A trilogy for unconventional founders building against the grain.We explore the realities that rarely make it into the success stories.
Every founder story is told twice. One for the public, the other lived.
The version for investors, press and recruits is linear, confident and inevitable in hindsight. The other version sits behind closed doors, when no one is listening. The Founders Truth is about that one.
The signal is never clear
There is too little information and too much noise. You get stuck, you feel overwhelmed, and you still have to decide.
The metrics stop meaning anything
You are introducing an idea before it is understood, so the numbers measure something else. Much of it only makes sense looking back.
The world moves faster than you can
With AI, the change never slows, and the disruption is bigger than you. Facing it quietly wears down the drive that put you on this path.
Three confrontations. One journey.
Building something
Becoming someone
- IFirst
We confront ourselves.
Who you are when the plan stops answering: the burnout, and being alone with it.
Volume I · Reality Check - IIThen
We confront each other.
How you relate to others: the people you build with, and the ones you build for.
Volume II · Relativity Lost Its Purpose - IIIEventually
We confront the world.
How you introduce something novel, where cultures move slowly and technology doesn’t.
Volume III · The Culture of Why & The Rise of AI
Becoming someone
Three volumes. One truth.
From the clarity you can’t optimize your way to, through the metrics that stopped telling the truth, to what remains when the machines take the measurable work.
Volume II · Coming 2028
Relativity Lost Its Purpose
Your metrics are lying to you.
Metrics that measure everything except what actually matters, and the absurdity of chasing optimization while a culture quietly collapses. The invisible, unmeasurable forces in an organization turn out to be the only ones still moving the needle.
Volume III · Coming 2029
The Culture of Why & The Rise of AI
AI is about to expose what’s been missing all along.
When automation takes the measurable work, what remains is aliveness: the messy, unmeasurable vitality no algorithm can replicate, and the one thing a founder cannot delegate.
Ambiguity. Absurdity. Aliveness.
A rosette of three petals inside a ring. Ambiguity is the petal at the top, Absurdity the one at the lower right, Aliveness the one at the lower left. The three overlap in the middle, where the words The Founders Truth are set.
The three threads that run through the books and the podcast. Not problems to solve, but conditions to recognize, understand and accept, so you can move forward.
Carlo Mahfouz
Technology executive · Author · Speaker & advisor
The books, the conversations and the letters come from the same place.
Carlo Mahfouz is a technology executive, author, speaker and advisor who helps leaders ask better questions about AI, from inside the work, not beside it. Fifteen years building technology in health and education, from writing code to shaping AI strategy, have kept him in the rooms where the founder story is lived rather than told.
The Founders Truth is where he brings that version into the open. He writes it down in the trilogy, talks it through on the podcast with the founders living it, and sends what he finds along the way in the newsletter.
“In the space of ambiguity, absurdity and aliveness, you will experience firsthand the founders truth in its uncertainty, discomfort and fragility, so that when you encounter it on your own journey, you won’t be a stranger to it.”
The messy middle, in real time.
Conversations with unconventional founders and builders, including the corporate founders: the product managers and technologists building inside companies. Real-time insight into the part that gets edited out of the success story.
This podcast is for you if you are
Sharing a message that’s too new to land
When the idea is a foreign concept, too innovative to be accessible yet.
Positioning yourself before you know your audience
When you still don’t know who you are building for, and have to move anyway.
Living through it without losing the fire
When the passion and drive that put you on this path start to thin.
Three episodes to start with
All episodes
Every episode brings this to life, not only in words but in the tension the dialogue creates: the unspoken challenges, the nuance that’s rarely highlighted, and the in-between stages.
The founders truth, in your inbox.
Discover the gap between what you see unfolding and where you or your organization actually are. This trilogy maps a different path where ambiguity, absurdity & aliveness become your secret weapon.
Essays, episodes and news of the trilogy as it unfolds. Free, on Substack.