Adeo Ressi on How To Build Purpose Driven Startups That Can Change the World
In this keynote, moderator Pani Stutt introduces Adeo Ressi, a nine‑time Silicon Valley entrepreneur and founder of the Founder Institute, highlighting his work with over 3,500 startups, including Udemy. Ressi frames the talk as part of a broader "Neo‑Enlightenment"—a global awakening in which entrepreneurs become custodians of a new, purpose‑driven future. He argues that humanity has been operating with a mind‑first, heart‑less, soul‑less paradigm, and that true progress requires re‑ordering to soul → heart → mind. Ressi guides the audience through a series of breathing and visualization exercises to surface their personal vision (a "postcard" of an ideal future) and then to feel the heart‑driven purpose that connects that vision to reality. He explains how purpose acts as a guiding force, how misalignment manifests as physical or situational discomfort, and how to interpret these signals. Finally, he moves to action, describing the role of the mind in manifesting purpose, introducing the concept of manifestation, and offering practical steps for entrepreneurs to translate purpose into concrete, heart‑aligned actions. Throughout, he emphasizes inspiration, empowerment, and the importance of women and future generations in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Chapters
My name is Pani Stutt. I'll be guiding you through the evening, introducing our speaker, our panelists. I'll be moderating the panel discussion, also making sure that you too can contribute and ask questions. So I believe the theme for tonight is not only interesting, I believe it's extremely important, and it's because it has to do with how we can change the world. The world, you know, it's the place where we live, it's the only place we have, it's where we raise our kids, it's where future generations should be able to thrive. So, how can we change the world? Well, we have states and democracy, So maybe we can just vote for a better world and someone else can take care of it, you know, while we are making money. Our speaker here tonight, he has an additional way that he wants to tell you all about. And he also tells me that he's going to work with you on this. I don't know how, but it'll be really interesting. I hope. Yeah. So, our speaker has helped over 3,500 startups start and grow through the Founder Institute Accelerator program that he created. And among those 3,500 companies, you find companies like Udemy, which is a startup within education. Online education. They have 24 million students worldwide, and they offer around— over 100,000 courses, everything from software development and business to music and personal development. Foundry Institute now operates in over 50 countries in 180 cities. Here in Stockholm, operations is handled by deCypher, which is the company I work for. And, well, our speaker, a 9-time entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, he's an investor, he's the CEO and founder of Founder Institute, and he began his career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he, together with his roommate Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, needed money for— for their room, their dorm room. They needed to pay the rent. So they rented a house and turned it into a successful nightclub. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Adil Rassi.
Hello. The nightclub story, it haunts me forever. The first thing I'm going to do is say good morning. I like the fact that some of you laughed. So why would I say good morning? It's clearly the evening. It's not even the morning where I live anymore. I say good morning because humanity is awakening right now. I'm sure you see it around you in small and big ways. The fact that I walk from one impact accelerator, a coworking space, to another impact accelerator coworking space to, to have this event here tonight says a lot about the awakening that's happening around the world, here in Sweden, in Scandinavia, and really every country, no matter how small, impoverished, or large. You're seeing people like yourselves Finding their purpose, finding their vision, and taking action to make the world better. And so, we're a little groggy. We've been asleep for generations, right? I don't think that humanity has been awake like we are awakening right now for a long time. And so, this moment is special in many ways. But we're finding our footing, right? We're starting to see the right path, and it's beautiful, right? And I know many of you may sit here right now and say, "Well, it's not that beautiful." And I ask you not to look at what is before you, but what can be before you. And that's a lot of what I'm going to be talking about today. Because if you look at what is, then you will see things that you may not like. But if you look at what can be, then you will start to see things that are beautiful. And in fact, we need to let go of these awful things that surround us because that's not the platform from which we can build something great. Right? We need to start with a clean slate. So, welcome everyone. I think this new period I refer to as Neo-Enlightenment. It could be called the Renaissance. I don't think it's necessarily a creative period. I think it's really an enlightening period where people are going to come up with new ideas and new constructs and new thinking that will make the world better. Rather than just making beautiful art and other things. So it's more of an Enlightenment period, in my view, than a Renaissance. And in this Enlightenment period is when dreams, your dreams, will become reality. And in the introduction, we were talking about, you know, this is our world, And it is our world, it's our shared world, but in many ways it's your world, right? And I'm a firm believer that if we all live in a beautiful world that we want and we dream to be perfect, then that world will be perfect for everyone, right? Because now we're living in a world filled with people's compromises, compromises which don't really exist. They're compromises that you've created in your own mind. Maybe you say, "I'm not good enough," or "I don't have enough money," or "I can't do this because of that." There's no rule that says that's true. These are just things that you've made up in your head. So when you start to live in the dream world of your own, the world that we share will become that beautiful place that we want it to be. So I want to talk for a second about what my intentions are tonight because that's important. You say, "What is this tall dude's intentions?" And it's a good question. So I have two intentions. I want to inspire you and I want to help you. And I'm ready to do hopefully both. And if I'm lucky, at the end of the talk tonight, you might have a better sense of what your purpose is in the world. And that would be considered success. And then hopefully you can come out with us, and I would be very happy to help you think about how to manifest that purpose in the world. And then I will have the best time in Sweden for the 20 hours that I'm here or 18 hours. So I'm gonna be covering vision. Then I'll be going into purpose and lastly the actions, right? And I'm gonna go through some exercises and I'm gonna ask you to visualize some things. So you might be doing some light meditation, and hopefully that will help you to better understand what your purpose is. Okay. So just take a look. Hi there. I love the fact that we have a child here because that is our future. I have 3 children and they warm my heart. Every day. And so thank you for bringing your child. I think we should have— it's probably super boring. Hopefully you're enjoying the coloring. But we should have more children. We should have more women at events like this. And it's— I'm very happy to see there's about a third of the audience is women. And I hope one day it will be 50% of the audience and the leaders will be women everywhere in the world and we'll share responsibility for the future between the genders, which is long overdue. Okay. So, for me, with each start of an awakened entrepreneur, the world gets a little brighter. And that's because these entrepreneurs are custodians of vision. And so the first thing I'm going to talk with you about tonight is vision. And you might say, "Well, what is vision?" Right? And good question. We'll go into that in a second. Vision is your dream of a perfect world. So I'm sure you have a dream of what a perfect world is. You probably suppress it. So I'm gonna help work with you a little bit about bringing it out. And every vision is beautiful and perfect. You may even be afraid of looking at your vision because it's so far away from what the world is today. And I can tell you that, so let that fear go. Fear drives too much of what is happening in the world today. It motivates people for almost all of the actions of humanity. And it's really not what we need to be using as our primary catalyst for action. We need belief. And hope and love, not fear. So I ask you to start suppressing your fear and start opening your mind, and I'll take you through an exercise to try and understand what your vision is. Okay. So what we're going to do is I ask everyone to take really, really deep breaths. Big breaths. Come on, you can breathe. Big breaths. Now get a lot of lungs in and then breathe out all that negative emotion, all that fear, all that hustle that you have to have and just breathe it out. Right? Really big breaths. Get a lot of oxygen in your lungs. And now close your eyes and start picturing yourself in the future. You're walking to a house. In that house is a friend. You talk with the friend. Good. What are you talking about? OK. You leave the house. You go to a work to do a task. What are you doing? Where are you going? OK. You can come back. OK. That was nice. Now, freeze a postcard of that in your mind. And I know maybe not everyone got there, and that's OK. However far you got, freeze a postcard of that feeling, of that vision in your mind. We're going to use it a little bit later. Entrepreneurs are champions of visions. They take these pictures or postcards of the future and they try to make them into reality, especially the entrepreneurs with purpose. And purpose is really where that vision intersects with reality, right? And so you have this postcard of the future. You bring it to the purpose and then you project it into reality. So what is purpose? Purpose is the force that guides you. And it's, you know, there's a lot of talk on purpose-driven business and I like that idea of like purpose-driven because purpose is a force. That guides you. And so, I want to— before I go more into purpose, I'll talk about where that force comes from. So I believe that every human being has a soul, has a heart or a body, and has a mind, right? And in that order. And in many ways, when you visualize the vision, That's coming from your soul. And when you start to manifest or take that vision into reality, it's coming from your heart, right? And the last element, your mind, is where all the actions, which I'll go into in a moment, come from. The problem we have today is that the entirety of everything that we've built, the perfect lines, the projector, the everything, has been built from the mind. And there's very little heart and almost no soul in what we have. And that's okay. It is what it is. I'm not judging, but it's backwards. Right? Soul first. Heart second. Mind third. And so your purpose is driven from your heart. Everyone has a purpose. Everyone has a heart. And so I'm gonna do another exercise, of course. And we're gonna work on finding that feeling of purpose for you. So what I want you to do now is take those deep breaths again. Breathe out all that negative energy. I feel some of you are a little nervous. That's okay. And I want you to try and feel your heart beating. Now, look at the postcard, look at your vision, the house, the conversation with your friend, the actions you took for work, the environment. What makes your your heart beat most? What excites your feelings when you think about them, when you picture them? Okay. Come on back, everyone. Hi. That's your purpose. Right? Now, I don't know how many of you got there. I felt really good response. I felt— I can I can feel you. So I felt definitely some of you with your heart racing. And as you pictured it and your sensations changed, that's your purpose, right? That's your purpose. That's how you know. Now maybe I went a little fast. You can certainly do this at home in your own time at a slower pace with better music. Maybe someone who has a slightly more entertaining voice. But that's your purpose, right? You set your vision, you come back to it, you feel your way through it, and when your feelings start changing and your heart starts speeding up, that's your purpose. There it is. It's simple as that. And when you find your purpose, you will be on path and in alignment. And this is not— unfortunately, you know, someone asked like, "When did you find your purpose?" And I'm 46 years old. I found my purpose in the late 30s. So not that long ago in my adult life. And I kind of stumbled on it, and I wish someone had done something like this with me because I probably would have found it a lot sooner. And it's— but it's not like when I found it, I was there and I was like, "Ah, there's my purpose, done." It's a continual quest. And in fact, once you find your purpose and you pursue it, steadily, what will happen is as you go off purpose, the life around you course corrects pretty harsh. So just in the last couple weeks, the last week, I had— my car got stuck on a mountain, then it got broken into, and then I crashed another car. And I'm like, what's going on? Well, off path, not in alignment, clearly, right? We're all sending clear signals. I was too much in control. So when you're following your purpose, you follow your heart and your mind trails behind kind of cleaning up the mess, organizing the world around you, right? We have the world today backwards: mind-led, maybe you feel, no soul, right? The correct way for a thoughtful, aware human to proceed is soul first, heart next, mind last. And when you're controlling too much of the world around you with— which I have to do running an organization in 200 cities at times— your heart gets suppressed because you put everything in boxes and try and organize everything. And then you go off path and out of alignment. Unfortunately, as you get more and more in alignment, if you go a little bit off, the slaps are fairly hard to get you back on. But you all today have things that are happening to you that are telling you whether you're on or off path, in or out of alignment. You might have physical symptoms. Like back pain. A lot of suppression of feelings goes right to the back. You might have external situations where you're fighting with a loved one or a friend, or you have trouble at work, or your startup isn't going the way you wanted it to go. All these things are just straight manifestations that you're off. Path. And it's very easy to fix, right? Don't look, "Oh man, I'm fighting with my loved one. This is terrible." Okay, go, "What is this showing to me about where I am on my alignment and my path? What is it trying to tell me? What is the message?" in this circumstance that I can carry back and get into alignment, right? And then turn on your heart and let it guide you, and the problems will go away. So as long as you lead by the heart, you will remain in your purpose pursuit state and you will have far less trouble and far greater success in everything that you do. Your home life, your work life, just life. Now, you need to carry all this into action. And this is where I'm going to be the most practical, but I will still do a visualization exercise for you. So what is action? Well, I think, you know, we live in the world of the mind. You're all pretty good at action, but actually you're pretty bad at action as well. Actions are the steps that you take to realize your purpose. So this is where the mind comes in. And as I said, you live in a world of the mind, so we're pretty good at action in general in the world. But what people don't realize is how powerful human beings are at manifestation. And do people know what manifestation is? It's like kind of all the rage in the Bay Area, but I'm not sure if it's penetrated the world collective consciousness. You know what manifestation is? Raise your hand. Okay, well, there are 3 of you. High five! We can go hang out right now.
