Mastermind Breakfast Session: Founder Health

Fabrik's Mastermind Monday Series offers a focused setting for personal and professional enrichment. Each session, guided by industry experts and thought leaders, is an opportunity to engage with peers on a deeper level, exchange valuable insights, and set actionable goals. It's a space for mutual growth and accountability, wrapped in a spirit of collaboration. Grab your lunch and get ready to dive in!
10:00 - 10:30 : Arrival and Breakfast
10:30 - 11:30 : Presentation & Workshop
11:30 - 12:00 : Intentional Connection
Description:
The most dangerous threat to your startup right now is not a market shift, a competitor, or a broken strategy. It is the part of your brain that still believes you are fighting for survival.
Every high-performing founder carries the same hidden vulnerability: a nervous system forged for a radically different world. Under the relentless pressure of building a company, that ancient wiring activates and consumes leaders with anxiety. It reads status threats as danger, uncertainty as a physical threat, and pushes us into a chronic state of fight-or-flight. The result is chronic stress dressed up as dedication, aggression disguised as decisiveness, and withdrawal masquerading as strategic thinking.
I call this the primal trap, which is the dark engine behind individualistic hustle culture. It convinces us that relentless self-sacrifice and reactive emotional responses are the only path to success. It is how smart founders burn out, make disastrous decisions, and watch their mental and physical well-being erode without fully understanding why.
In this workshop, you'll learn that founder burnout and leadership failures are not a lack of resilience or grit. They are our ‘Ape Brain’ gone wild, controlling us through unexamined unconscious processes that modern grind culture exploits.
Drawing on sixteen years of research in neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics, and hard-earned operating experience building companies from the ground up, this session gives you the tools to do what hustle culture actively discourages: prioritize yourself.
In this workshop, you will:
Identify your primal triggers: Learn to spot the biological responses that hijack your well-being and critical decisions at the worst possible moments.
Dismantle the "grind" mentality: Expose the invisible forces driving isolating, individualistic hustle culture and learn exactly how to disarm them.
Reclaim your resilience: Gain practical, science-backed frameworks for building the one quality that separates enduring founders from those who crash, sustainability. This is the capacity to lead with conscious awareness and genuine self-care.
We will learn how to be way more productive by rejecting the exhaustive grind, finally seeing the forces that have been shaping you, and deliberately choosing a more sustainable path forward. Lead beyond survival. Take care of yourself, and build something that lasts.
Session Led by Farzad: Farzad is a 3x founder, operator, and executive coach working at the intersection of leadership psychology, AI systems, and company building. He has launched four agentic AI products generating over $1M in revenue and most recently served as Fractional COO and first employee at Humoniq (YC S25), helping raise an $8.5M seed. So far, he has coached 500+ founders and executives, mentored through programs like Intel Ignite Startup Montreal and Nucleate, and is publishing his first book The Primal Trap, a book about how primitive human psychology quietly shapes leadership and organizational success.