Life as a Series of Learning Cycle. Over the last 30 years, I founded, led, or co-led 7 organizations on 6 continents, from local NGOs to billion-dollar global companies. My professional life has been a blast as I have had the privilege to contribute, socially and economically, in a number of contexts. Along the way, as I experienced some measure of success, I started to think that I was in control, that I drove the show, and that I could affect anything I wanted if I surrounded myself with the right people and provided the right amount of effort. Each time, life found a way to humble me and remind me that "I" was not the "doer", and that something bigger than me was simply deploying lessons for me to learn... as if Life was a series of Learning Cycles. My last gig as the CEO of Total Brain is no exception. For the first time since I Ieft the company at the end of 2021, I offer a public recount of the story behind my departure and the key personal learnings I took away. Learning Cycles Always Start with Ease. In January 2017, I dreamed of building an app and a company where I could openly share the Eastern Spiritual Practices (breathing, yoga, and meditation) that had forever changed the way I see, feel, and live my life. That same week, I was introduced to an opportunity to rebuild a 16-year-old publicly listed Australian company that was financially distressed despite having amassed an incredible amount of neuroscientific assets and expertise. In a strange way, I felt like I had found the missing piece of a long-lost puzzle that only "I" was meant to put back together: we would leverage neuroscience to help people monitor their mental state and get custom breathing and meditation practices to optimize said state over time. Deeply excited, I invested almost a year (unpaid) to try and recapitalize the firm (complex multi-national montage) in exchange for equity and the privilege to lead it. With the help of a few friends who I considered my partners in the endeavor, we got it done and Total Brain (TTB) was re-launched on January 1st, 2018. At the beginning of any Cycle, Life facilitates what must emerge for all involved to take their lessons. Challenges Always Hit Soon After. The TTB adventure was highly constrained. I had to manage a company publicly listed in Australia (ASX) and headquartered in San Francisco with a decentralized workforce from the third floor of my home in Montclair NJ, approximately 10 miles West of Manhattan. My staff who I loved and respected, came from all walks of life. From the outset, we did not share much of anything, but deep down, we shared a genuine desire to improve people's well-being. As we opened the hood over the tech stack, we discovered that all of our legacy systems needed to be rebuilt for the company to scale. As a result, we launched our first iteration of a fresh brain/state optimization tool 12 months later than originally anticipated. At that time, the mental health crisis was starting to emerge... being astute and agile, we quickly pivoted the company, forgot the 2nd iteration of our new "brain optimization" product, and turned our solution into an integrated data-driven mental health solution. Months later, we found Product-Market Fit and announced a mega-deal with the largest health system in the world via a partnership deal with IBM Global. We raised $10M based on the premise that this deal could 5-10X our business in a few years, and then... COVID hit. Submerged by the impact of the pandemic, the said health system delayed the implementation of our solution for 18 months, and I got to show up at countless boards of directors and quarterly investor meetings mostly with 40-50% revenue growth numbers, a far cry from the 500-1000% we all believed we could get. In the long 18 months that our client delayed its launch, stress, not business, is what decupled in our lives... Challenges Can Also Hit you as a Person. COVID did not only hit our business, it came to hit me very personally. In December 2020, I got the "meanest" version of COVID (floored for 12 days) which activated a long-haul genetic disorder (now 100% under control) that messed up the capacity for my blood to clot properly. It took nine months for that diagnosis to fall and, in the meantime, I suffered two episodes (4 months apart) of Deep Veins Thrombosis and Multiple Pulmonary Embolisms (PEs), with a 50% chance of dying each time, according to my lung doctor. The first time, I left the hospital and went back to work immediately in order to close an urgent funding round. The second time, I took a week off before we had to restructure the company (25% RIF) so we could make it to the launch of our delayed implementation and sign another landmark deal that we sign but whose implementation also got delayed for 12 months. Life was sending me a clear message. It wanted me to slow down. I did not think I could... I felt like I had taken a wedding vow with my investors... in sickness and in health. Aloneness, Head, and Heart. Such extreme experiences led me to re-think my assumptions about life, its meaning, my role in it, the system I am part of, its upside and downside, my relationships with family, friends, spiritual master, the planet, etc. Above all, those experiences made me realize and understand the concept of "aloneness", this human condition that we tend to forget about because we always have "something to offer to the world" and we are constantly surrounded by a well-attended group of "offer takers". These well-intended people (we all are offerers and takers) give short-term meaning to our existence. They validate us, make us feel useful, and provide us with a purpose... we love them and we think that they love us... until life puts us in a place where we "can no longer offer". At that moment, we realized that many "offer takers" freeze or run to the hills, we realize that everything (events, people, circumstances) can and does change all the time and that we should never take anything or anyone for granted. Near my death, I felt alone and it took me some time to understand why... I was in my head trying to match the number of texts and phone calls with my list of friends and family members... and it was far from matching my expectations. When I stopped that madness and actually accepted the "count", I realized and accepted that people are all very busy living their own lives full of their own very real problems. I relaxed, took a deep breath in, left my head, and went into my heart. This is where I met all of my friends and family, for real, a nd I never felt alone again. Corporations Are Rule-Based. As my mind grappled with the concept of aloneness, it became clear to me that being CEO in the Corporate World was the epitome of aloneness. That world has no time for anything but "the number you have vs the number the market understood you would have". It does not wait for "life to happen", for COVID to pass. It does not have time to "heal". It does not "care" about individuals who are not peak performing. In fact, it cannot afford to care because investors believe they cannot afford to lose money which in many cases, especially for retail investors, is totally true. At a board meeting that I will forever remember, weeks after I came back from my second set of PEs and let go of 25% of my beloved staff, one of my biggest private investors openly questioned whether or not I "could" effectively "sell" the company moving forward. That investor who I realized spoke up for most others, had lost trust in me. It did not matter that I did not create COVID, that it almost killed me twice, and that we had a deal with a health system that got clobbered by it, the fact is that I did not deliver the revenue we were all anticipating for a long time. At that very moment, my heart shattered into pieces. T rust is the fuel of any leader/entrepreneur. Without it, I could no longer find the energy to continue. I had to accept that, after 5 years of total commitment, I was no longer "the man", that it was time for me to let go, listen to my body, and focus on myself. I resigned days later, and t he board treated me with grace and respect. Beginning of a New Cycle. The day after I arrived home, my plan was simple: rest, meditate, play pickleball, connect with people I love, create and learn stuff I had put on the back burner for years. One of those back burner items was digging into the state of the world. I knew we were in the middle of many crises and I knew that my grasp of their magnitude, interdependence, and root causes, was shallow at best. I would dig in in the following months while executing my self-care plan to the letter. It worked. I quickly felt rested, fit, peaceful, better educated... and happier than ever. That is how I started Renegerative.group , an outlet where people like you and I simply come together to work on regenerative projects, projects that give more to life than they take from it. This is not yet a formal business, it is more of a paid collaborative where people join forces to get meaningful regenerative stuff done. We executed 8 projects in the last year, 4 projects regenerating Beliefs and 4 projects regenerating Systems. You can see what they are and who I did it with on our web site. Some of them will, in my humble opinion, become serious businesses. Why? because they are aligned with what is good for the universe, with Life itself, not with a Rules book.

Holy Retirement. Happy not to be leading anything for a minute, I started to work on my retirement plan at the beginning of 2022. Could I simply maintain what I was doing (meditate, play, connect, learn, and create) for the rest of my life? Could I live that simple but 'oh-so-exciting' dream of getting paid for the performance of my financial assets and doing what I want every day? I started a planning exercise with my wealth manager and realized that YES, it could be done. My plan assumed a conservative return on assets invested but it sure required an average "growth" rate over my remaining lifetime. I was going to be the happiest fifty-something walking on the earth. I was going to launch Regenerative.group, invent, collaborate, create, solve problems, and "give more than I take" from life. It all made sense, for a hot minute... Economic Growth. Then, the next minute, I learned how Earth's resources are hitting their limits, and how many of them are either dangerously depleted or fast depleting. For example: The UN estimates that by 2025, 1.8B people will have no drinking water. Approximately half of the world's tropical forests have already turned into deserts or feeding fields for livestock. All things being equal, oil reserves will not meet demand in 30 years. Natural gas is estimated to run out in 60 years. Minerals like copper, iron, bauxite are harder and harder to dig out. The cobalt, lithium, and nickel that go into our ever-expanding need for batteries are less and less accessible. And the list goes on... In order to grow our economy each year, which is a condition to maintain the financial performance of our retirement portfolio, we need to extract more and more of those limited resources which destroy the ecosystems that support life itself. Life itself? That is a tad exaggerated no? Well, I'm afraid not. In the last 50 years, our ecosystems got so out of balance that 60% of all mammal species have gone extinct...