Dave KashenStartup CEO Coach / 2x founder

The Hidden Cost of Repressed Sadness – A Founders 9 Figs Blind Spot #innergame #founders #startups

23 Dec 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:21

This content was created by Dave Kashen. This content was uploaded by Dave Kashen. This is a YouTube video titled "The Hidden Cost of Repressed Sadness – A Founders 9 Figs Blind Spot #innergame #founders #startups" (created 2025-12-23) containing a conversational excerpt between Dave Kashen and another speaker. They discuss founders' emotional blind spots—how holding on to idealized outcomes prevents seeing reality clearly, the grief involved in letting go, how physical sensations limit choices, and an anecdote about a deal structured with Red Ventures and a nine-figure expectation. The clip appears to be about emotional/psychological challenges founders face when making business and personal decisions.

And I'm fond of saying, um, the team that sees reality the clearest wins. And I think it's one of the primary ways we don't see reality clearly is when we're holding on to some ideal image we had of how reality would be. That's not how it is, but we don't want to feel the grief and sadness of letting go of that image. I think that's one of the most common ways we don't.
Yeah. And I mean, dude, and I don't know if you remember this, but the actual deal, I had 9 figures in my head so high that the deal we did with Red Ventures was literally like, buy, buy some right now, but then we're going to give you a call option to buy the rest at, you guessed it, 9 figures. And the whole deal was constructed around this like number I had in my head. Yes. Because I was like, I just didn't want to let go of. Yeah. That I just wasn't willing to feel.
And it's, I mean, it's just a crazy thing of how, again, it's like, well, and how many people are in marriages, relationships, jobs, startups that they actually no longer want to be in just because they, they're not willing to feel. And what's crazy too is, in a way, I think is it's actually a set of physical sensations, right? Like, if you really like wrap your head around that, we limit our lives by which physical sensations we're willing to experience. Yeah. Yeah.