What Founders Get Wrong About Mindfulness, with Tom Coburn @ Waking Up
Update: 2025-07-08
Description
Tom Coburn co-founded Jebbit in a college dorm room, scaled it over 13 years, raised $90M, and eventually sold the company to BlueConic. Today, he’s the CEO of Waking Up — one of the most popular meditation apps in the world.
In this episode, we talk about what it means to train your mind like you train your body, and how that shift has changed the way Tom leads, builds, and navigates uncertainty.
We cover:
- How Tom used meditation to stay grounded through layoffs, pivots, and a near-collapse at Jebbit
- The mindset reframe he gave his team when they were down to $1M in the bank and had no working product
- Why most founders give up on mindfulness too quickly… and what they miss by treating it like a performance hack
- How Waking Up balances scientific insight with contemplative wisdom, without forcing anything on the team
- What mindfulness looks like in practice when things go wrong
- What Tom got wrong about culture early on, and how his approach evolved over time
If you’re a founder navigating stress, uncertainty, or burnout — and want a different lens to approach it — this episode is for you.
🎧 Listen now on Founders & Empanadas.
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