almost always did. Their ability to connect people wasn’t a side skill; it was the most valuable thing they offered. That realization became the foundation of a company built on one belief: the warm introduction is the most powerful force in business.
Photo credit: Nucleus Network
Their partnership works because they share a core philosophy: everything is figure‑out‑able. It’s the mindset that drives their company, their leadership style, and their approach to solving problems for founders. They don’t believe in waiting for perfect conditions; they believe in building momentum through action, judgment, and trust.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
Real estate is still one of the last fully bundled services left in a major industry, but the NAR settlement this spring is changing that, whether anyone intended that or not.
The industry keeps fighting over whether agents will survive technology, but that’s the wrong question to ask. The real question is what level of service each consumer needs for their specific deal.
For about two decades, the real estate industry has talked about itself like it’s in the middle of a war. Agents vs. technology. Full commission vs. flat fee. For-sale-by-owner (FSBO) vs. full service. Every few years, a new headline declares that agents are about to go extinct, technology is about to make the profession obsolete and the old model is finally cracking. None of that has actually happened, and there’s a pretty obvious reason why. Consumers were never asking the question the industry kept arguing about.
Nobody wakes up wondering whether real estate agents should exist as a category. They wake up wondering how much help they actually need for the specific situation in front of them. That’s a completely different question, and it’s the one the industry has mostly ignored while it kept refighting the same fight.
Here’s the part that should embarrass everyone still arguing about FSBO. It’s at an all time low.
Last year, 5% of home sales had no agent involved at all, down from over 20% in the ’80s, and 91% of sellers used an agent. If the future of real estate were really about consumers ditching agents entirely, the data would show some version of that happening. It shows the opposite. People are not rejecting professional help. What’s actually shifting is something quieter and more interesting: how much help, and which parts of it, people want to pay for.
Real estate is finally catching up to everyone else
Real estate is still one of the last fully bundled services left in a major industry. When you hire an agent, you’re typically buying a pricing strategy, MLS access, negotiation, marketing, paperwork and advice as one inseparable package, whether you need all of it or not.
Most other industries went through this exact transition years ago. Travel agents used to be the only way to book a trip. Now you can do everything yourself, hire someone for the complicated parts or use a hybrid service depending on what the trip requires. Investing went the same direction. You can manage your own portfolio, pay a flat fee for specific advice or hand the whole thing to a full-service advisor.
Tax prep splits the same way. Real estate has been one of the slowest industries to unbundle, mostly because the transaction itself has stayed so structurally complicated that full service felt like the only safe option for most people.
That’s actually changing, and the National Association of Realtors settlement accelerated it, whether anyone intended that or not. Buyer-agent commissions are now negotiated individually instead of baked silently into the deal, and sellers are no longer required to cover them automatically. Flat fee MLS listings, hourly consultations and à la carte services are becoming real options rather than fringe ones. None of this is eliminating the agent relationship; it’s just giving people more entry points into how much of it they actually want.
Good agents win when consumers get more options
Here’s where the conversation gets a little uncomfortable for some agents and a little exciting for others. The agents who are nervous about unbundling are usually the ones whose value was tied up in tasks that technology was always going to make easier: scheduling showings, generating comps, formatting paperwork, etc. Those things were never really the reason a good agent was worth the money.
The agents who thrive when consumers get more options are the ones whose actual value was always negotiation, judgment under pressure, local market knowledge that doesn’t show up in an algorithm and the ability to walk a stressed-out buyer or seller through a decision that’s bigger than almost anything else they’ll do financially. Unbundling doesn’t threaten that kind of expertise — it clarifies it. When a consumer can choose exactly which services they’re paying for, the services that are genuinely hard to replicate become more obviously valuable, not less.
This is where I’d point to something like Ownli, the flat-fee real estate platform built around the idea that consumers shouldn’t have to choose between affordability and real representation. The traditional model ties commission to home price, so two nearly identical transactions can cost wildly different amounts for the same basic work. And it’s not about stripping services down to a menu; it’s about making the cost of good representation transparent and predictable instead of opaque and percentage-based. Consumers don’t actually want less help. They want to know what they’re paying for and why, and they want that price to reflect the actual work involved rather than an arbitrary cut of their home’s value. That’s not anti-agent. It’s pro-consumer in a way that, if anything, makes good agents more valuable by forcing the market to compete on transparency and real service instead of legacy pricing nobody questions.
The industry keeps fighting over whether agents will survive technology. That’s the wrong question, and the data already answered it. The real question — the one actually shaping where this market is headed — is what level of service each consumer needs for their specific deal. Real estate spent decades as one of the only major service industries that hadn’t figured out how to answer that question flexibly. It’s starting to now. The agents and platforms that understand the difference are going to be in a much stronger position than the ones still arguing about a war that consumer behavior already settled.
Key Takeaways
Real estate is still one of the last fully bundled services left in a major industry, but the NAR settlement this spring is changing that, whether anyone intended that or not.
The industry keeps fighting over whether agents will survive technology, but that’s the wrong question to ask. The real question is what level of service each consumer needs for their specific deal.
For about two decades, the real estate industry has talked about itself like it’s in the middle of a war. Agents vs. technology. Full commission vs. flat fee. For-sale-by-owner (FSBO) vs. full service. Every few years, a new headline declares that agents are about to go extinct, technology is about to make the profession obsolete and the old model is finally cracking. None of that has actually happened, and there’s a pretty obvious reason why. Consumers were never asking the question the industry kept arguing about.
Nobody wakes up wondering whether real estate agents should exist as a category. They wake up wondering how much help they actually need for the specific situation in front of them. That’s a completely different question, and it’s the one the industry has mostly ignored while it kept refighting the same fight.
Here’s the part that should embarrass everyone still arguing about FSBO. It’s at an all time low.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
Top performers quit after their biggest wins because the dopamine, adrenaline and cortisol cocktail they’re running on drops fast after the goal is hit.
What follows is what researchers call post-achievement depression, or the success crash. The result looks like disengagement. It gets treated like a management problem. It is neither.
Organizations that keep top talent through high-output cycles have a plan for what comes after the win. The plan includes awareness, a structured recovery window and someone who can walk them through it.
When a top performer hands in their notice, the instinct is to look inward.
Why do high performers leave? Why did my best employee quit? Why are my best employees leaving right after their biggest wins? The answer most organizations reach for is familiar: compensation, culture, management, growth path. Sometimes it is those things.
But there is a pattern showing up inside high-performing teams that none of those explanations account for. It tends to strike at the worst possible moment — right after a major win.
The record quarter. The product launch that exceeded every target. The employee who finally got the promotion they worked years toward. The top performer who delivered their best year on record and handed in their notice two months later. On paper, everything was going right, which is exactly what makes this pattern so hard to see and so costly when you miss it.
I have spent years documenting this. What I keep finding is not a management story. It is a biology story that organizations have never been given the language to understand.
Why top performers quit after their biggest wins
For months leading up to a major goal, the brain runs on a specific neurochemical cocktail. Dopamine drives the pursuit. Adrenaline sharpens focus. Cortisol sustains the pressure. Your top performers are running on all three, and they are exceptionally good at it. That capacity is precisely what makes them top performers.
When the goal lands, all three drop. Fast.
The target disappears. Dopamine has nothing left to anticipate. What follows is what researchers call post-achievement depression, or the success crash: a biological comedown that hits hardest in the people who drove hardest to get there. It is why top performers leave after hitting their biggest goals, why an employee who just delivered a record quarter starts looking distracted two months later, why the person who crossed every finish line on the roadmap suddenly cannot seem to find their footing.
According to NIH research on burnout and the HPA axis, chronic stress leads to a predictable progression of elevated cortisol followed by exhaustion and suppressed function. Your best people have been running that system at full capacity. The finish line removes the reason it was running. It does not turn the system off.
The result looks like disengagement. It gets treated like a management problem. It is neither.
The people most likely to crash are your best ones
This is the part most retention conversations miss entirely.
The people most likely to crash after a big win are not your struggling employees. They are your best ones. The ones who care the most, push the hardest and have tied the most of their identity to what they deliver. Google’s research found that top performers produce up to 400% more than the average employee. That output does not come free. It comes from a brain that has been running in sustained pursuit mode, often for months, with the finish line as the only thing keeping the system calibrated.
When the finish line disappears, so does the calibration.
And the standard organizational response — celebrate the win and immediately load them up with the next project — is the fastest way to accelerate the crash. You are not giving them momentum. You are removing their recovery window and handing them a bill they do not yet have the capacity to pay.
Left unaddressed, this is not just a retention problem. The World Health Organization estimates that in a company of 1,000 employees, 1 worker will die by suicide every 10 years, and for every 1 who does, another 10 to 20 will have made an attempt. The Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies management occupations as having the highest share of workplace suicides, and workers in finance and insurance, where many of your highest performers sit, face suicide rates more than three times the national workplace average.
These are not numbers about weak people or troubled people. They are numbers about driven people who were never given the tools to come down from the level they were asked to sustain.
What it costs when you miss it
Losing a top performer costs a minimum of three times their annual salary in recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity and institutional knowledge that walks out with them. That is the financial cost, and it is the one that gets tracked.
The more expensive cost does not show up in any dashboard. When your highest performers quietly disengage before they leave, the organization loses its engine while the metrics still look fine. Teams feel it before leadership sees it. And by the time anyone acts, the person is already halfway out. The managers who ask why their best employee quit after their best year are asking exactly the right question. They are just asking it too late, and looking for the answer in the wrong place.
Seventy-five percent of voluntary departures are preventable. Three out of four resignations did not have to happen. The conversation around top talent retention almost always starts too late and looks in the wrong direction. And almost none of it accounts for whether the departure followed a major win.
The ones that do look in the right direction have something in common.
What organizations need to build that almost none of them have
The organizations that keep top talent through high-output cycles are not doing it with better perks or faster promotions. They are doing it by building something most companies have never considered: a plan for what comes after the win.
That plan has three components. The first is awareness. Every leader and every executive needs to understand what the post-win crash actually is, what it feels like from the inside and why the people most likely to experience it are the people they can least afford to lose. Without that foundation, every other intervention is guesswork.
The second is a structured window. Every major win should come with an intentional recovery period, anywhere from 48 hours to seven days, where the expectation shifts from acceleration to integration. Not a vacation. Not a performance review. A guided process built around three questions every leader should be asking their top performers after a major finish: What did this cost you? What part of this actually mattered? What do you need before you can give us full energy again? Each person’s answer looks different. That is the point. A one-size retention policy does not account for the fact that the biological cost of finishing something significant is personal, cumulative and different for every high performer on your team.
The third is someone who can walk them through it. Employee retention starts with leadership, but leaders cannot guide people through a cycle they were never taught to recognize in themselves. The way you manage energy across your team after a major finish is not a wellness initiative. It is a skill. And like every skill, it improves when someone names what is happening, provides the right tools and creates space to actually use them.
Your best people are not leaving because of you.
They are leaving because nobody, including them, understood what finishing something that hard was going to cost. Nobody taught them how to come down. And nobody in your organization had a plan for the part that comes after the win.
That changes when we decide it does. And the cost of waiting is higher than most organizations have been willing to look at directly.
Key Takeaways
Top performers quit after their biggest wins because the dopamine, adrenaline and cortisol cocktail they’re running on drops fast after the goal is hit.
What follows is what researchers call post-achievement depression, or the success crash. The result looks like disengagement. It gets treated like a management problem. It is neither.
Organizations that keep top talent through high-output cycles have a plan for what comes after the win. The plan includes awareness, a structured recovery window and someone who can walk them through it.
When a top performer hands in their notice, the instinct is to look inward.
Why do high performers leave? Why did my best employee quit? Why are my best employees leaving right after their biggest wins? The answer most organizations reach for is familiar: compensation, culture, management, growth path. Sometimes it is those things.
But there is a pattern showing up inside high-performing teams that none of those explanations account for. It tends to strike at the worst possible moment — right after a major win.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
Building software has never been easier, but verifying that what you build actually works is still a challenge. And it’s no longer just an engineering problem; it’s a founder problem, too.
At the speed teams are now shipping, the cost of missing quality shows up in ways that are hard to recover from: security breaches, customer trust, reputation, investor confidence, compliance risk, etc.
In most companies, quality looks covered on paper. But a process that worked when humans wrote every line doesn’t automatically hold when an agent writes 95% of it and a human skims the rest.
The assurance gap is real. Founders, product teams and engineering leads — everyone has a role in closing it.
We’re living in the best time to build software. AI writes code faster than any team can review it, development cycles have collapsed, and barriers to shipping have never been lower.
With the rise of vibe coding, almost anyone can be a coder now, and the market is already reflecting that. Twenty-five percent of Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 startups had codebases that were 95% AI-generated.
The first version of a product has never been easier to create. But software isn’t judged by how fast it shows up in a repo. It’s judged by whether it holds up once real users, real data and real attackers arrive.
However, every superpower comes with a blind spot — and ours is quality. Building got easy. Verifying that what we built actually works did not. In 2026, it quietly moved up the org chart. It’s no longer just an engineering problem. It’s a founder problem, too.
When quality breaks, the business breaks
A December 2025 analysis of 470 open-source pull requests found that AI-co-authored code contained roughly 1.7 times more issues than human-written code, with security vulnerabilities at up to 2.74 times the rate.
At the speed teams are now shipping, the cost of missing quality shows up in ways that are hard to recover from.
Security breaches: The assumption that AI-generated code is production-ready is one of the most expensive mistakes a team can make. Lovable, a popular vibe coding platform, had critical security vulnerabilities in over 10% of the live apps sampled from its own showcase. The root cause wasn’t a sophisticated attack. It was AI-generated code that simply skipped basic security configurations.
Customer trust: Users don’t read incident reports. They don’t care whether the bug came from a human or an AI; they just know the product failed them. Moltbook, one of the most talked-about AI social networks at the time, exposed 1.5 million API tokens and 35,000 email addresses through a single misconfigured database in AI-generated code. The reputational damage spread faster than the patch ever could.
Reputation and investor confidence: Quality failures don’t stay in the engineering team. They show up in board meetings, investor updates and press coverage. In 2026, software quality is a business risk, and founders are accountable for business risk.
Regulatory and compliance risk: AI doesn’t understand compliance obligations; it just writes code. GDPR, HIPAA, data residency requirements — these don’t come baked into a prompt. And unlike a security breach that shows up quickly, a compliance failure can sit quietly in a codebase for months before anyone notices. By the time it does, it’s not an engineering fix. It’s a legal one.
These look like four different problems. They’re the same one wearing four costumes: speed that outran verification. When nobody owns the gap between how fast you ship and how well you check, it surfaces wherever the business is most exposed.
The accountability gap nobody talks about
In most companies, quality looks covered on paper. There’s a QA team, a review process, a definition of done. But a process that worked when humans wrote every line doesn’t automatically hold when an agent writes 95% of it and a human skims the rest.
The checks were built for a slower kind of mistake. So when something breaks in production, the fallout doesn’t end at engineering.
It travels up to the product lead, to the CTO and eventually to the founder. And by the time it gets there, it’s not just a technical problem anymore. It’s a company problem.
What I know from being in this space is that AI has made speed a commodity. Every team is fast now. Every team is shipping. Speed alone will not keep you afloat anymore. What will is quality, and for that, you need the founder in the picture, captaining the boat.
This is something I’ve learned firsthand at TestMu AI. Across hundreds of conversations with engineering and product leaders, from early-stage startups to large enterprises, one thing stays constant.
The ones shipping with confidence aren’t defined by their size or their headcount. They’re defined by how seriously they take quality. Whether you’re a team of five or 500, quality has to be the goal.
What changes when the founder owns it
Founder-level accountability isn’t about the founder reviewing pull requests. It’s about three shifts in how the company treats quality.
First, quality becomes a number of leadership watches, not a status QA reports once a sprint. If revenue and burn get a dashboard, so should escape rate, security findings and time-to-detection.
Second, AI output gets treated as a draft, not a deliverable. The default assumption is untrusted until verified, the same way you’d treat code from a contractor you’ve never worked with.
Third, verification moves into the pipeline instead of sitting at the end of it. When code is generated continuously, quality has to be checked continuously. A gate at the finish line can’t keep pace with a team shipping every day.
None of this slows you down. It’s what lets a team keep moving fast without quietly betting the company on code nobody actually verified.
The assurance gap is real. And it widens every quarter; nobody is watching it. Founders, product teams and engineering leads — everyone has a role in closing it. But it only becomes everyone’s priority when it starts at the top.
Key Takeaways
Building software has never been easier, but verifying that what you build actually works is still a challenge. And it’s no longer just an engineering problem; it’s a founder problem, too.
At the speed teams are now shipping, the cost of missing quality shows up in ways that are hard to recover from: security breaches, customer trust, reputation, investor confidence, compliance risk, etc.
In most companies, quality looks covered on paper. But a process that worked when humans wrote every line doesn’t automatically hold when an agent writes 95% of it and a human skims the rest.
The assurance gap is real. Founders, product teams and engineering leads — everyone has a role in closing it.
We’re living in the best time to build software. AI writes code faster than any team can review it, development cycles have collapsed, and barriers to shipping have never been lower.
With the rise of vibe coding, almost anyone can be a coder now, and the market is already reflecting that. Twenty-five percent of Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 startups had codebases that were 95% AI-generated.
The first version of a product has never been easier to create. But software isn’t judged by how fast it shows up in a repo. It’s judged by whether it holds up once real users, real data and real attackers arrive.
Selena Gomez launched mental health startup Wondermind in 2021 with the intention of focusing on mindfulness and “mental fitness.”
Now, investors are accusing her of fraud after the startup reportedly faced setbacks last year.
The investors are reportedly seeking to recover nearly $1.2 million, along with damages and legal costs.
Selena Gomez faces allegations of fraud from investors in Wondermind, the mental health startup she co-founded, after the company reportedly faced setbacks last year, including layoffs and missed payrolls.
A group of investors in Wondermind filed a lawsuit this week accusing Gomez of failing to follow through on commitments that persuaded them to back the business. They also name Gomez’s mother, Mandy Teefey, and business partner Daniella Pierson, founder of pop culture newsletter Newsette, as defendants in the case.
According to the complaint, which the investors filed on Thursday in Delaware District Court, the plaintiffs expected that Gomez would use her enormous public profile and social media reach to help market Wondermind. Gomez is the most-followed woman on Instagram, with about 404 million followers. She has an audience of 58.7 million followers on TikTok.
The investors believed that Gomez’s social media platforms would give the young company an immediate marketing advantage and a direct line to a highly engaged audience.
They argue that Gomez’s role was central to Wondermind’s appeal. Investors said they understood that much of the startup’s early value rested on her involvement, particularly her ability to promote its mental-health content and future products to followers who already trusted and paid attention to her.
They also allege that Wondermind positioned itself as a mental wellness platform that was exploring products like a “groundbreaking” mobile app. They allege that the company ultimately failed to deliver the products and revenue it had projected.
“The initiatives never materialized,” the investors allege in the complaint. “The app was never built. And for three years, while the company quietly collapsed around them, not one of its founders, officers, or directors said a word to the investors.”
Pierson said in a statement to NBC News that she denies the allegations against her and “welcomes the opportunity to present concrete documentation and financial records that establish the facts.”
“To be clear, she has never used investor funds for personal expenses,” the statement read. “Quite the opposite: Daniella invested her own money into the business and did not draw a salary from the company.”
Other allegations
Gomez started Wondermind in 2021 with the intention of focusing on mindfulness and “mental fitness.” The company sought to promote routines to maintain mental health, just like people use gyms to stay physically fit.
The startup sought outside funding in 2022 at a reported valuation of $95 million. The suit describes Gomez as the company’s chief impact officer and head of marketing. The investors contend that the venture overstated its prospects, leadership and readiness to build a viable, differentiated mental-health business.
The suit also alleges that Wondermind overstated how far along its business was. Investors claim the company said it had lined up employer partnerships with JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity, while also building revenue through advertising agreements and celebrity-driven cover stories.
According to the investors, they did not learn the extent of Wondermind’s financial and operational problems until a September 2025 investigation by New York magazine’s The Cut. The complaint says the article portrayed Gomez as disengaged from her responsibilities and attempting to distance herself from the company as its condition worsened.
The investors are seeking to recover their investments, which reports put at nearly $1.2 million, along with damages and legal costs.
Key Takeaways
Selena Gomez launched mental health startup Wondermind in 2021 with the intention of focusing on mindfulness and “mental fitness.”
Now, investors are accusing her of fraud after the startup reportedly faced setbacks last year.
The investors are reportedly seeking to recover nearly $1.2 million, along with damages and legal costs.
Selena Gomez faces allegations of fraud from investors in Wondermind, the mental health startup she co-founded, after the company reportedly faced setbacks last year, including layoffs and missed payrolls.
A group of investors in Wondermind filed a lawsuit this week accusing Gomez of failing to follow through on commitments that persuaded them to back the business. They also name Gomez’s mother, Mandy Teefey, and business partner Daniella Pierson, founder of pop culture newsletter Newsette, as defendants in the case.
According to the complaint, which the investors filed on Thursday in Delaware District Court, the plaintiffs expected that Gomez would use her enormous public profile and social media reach to help market Wondermind. Gomez is the most-followed woman on Instagram, with about 404 million followers. She has an audience of 58.7 million followers on TikTok.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
One of the most effective communication methods is the mirror method, focused on reverse communication. When you apply the reverse communication method, your immediate goal is to get staff in a psychologically safe state, where they’re the most receptive to take instructions and to execute.
When your staff feels heard and seen, the environment shifts. Structure appears as safety, and safety boosts motivation. The performance follows.
The right message and the wrong method lead nowhere: The problem isn’t what you said. The problem begins before you even open your mouth.
When you discuss things with your staff or with your customers, do you listen to what they say? Do you pay attention, or do you just wait for your turn to present your ideas?
Are you a leader who just waits for your turn to speak and puts all your effort into getting your employees to like you? But the most important question to ask yourself is: Do you want your employees to like what you say or what you execute?
Why mirror method works
One of the most effective communication methods to try is the mirror method, focused on reverse communication. Let’s say a person comes to you with a problem. They explain the problem in detail while you carefully listen without interruption.
Once they’re fully done with expressing the problem, it’s your turn. Tell them their exact problem in detail, but use technical vocabulary relevant to your industry.
According to psychologist Carl Rogers, people are more likely to accept change and direction when they feel understood and not evaluated. In his person-centered theory, Rogers argues that psychological safety is built on reflective listening.
To increase the feeling of psychological safety in the business environment you lead, the first step is to master the skill of reflective listening.
Reflecting back on their problem ensures you several things:
They comprehend that you’ve listened carefully and deduce that you care enough for them, which makes them feel heard and safer in your environment.
They comprehend that you understand their problem, and they start building trust in you as an expert in the field.
They are ready to act with less defense and more trust towards a person who knows about their problems as much as they do.
In the context of a doctor’s office, for example, this translates to: If this doctor knows my problem better than I do, they must be the person capable of fixing it!
How to make reverse communication part of your leading system
In businesses, staff often refuse to execute proposed tasks not because the tasks feel too difficult, but because they don’t feel heard. They don’t feel psychological safety in that environment. They don’t feel their reality is acknowledged before a new task is proposed.
When you apply the reverse communication method — listen first, and reflect back at them — they will generally respond with less pushback. This method may look like people-pleasing, but the two have completely different goals.
The reverse communication method is different from people-pleasing. If you’re a people-pleaser, your ultimate goal is to fit in and reduce your own anxiety from potential pushback. When you apply the reverse communication method, your immediate goal is to get staff in a psychologically safe state, where they’re the most receptive to taking instructions and executing.
While Rogers proves why the mirror method works psychologically, former FBI negotiator Chris Voss, author of Never Split the Difference, explores why the method works strategically. According to him, mirroring is one of the most powerful communication tools, and it has nothing to do with people-pleasing. It disarms people and makes them ready to move forward.
Do you want your business to move forward? It can’t be done without effective leader-team communication. Use the mirror method as your leadership strategy to build an environment focused on safety. It is what your staff and even your customers need.
Leaders don’t need likes
The purpose of the mirror method isn’t to make your staff like you. You don’t need staff to be your friends, and neither do they need you. You’re not there to be liked. You’re there to lead and to be respected.
Sometimes, likability can be a byproduct of respect built through an environment that makes people feel heard. But it should never be the goal.
When the building is on fire, nobody looks for the leader they like. They look for the leader who will make the right call. The mirror method helps you gain respect from your staff. People-pleasing doesn’t. One signals that you see and understand the staff clearly. The other signals that you constantly agree with them despite logic.
Create a performance culture
When applied consistently and on all business levels, the mirror method has a strong impact on your business culture. Your staff stops performing for approval and starts performing for purpose. Top performers want to know where they’re going and that their leader sees them clearly enough to get them there.
Comfort was never a motivation for people at the top. Highest achieving professionals wake up every day asking themselves where their career is going, what is the next challenge, and if their current leader is the one to take them to the top. A performance culture built on reverse communication answers all three questions even before they are asked.
When your staff feels heard and seen, the environment shifts. Structure appears as safety, and safety boosts motivation. The performance follows.
Conclusion
The mirror method isn’t a soft leadership tactic. It is the ultimate respect that you can give staff (and even customers), and as a by-product, improve performance from staff (and even customer conversions).
See your people clearly. Reflect them accurately. Then lead them somewhere worth going.
The best businesses are never the ones with the best individuals. The best businesses are the ones with leaders who can see the individuals clearly to make the systems work for them.
Key Takeaways
One of the most effective communication methods is the mirror method, focused on reverse communication. When you apply the reverse communication method, your immediate goal is to get staff in a psychologically safe state, where they’re the most receptive to take instructions and to execute.
When your staff feels heard and seen, the environment shifts. Structure appears as safety, and safety boosts motivation. The performance follows.
The right message and the wrong method lead nowhere: The problem isn’t what you said. The problem begins before you even open your mouth.
When you discuss things with your staff or with your customers, do you listen to what they say? Do you pay attention, or do you just wait for your turn to present your ideas?
Are you a leader who just waits for your turn to speak and puts all your effort into getting your employees to like you? But the most important question to ask yourself is: Do you want your employees to like what you say or what you execute?
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Netflix said “game over” to two gaming studios this week, shutting down Night School Studio, the developer behind horror game “Unhinged,” and Moonloot, a Helsinki-based studio, according to Variety. Night School released “Unhinged,” backed by David Fincher and Zach Cregger, less than two months ago.
“We are incredibly grateful to the talented colleagues we’re saying goodbye to today,” a Netflix spokesperson said. “We thank them for all their contributions to Netflix, and wish them the best.”
Netflix hasn’t given a specific reason for the closures, but the company has steadily shrunk its internal game studio roster over the past few years, divesting Spry Fox back to its founders last December, shutting down Boss Fight after its “Squid Game” mobile title, and closing the AAA-focused Team Blue in 2024.
What remains is Next Games, plus a team that works with outside developers. Under games president Alain Tascan, Netflix’s strategy now centers on four categories: kids’ games, party games, narrative titles like “Unhinged” and mainstream games like its recent “FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition.” Sources tell Variety the most internal excitement right now is around cloud gaming and kids’ titles.
Netflix said “game over” to two gaming studios this week, shutting down Night School Studio, the developer behind horror game “Unhinged,” and Moonloot, a Helsinki-based studio, according to Variety. Night School released “Unhinged,” backed by David Fincher and Zach Cregger, less than two months ago.
“We are incredibly grateful to the talented colleagues we’re saying goodbye to today,” a Netflix spokesperson said. “We thank them for all their contributions to Netflix, and wish them the best.”
Netflix hasn’t given a specific reason for the closures, but the company has steadily shrunk its internal game studio roster over the past few years, divesting Spry Fox back to its founders last December, shutting down Boss Fight after its “Squid Game” mobile title, and closing the AAA-focused Team Blue in 2024.
What remains is Next Games, plus a team that works with outside developers. Under games president Alain Tascan, Netflix’s strategy now centers on four categories: kids’ games, party games, narrative titles like “Unhinged” and mainstream games like its recent “FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition.” Sources tell Variety the most internal excitement right now is around cloud gaming and kids’ titles.
Former Google project manager Tucker Bryant recently decided to create ChatTJB, a chatbot that relies on human beings for answers instead of artificial intelligence.
The project started in April with him manually answering queries.
Now Bryant has paused ChatTJB in response to an unprecedented surge in traffic.
The trendiest new AI chatbot is just 10,000 human volunteers manually answering your questions.
Former Google project manager Tucker Bryant recently created an AI chatbot called ChatTJB that doesn’t use AI at all. Instead, the AI stands for “Average Individual.”
The project started in April with him on the other side of the screen, manually answering questions. ChatTJB looked uncannily like the AI assistants Silicon Valley has poured trillions of dollars into building. A user typed a question into a plain chat box, waited a moment and got a response.
The project exploded after Bryant spent $6,000 on a San Francisco billboard promoting ChatTJB in late July. Since it went up, the site has received more than 100,000 prompts, he told Fortune, while the volunteer list has been growing by about 1,000 names a day. At the time of writing, Bryant has paused ChatTJB in response to the surge in traffic.
The project is notable because instead of machines replacing people, people are lining up to act like machines.
From satire to sincerity
One message in particular changed how Bryant viewed the project. On the first night of their honeymoon, a user wrote in to say they couldn’t fully relax and asked whether that was normal.
Bryant said it was the moment ChatTJB began to feel less like surreal satire and more like a place where people genuinely wanted to talk to “a well-meaning, if undeniably average, human being.”
ChatTJB was never meant to be a business. But its sudden popularity has created opportunities Bryant didn’t necessarily expect.
“I’ve had a couple of conversations with people interested in working on the project in different ways,” he said. Even so, he still sees ChatTJB as a temporary art project, one of several ideas he wants to explore.
That said, he isn’t ruling anything out. “If the right partner wanted to help turn this into a sustainable project, I’d love to talk with them,” Bryant said.
The risk of outsourcing thought
The idea for ChatTJB grew out of Bryant’s unease with how easily people can hand everyday decisions over to AI without pausing to question its answer.
He told Wired that he caught himself asking an AI chatbot if he should wear short sleeves or long sleeves on a 65-degree day in a city where he had lived for seven years. His partner had a name for that habit: “cognitive surrender.”
“When people hear the term, they immediately recognize the phenomenon, both in others and often in themselves,” Shaw told Fortune. “Academic work can define and measure a phenomenon, but art can communicate its emotional stakes in a way that a research paper rarely can.”
Key Takeaways
Former Google project manager Tucker Bryant recently decided to create ChatTJB, a chatbot that relies on human beings for answers instead of artificial intelligence.
The project started in April with him manually answering queries.
Now Bryant has paused ChatTJB in response to an unprecedented surge in traffic.
The trendiest new AI chatbot is just 10,000 human volunteers manually answering your questions.
Former Google project manager Tucker Bryant recently created an AI chatbot called ChatTJB that doesn’t use AI at all. Instead, the AI stands for “Average Individual.”
The project started in April with him on the other side of the screen, manually answering questions. ChatTJB looked uncannily like the AI assistants Silicon Valley has poured trillions of dollars into building. A user typed a question into a plain chat box, waited a moment and got a response.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
Subtraction has a ceiling: once you’ve automated the obvious, you’re left with a cheaper business, not a more valuable one.
Agents scale your execution and your blind spots equally — the more they do, the more your judgment has to be worth.
Let me be clear about where I stand. AI agents are real, and they are not hype. The market has stopped arguing about it. When AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, IBM, Databricks, and the major consulting firms all describe agents in nearly identical terms — systems with goals, memory, planning and autonomy — you are looking at market structure, not a marketing cycle.
I run a data and AI consultancy. I deploy these systems for Fortune 500 clients. I am not here to tell you to wait. I am here to tell you that the question almost everyone is asking is the wrong one.
The dominant pitch for AI agents is subtraction. Cut the support team. Cut the schedulers. Cut the content drafters. Replace four roles with a digital worker that runs while you sleep. The math is seductive because it is real in the short term — a solo operator genuinely can offload lead qualification, invoice checking, meeting transcription and first-draft copy to systems that cost a fraction of a salary.
But subtraction has a ceiling, and you hit it faster than you expect. Once the obvious tasks are automated, savings flatten and you are left with a business that is cheaper to run and no more valuable than it was before. Worse, you have trained yourself to see your company as a pile of tasks to be eliminated rather than a set of judgments only you can make.
The founders pulling ahead are running a different play. Microsoft studied AI users this year and found that the most effective ones were not the people completing more tasks faster. They were the people who stopped asking what tasks define their job and started asking what outcomes they were now positioned to drive. The agents handle the mechanics. The human moves up the stack to intent, taste, and judgment.
That is not a soft distinction. It is the entire game.
Automation raises the stakes on judgment; it does not remove them.
Here is the part the cost-cutting crowd misses. The more work your agents execute, the more expensive your mistakes in judgment become. A bad decision used to ship at human speed, caught by the three people it passed through on the way out. A bad decision handed to an agent ships at machine speed, across every channel, before anyone blinks.
You do not get to delegate the judgment. You get to delegate the labor — and then you are more accountable for the judgment than before, because there is no longer a layer of humans between your intent and the market.
This is why founders who treat agents as a license to disengage are setting a trap for themselves. They are scaling their own blind spots. An agent will execute a flawed strategy with perfect efficiency and total confidence. It will never walk into your office and say this feels wrong.
What to automate, and what to guard.
The discipline is not complicated, but it requires resisting the pressure to automate by default.
Automate the mechanics. Research, transcription, data retrieval, first drafts, lead enrichment, scheduling — the repeatable workflows that drain hours and require no taste. Start with one workflow, give it narrow permissions, keep a human approval checkpoint, and measure what actually changes over thirty days. The teams that win here keep the stack small and the workflow documented before adding complexity. Stable systems beat sleek demos.
Guard the judgment. The decisions about what your company stands for, which customers you will not serve, when the data is telling you something the model cannot see, what tradeoff is worth making and what line you will not cross. These are not inefficiencies to be optimized away. They are the reason your business exists rather than a competitor’s. Microsoft’s own data names the limit clearly: agents still fall short on tasks requiring deep empathy, emotional intelligence, and nuanced social understanding. That is not a temporary gap. That is your job description.
The strategic move in 2026 is to use agents to buy back the hours you were spending on mechanics, and then to spend those hours on the judgment work you were too busy to do well. Most founders will do the first half and pocket the time as savings. The ones who compound will reinvest it.
Automation is becoming a baseline, not an advantage. When every business in your category can deploy the same agents at the same cost, the agents stop being a differentiator. What remains scarce is exactly what cannot be automated: the quality of your judgment, the clarity of your intent, the taste with which you decide what is worth doing at all.
So by all means, deploy the agents. Cut the busywork. Reclaim the hours. But do not mistake a cheaper company for a stronger one. The founders who win the next few years will not be the ones who automated the most. They will be the ones who automated everything except the thinking — and then got dramatically better at the thinking.
That is the asset no agent can run while you sleep. Make sure you are still the one holding it.
Key Takeaways
Subtraction has a ceiling: once you’ve automated the obvious, you’re left with a cheaper business, not a more valuable one.
Agents scale your execution and your blind spots equally — the more they do, the more your judgment has to be worth.
Let me be clear about where I stand. AI agents are real, and they are not hype. The market has stopped arguing about it. When AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, IBM, Databricks, and the major consulting firms all describe agents in nearly identical terms — systems with goals, memory, planning and autonomy — you are looking at market structure, not a marketing cycle.
I run a data and AI consultancy. I deploy these systems for Fortune 500 clients. I am not here to tell you to wait. I am here to tell you that the question almost everyone is asking is the wrong one.
The dominant pitch for AI agents is subtraction. Cut the support team. Cut the schedulers. Cut the content drafters. Replace four roles with a digital worker that runs while you sleep. The math is seductive because it is real in the short term — a solo operator genuinely can offload lead qualification, invoice checking, meeting transcription and first-draft copy to systems that cost a fraction of a salary.
