a trilogy by Carlo Mahfouz
You're optimizing yourself and your company into something unrecognizable.
This trilogy explores the gap between what you built and what it's becoming — and reveals why ambiguity, absurdity, and aliveness are your way through.
Book One
You can't optimize your way to clarity. Every founder hits the moment when more data, better processes, and clearer KPIs only create more confusion. This book reveals what emerges when you stop fighting uncertainty and start listening to it. Reality Check is about shedding the performance of certainty to rediscover the founder who built something from nothing — the one who knew how to move before they knew the path.
Your metrics are lying to you. Not because they're wrong — because they measure everything except what actually matters. This book explores the absurdity of chasing optimization while your culture quietly collapses.
Relativity Lost Its Purpose reveals why the relationship between effort and outcome has broken down — and why the invisible, unmeasurable forces in your organization are the only ones that still move the needle.
book three
AI is about to expose what's been missing all along. As artificial intelligence takes over analysis, prediction, and optimization, what's left for humans isn't certainty—it's aliveness. The messy, unmeasurable vitality that no algorithm can replicate. The kind that only emerges when we stop optimizing away our vulnerability, our interdependence, our need for each other.
When machines can think, what becomes possible in a world that finally stops pretending we're separate?
three books
You already know the optimization isn't working. You already feel the gap between what you built and what it's becoming. You already sense that AI is about to change everything.
The Founders Truth Trilogy doesn't give you another framework to follow. It gives you permission to stop pretending you have it figured out — and reveals what becomes possible when you do
About the author
Strategic Advisor to impact-driven founders and C-suite leaders at the intersection of culture and technology | Executive Coach | Speaker | Author