James Oliver, Jr.

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

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

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

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

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