5 Questions For Founders with Robert Bent

Bath-House Conferences and The Power of Pilgrimage

My experience with my previous company Roamly left me at rock bottom and struggling with sobriety. After four years of building that company, it unfortunately ended up failing and I had to let everybody go. I was just in a really tough place after that, and as a result, I decided to move to Israel. There, I got into Vipassana and psychedelic medicine, found sobriety, met my fiancé, and joined Ethereum. In a two-year window, I went from rock bottom to “wow, I feel amazing”. I began reflecting on why, and I realized it was because I had the support of someone in my life, which is one of the most important things for me to be healthy, and I had my daily mindfulness practice. 

After that, I began thinking about how I can help the standard mainstream person to feel like I am. I started going to bath-houses every week — I probably went to 70 in Berlin and San Francisco. As I was also working with Ethereum at the time, I would get groups of 40 people to join these bath-house “conferences” and the experience would be amazing. Nobody would be on their phones, and everyone would be chatting. For some reason, this connection was happening. 

When I moved back to Toronto, the water in my house wouldn’t get as cold as in the bath-houses. So, I just decided to do it myself — I built an ice bath in my backyard for group guided meditations. You could sit in it for a couple of minutes, and then afterwards, there would be a campfire and everyone would share. From that, a community formed — 100 or 200 people in a WhatsApp chat. People loved this thing and it was extremely social. I realized that ice baths can be used in meditations really well as they are a great way to increase the norepinephrine in the brain, which is a neurotransmitter for mood attention and vigilance. Physiologically, it brings you into a meditative state. So, for the standard mainstream person who is struggling to get into meditation, it’s the perfect onboarding with immediate feedback. Like all good startups, it all happened from being in the space with people and watching.

With my company Othership, we’ve empowered hundreds of people this year, and we’re just getting started. One of my best friends, who has been struggling with addiction, called me on Christmas to say that he wouldn’t have been able to change his life and go sober without me and the Othership community. Experiences like this let me know that if I am a leader, I need to set a really good example and act with integrity. I need to have values and implement them, and I need to focus on the customer, who have become my friends. I’m no longer worried about external validation, like “is this a VC-funded thing?” or “am I going to make a ton of money?”. They don’t matter. What drives me now is being a good leader in my community, and that feeling can get me through anything. 

Another thing that drives me to continue building companies is knowing that there isn’t a life out there without its stumbling blocks. For me, it happened to be in my 20s, with my first company. Life is full of stumbling blocks and failures, and even the most successful people face failures and rejection when they are starting out. This doesn’t just apply to career success, but even your relationships and your community. What keeps me going now is knowing that failures and rejections throughout my life make me who I am, rather than letting them bring me down.

Based on my experience, what comes home the most is to pick the thing that inspires you. For instance, think about the customer when you're building and ask yourself: do you care about them, and does helping them make you happy?

As for the solution you're providing them: does it excite you? The product itself doesn’t have to be complex to be exciting— with Othership, we’re not even building any tech into the product. However, the idea of breathwork and meditation excites me, so that’s why I keep working on it. 

I think that if you don’t have these two things, the number one problem is that it’s going to get really hard when things go wrong. I think you really need to search for the mindset of caring about your customer and your solution to keep building and sustaining a company.

Every year, I try to do some type of “pilgrimage” — not a vacation where you go and give into your urges, but something difficult, where you learn and have a reset. If you’re thinking that you want to take a break as a founder, the best way is through this “restriction”, because that’s going to build your energy for when you come back. It could be a Vipassana retreat, some type of extreme sport, a bit of time in nature or even a psychedelic medicine retreat. There’s all kinds of different things that reduce stimulation, and can help you to build back your energy, creativity and inspiration. 

I tend to do one of these a year. For me, they used to be some kind of resilience challenge, to conquer some fear of mine. Now, they’ve moved to just total relaxation resets. When I come back, I feel empowered again. 

For instance, this year was particularly challenging for me, as a lot of my usual habits started to go out the window slowly. When the gyms closed, I was suddenly not exercising anymore. Next, I was online all the time: checking Twitter to keep updated with the COVID situation, and also maintaining two businesses at the same time remotely, which meant my email flow was doubling and seven hours straight on Zoom. There were no boundaries — I was not eating properly, I was drinking too much coffee, I wasn’t sleeping well. As an entrepreneur, even when you’re doing the thing you absolutely love, it can still lead to burnout when it all gets too much. This is where the retreats and the yearly pilgrimage come in — allowing me to take a break and come back to doing what I love with more energy and a deeper vision.

During my Vipassana retreats, one of the learnings that was very interesting for me was on how to deal with fear. During these retreats, there are times when you feel claustrophobic, especially in the dark, and you have to deal with this pervasive sense of fear. I have often repurposed my experiences from these retreats in my other life circumstances, like when I am running my company. 

For instance, during my retreats, when I began feeling panicked and scared in the dark, I would use my breath to calm down. This made me realize how I could use my breath to move into a parasympathetic state — which became really useful during times of stress as a founder. After all, stress is just a sensation when it’s coming up. You can actually use your breath — taking low and slow exhales deep in the bottom of your lungs — to completely change your state. 

And when you’re changing your state, an exercise I learnt during my retreats was to start injecting positive feelings into your thought process. It could be bravery, gratitude, or some other type of feeling that you’ve felt before that you want to cultivate. It could be how you felt when you helped someone, or when you passed that test. Through my retreat experiences, I learnt that you can change your state at will at any time. When your fear comes up and you identify it, you can use that to change your state. That’s been a really powerful tool from my retreats that I’m currently practicing in my life. 

To dive even deeper into Robert’s founder journey, check out our podcast episode with Robert Bent (and hosts Maria Sipka & Stacey Lawson), available on all major podcast platforms!

Find us on: Spotify, Apple Music, Google Podcast, Red Circle & Stitcher