By Matt Doan · Nov 15, 2025 · 3-min read

Your Founder Era

It was an awful feeling.

I was running multi-million-dollar meetings. Leading high-stakes strategy. Managing teams across continents.

And yet... I wasn’t running my own life.

I felt like I had no power.

My best thinking, my sharpest frameworks, my most valuable IP… disappeared into corporate share drives. Never to be seen again. Never to live beyond the next deck.

Soon, that felt ridiculous.

There was something inside me that needed to grow—bigger, louder, sharper. There was something I needed to build. Something of my own. But not within the confines of a corporate institution, because it’s not designed for individual flourishing.

Corporate had served my past self, but it wouldn’t serve my future self.

So I found myself at a crossroads.

At first, the word “founder” felt foreign. I thought that label was only for hoodie-wearing twenty-somethings in Silicon Valley hustling to spin up the next VC-backed unicorn.

Who was I to contemplate being a founder? Never even crossed my radar.

But then I started putting myself in rooms with actual founders. Normal people (like me) who had made a decision: they would no longer rent their genius to someone else. They would own it.

That’s when everything flipped.

If you’ve ever felt this—like your current world is too small for the future you know is possible—then welcome to your Founder Era.

It’s the phase of life where you stop performing and start building. Where you bravely trudge through the Gray Space—the messy middle between your corporate past and your entrepreneurial future. And do the work of building your new chapter.

Let’s discuss how.

Based on ruthless self-experimentation and guiding 160+ Corporate Graduation™ transformations with clients…

Here are 10 power moves that launch you into your Founder Era:

1) Turn your employer into your investor
​Keep the paycheck. Ditch the dependency. Use the system to fund your graduation—don’t wait for permission. Your employer isn’t your identity. It’s your initial investor.

2) Reclaim 50% of your calendar
​Time is not your problem—ownership is. Audit your meetings. Cut low-leverage calls and fake work. Install founder blocks. Create time for the next version of you.

3) Extract the IP you’ve been paid to hide
​You’ve spent years building brilliance. It’s time to stop hiding it behind NDAs and company whitepapers. Package it. Market it. Monetize it. Make your insight your income.

4) Rapidly upgrade your skill stack
​No more waiting for HR to approve the training budget. Learn positioning, storytelling, selling, automation, and systems that compound. We’re in the era of permissionless leverage. Stack accordingly.

5) Build one premium, genius-based offer
​Stop juggling 10 ideas. Pick one. Craft a clear, energizing, urgent problem only you can solve—then build around it. Simple scales. Complexity kills.

6) Generate Founder Magnetism
​Founders don’t chase—they magnetize. Structure your business so that clients, opportunities, and capital find you. It starts with positioning. And it never ends.

7) Install pressure. Accept the mess.
​The Gray Space is murky, lonely, and unstable. But high-agency people sprint anyway. You don’t wait for clarity—you create it.

8) Surround yourself with builders, not talkers
​You need proximity to action. Join rooms where momentum is the norm. Surround yourself with mentors, coaches, and peers who create a nervous excitement within you. Be the smallest fish in the most dangerous tank.

9) Obsess over high-ROI moves
​You’ve outgrown applause. You care about what’s launched, not what’s promised. Ship constantly. Sell boldly. Iterate constantly. Build without needing a safety net.

10) Design your life around advantage, not obligation
​The system taught you to be responsible. Now you get to call the shots—a huge responsibility. Work when you’re sharp. Rest when you need to. Align your rhythm with your results.
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We see the founder shift every week…

Cole walked away from a 25-year senior director role in tech consulting. Then he built a premium agency helping Main Street businesses infuse AI. He’s now growing 20X faster than he ever did within corporate, and operating as a founder with full control.

Rick turned his decades of executive marketing and GTM expertise into a strategic consulting business that leverages private equity firms as channel partners. He gets to solve high-leverage problems on his terms—and charge accordingly.

These are not fantasies. These are patterns. Founder Era patterns.

This is your moment of truth.

Sure, you can keep optimizing inside the system. That’s your choice.

Or… you can build the business you were born to build—the one that delivers the money, meaning, and freedom you crave.

You don’t need permission. You need velocity. You need to move. You need the conditions where this type of success becomes inevitable.

You need to decide: Will I own my life, or will I keep leasing it out?

Because your Founder Era isn’t just a dream. It’s a bold decision. And you already know it’s time.

—Matt

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PS - The Founder Era™ Workshop is happening soon.

One private session. Pure energy. Tactical growth.

This is where Directors, VPs, and execs step fully into their Founder Era.

Can’t join live? The recording’s included.

​→ Get your ticket here​

See how deep the rabbit hole goes:

🎧 Dive into our podcast for bold strategies on Corporate Graduation™ and how to build your next chapter.

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