The Power of People: The Real Currency of Resilience

The hardest part of building isn’t the code or the capital - it’s staying grounded when the room is quiet and the doubts get loud. We pull the curtain back on the emotional infrastructure that actually powers a solo founder’s journey: mentors who compress time, believers who lend conviction, and communities that turn stress into resilience. This is the playbook for the human side of entrepreneurship, rooted in data, lived experience, and the immigrant lens that treats relationships as the first currency.

We explore why social buffering isn’t just a psychological concept but a strategic advantage. From statistics that show mentored startups doubling five-year survival to stories of leaders who chose belief over titles, we map the “people stack” you need: mentors who upgrade your questions, partners who show care before contracts, and family anchors who remind you why your dream matters. You’ll hear how a tough season (travel chaos, grief, and a pivotal deal) clarified the bar for values-aligned partners and reframed legacy beyond revenue or roles.

By the end, you’ll have a framework to intentionally design your support system: identify who belongs on your bus, set simple rhythms for honest feedback, and prune inputs that drain courage. We close with gratitude for grandparents who kept going, spouses who carry the load at home, mentors who stayed curious, and listeners who choose to be part of this story. If the grind is loud but belief is louder, hit play, share this with the person who believed in you earliest, and leave a review so we can grow this community of builders who go far together.

Chapters

• 2:34 The Loneliness Of Solo Founding
• 4:40 Immigrant Lens: Relationships As Currency
• 6:09 Get The Right People On The Bus
• 8:15 Shoutouts: Bill Ross And Bruce Waterman
• 11:51 Believers Behind Every Iconic Founder
• 15:34 Grief, Legacy, And Meaning
• 19:25 Gratitude And Paying It Forward

Transcript

VladlenStark: 0:11

Welcome back to the Immigrant Hustle. My name is Vladlen Stark and I am your host. If you're tuning in to the Immigrant Hustle for the first time, it is an unfiltered CEO's playbook on how to build a business with AI. In this show, I'm pulling back the curtain on my journey, the challenges, the grind, and the incredible moments of discovery that come with building something from scratch. It's about the hustle. Last week, we opened up the toolkit that makes building Luxara possible while holding down a demanding corporate job and having a young family at home. Today, I want to talk about what I believe to be the most important, yet the least discussed part of entrepreneurship. And it's the power of people. When you're a solo founder, especially one like me, trying to build something from nothing while working a full-time job, having a young family, having all kinds of other commitments, sometimes it can feel like you're carrying the world on your shoulders. There's no team to delegate to. And yet, the truth is, no one succeeds alone. The difference between breaking down and breaking through almost always comes down to who is in your corner. A recent study found that 72% of entrepreneurs report struggling with mental health challenges, depression, anxiety, chronic stress, and so on. That's almost three out of every four founders out there. And here's another kicker. 70% of those same entrepreneurs report that at some point or another in their journey, they felt deeply alone. Honestly, those numbers don't really surprise me. Now that I've been living that life for the past five months, there's a special kind of loneliness that sets in at 11 o'clock at night when you're sitting by yourself, everyone else is asleep, you're staring at your laptop, and you're trying to figure out one more thing before the day is out. Sometimes you start to question whether you're crazy for believing in this dream that no one yet seems to understand, and no one yet really seems to see the potential of. That's why today's episode isn't about the hustle in a traditional sense. It's about the emotional infrastructure that keeps the solo founder going. It's about the people that keep you grounded, inspired, and sane. When I started building Luxara, I didn't have a team, I didn't have a big budget, I had a vision and a mountain of late nights ahead of me. It wasn't the caffeine that kept me going, it was a connection. It was a conversation with a mentor, a friend who told me to keep going, my wife reminding me that this dream matters. So that's what fuels the resilience and the motivation. It's the meaning. And the meaning almost always comes from people. The psychologists call this social buffering. The more emotionally connected you are, the more resilient you become under stress. It's not just an academic theory. This was very well studied, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. And the finding was that entrepreneurs who remained connected with their family, with their friends, or even with online communities persevered and stayed in business at a much higher rate than those who didn't. In other words, these support networks didn't just help the founders survive and thrive. It also directly translated into their businesses surviving and thriving. I often think of this and how it relates to the immigrant experience. When you move into the new place, into a new country, you often start from zero. No connections, no social capital, sometimes even no language. And you very quickly realize that the most important currency you have is the relationships. It's that person who gives you your first job. It's the friend that helps you translate your resume. It's that family member that believes in you before anyone else does. I believe that same principle applies to entrepreneurship. Your people are your first investors, even if they never put in a cent. A famous entrepreneur, Simon Sinek, said success is not about the next big idea. It's about the people who believe in it with you. Jim Collins and Bill Lazier's book Beyond Entrepreneurship that I mentioned in the earlier episodes really frames this powerful idea quite well. Before you figure out where you're going, you need to get the right people on the bus. And just as importantly, you need to get the wrong people off it. This concept has really shaped the way I think about leadership, about hiring, partnerships, and even friendships. So who are the people on your bus? Well, I think some of the most important people on your bus are your mentors. If you ever wondered if mentors really make all that much difference in business, the statistics are actually quite staggering. Startups with mentors have twice the likelihood of surviving past five years. So basically, what that means is 70% of all startups who have mentors survive past five years compared to only 35% of startups that survive past five years without formal mentors in place. And it's not just about surviving, it's also about thriving and the growth that comes with it. Mentored startups reported 83% faster revenue growth than those that didn't have mentors. And mentor gives you something that you can't just Google. And even with all the advancements in AI, I don't think you can quite get there yet. It's experience and pattern recognition. They've already lived through all the same challenges that you're going through: raising capital, building a business, hiring people, firing people, failing, succeeding, failing again, on and on and on. In many ways, mentorship compresses time. It allows you through a single conversation or a few conversations to accumulate the knowledge and experience that would have taken you months or years of trial and error on your own. And honestly, mentorship doesn't even need to be a formal thing. It can be your colleagues, it can be your friends, it could be your former teachers, and on and on and goes. One of my mentors told me, you don't need someone to give you answers. You need someone to help you ask better questions. And I found that to be true time and time again. So I want to give a really special shout out to two people who got on my bus early on. And they're these wonderful mentors that I've had over the years, uh, Bill Ross and Bruce Waterman. Bill Ross gave me my first big breakthrough at FEI. He gave me a chance when he really didn't need to. He could have picked somebody with a lot more experience, with much nicer title, better credentials. And yet he saw something in me. He invited me to join the FEI Technology Thought Leadership Forum and took me under his wing. And it's the same forum that I now have the privilege of being the chair of many years later. That single act of trust changed the trajectory of my professional journey in a very profound way. And then there's Bruce Waterman. I actually met Bruce and Bill at the same time at this really amazing program that FEI used to run years ago called CFO Leadership Beyond Finance. It was this in-residence program where 20, maybe 25 of us spent about four weeks together at a campus in Queens. And we went through this amazing program with these several really high-profile CFOs in residence that shared a lot of their war stories and a lot of their wisdom with the group and really inspired all of us for many years to come. Bruce, though, didn't really come back into my life in a meaningful way until many years later. It was during a period when I was completing my ICD. And really asking myself, well, what was next? Was I ready for that next big challenge of corporate boards? Did I need to take a pivot in my professional career and get more experience in other areas? So after I got my letters, I applied for the mentorship program at ICD. And by stroke of luck, I was assigned my new mentor, Bruce Waterman. Bruce really helped me figure out myself in many different ways, set the right priorities, look at my career from a different angle, really ask myself, what am I doing? How am I doing it? What do I want to do? Where do I want to go? Who do I want to do it with? And these series of questions and series of lunches that I've had with him as my mentor really had a profound impact on my personal and my professional life. He also taught me that leadership is often not about the title. It's about the humility, the responsibility, and how you make the people feel around you. So these two, Bruce and Bill, and if I'm being honest, a handful of other mentors over many years, didn't just give me advice. They believed that I could do something more, that I could be something more, that I could create something more. And when you have people who believe in you long enough, you start to believe in yourself. And there's really nothing quite as powerful as that. If you think of the big names in the world of business, from Steve Jobs to Richard Branson, there's always this group of believers around them. Jobs had Wozniak, Branson had his mentor, Freddie Laker. Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, said that if it wasn't for the belief of his parents and the loan that he got from them, Nike would have never existed. And even if you zoom in to the smaller stories, the many, many businesses that are running out of their garages and these quiet success stories. Well, you realize that it's always the same formula. There's always somebody there, however loud or quiet, telling them you can do it. Mel Robbins famously said, No one who's done anything extraordinary did it alone. And I think that message captures the theme of today's episode quite perfectly, because every solo founder out there won't be defined just by what you have built, but more importantly on who you have built it with. Speaking of which, earlier this year, my certifiably insane wife and equally certifiably insane, yours truly, took our then four-year-old and almost one-year-old kids to Abu Dhabi to visit our friends. From Calgary, it's about a 15-hour journey via Vancouver, and that's just plain time, not taking into account any layovers or delays, and so on and so forth. And we've been traveling with our kids almost at the same pace as we did before we had them. My wife even wrote a whole blog about traveling with little children. So even as veterans in travel with little kids, this was really pushing the limits, even of our comfort zone. Nonetheless, we had a phenomenal trip and we did have a small hiccup or a large hiccup on the way back. Courtesy of Air Canada, of course, enough said. So when we arrived back to Calgary almost 48 hours later than originally planned, at about 9 p.m. local time on a Sunday, I got a call from my brother. My grandmother had been battling cancer for some time, and things took a very rapid turn, and she only had a few days left. Sleep deprived, shocked, sad, confused, I started making arrangements on my taxi ride home, and I really wanted to make sure that I spent every possible moment with a woman who raised me like a son. After a few more adventures of getting from Calgary to Ontario, I finally arrived on Monday evening, and then I spent Tuesday with her, and she peacefully passed away on Wednesday. She was my anchor, my unconditional love, and my true believer my entire life. When she was gone I wasn't angry, I wasn't even really crying. I was just numb. And I had a trip planned the following week down to Costa Rica to finalize the negotiations on an investment. And part of me wanted to cancel that trip, but I knew that she would want me to continue going, to keep pushing on. And my wife actually felt the same way. She thought that taking this trip and spending a few days on my own, maybe getting a win, would maybe help me process what just happened to me and to my family. So I decided to still go on a trip, though it was a lot shorter than originally planned. I just went in and out over the weekend and didn't even miss any work time. I had a really great meeting with my now partners. It was a really genuine interaction right from the very start, and I felt comfortable enough to even share the story of what just happened to my family. And judging by their reaction and their genuine concern to what then was a stranger, I knew that there were the right people to be around, and these were the partners that I needed. So the meeting went really well. We finalized all the arrangements, and after it was over, I walked back to my villa and I sat there looking at the ocean, and that's when the grief finally found me. I was sitting on the couch all by myself, no one around, just looking out the window at the water, and I just thought to myself, I think she would be proud. And I totally broke down. I don't think I've ever cried that hard in my whole life. It was this flood of emotion, of grief, of gratitude, of pride and pain all mixed together in one. And I think in that moment I realized that much of what I've done up to that point, and much of what I'm going to do since that point, the sleepless nights, the hard choices, the sacrifices, it's not just for me. It's for her and it's for my family. So that's what legacy really means to me. It's not a company, it's not the money, it's the people who live on through your choices. You build with those around you and for those who have gone before you and also for those who will come after. So as I look at where I am today, what I'm building, the projects that I'm working on, a word that comes to mind certainly is gratitude. It's gratitude to my grandparents and my parents who kept going when they had every reason to give up. Gratitude for my wife who manages to keep the family going while I'm trying to build this crazy dream. Gratitude to my mentors, my friends, my colleagues, all the people who believed in me. And also gratitude to every listener who tuned into this podcast because you are now also part of this story. There's an old proverb that says if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much AI you're using to automate your business, the real currency of success is people. The ones who inspire you, the ones who challenge you, the ones who remind you who you are when you sometimes forget. So as you're listening to this, wherever you are in your hustle, I would like you to take a pause and think about your people, the ones who got you here. Call them, text them, thank them somehow. And more importantly, if you are in a position to help somebody, be that person. Pay it forward. So I keep saying, let's build this community together. But what does that even mean? To me, that means let's build a community of dreamers, those who dream big enough to dare. A community that honors the people who came before us and helped us get here, and a community who will help the people who come after us and always pay it forward. Because none of us can do it alone. Next week, we move from the why, the how, the who now on to the what. What is it that we're actually building here and how are we going to turn this vision into reality? Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.