Stop Treating Money as Your Worth If You Want to Stay Sane Building a Startup

Owen left a promising career at a London bank to build a startup with the person he trusts most — his girlfriend, who's also his co-founder.

Owen is co-founder of a startup building scheduling software for hospital physician teams — a problem that's technically NP-hard, but the more interesting part is how he and his co-founder (a physician) decided to sell directly to doctors, skipping the "pilot project" phase that's standard in healthcare sales — and closed their first contract in just one month. Owen studied material science at Oxford before working as a software engineer, and now leans on Zen Buddhism as his framework for thinking about money, pressure, and what actually gives work meaning.