Initium
The Circle
The conversation no one has when the climb is over.
The circle is a small, private community of founders and operators who have been through the full arc. Build, scale, exit — and the part nobody talks about after.
Monthly conversations, hosted by Paul. He opens with what he’s navigating himself — then the room goes around. No recordings. No observers. No performance, no pitching, no fixing. Truth-telling among people who have paid the same price.
Between conversations, members connect directly — matched by what they’ve lived through, not what industry they’re in.
Members are known to each other inside the circle. Outside it, the circle does not exist.
How We Operate
- What is said here stays here. No recordings, no transcripts, no named references. No exceptions.
- We are peers. No hierarchy, no experts holding court, no one selling anything.
- We share experience, not prescriptions. You take what is useful and leave the rest.
- We deal with the chapter in front of us — not the one behind us.
- We stay small on purpose. Intimacy is the product. Scale would kill it. And there is no graduation — transition is not a course you complete.
I’m not building the circle because I’ve figured it out. I’m building it because I needed it. In 2008 I sold my business just before the financial crisis — on paper, brilliant timing. In reality, the beginning of the worst years of my life. I’d built my identity into the company, and when the company ended, the identity ended with it. What I needed then — and what didn’t exist — was a room where I could say that honestly to people who’d lived the same thing. Not therapy. Not coaching. Not a mastermind. I have forty years of sobriety. I know what peer support looks like when it’s real. That’s the model for the circle.