Hi there, I’m Avi.
I built and sold two companies. The most recent, CreditVidya, scaled to 740 people over a decade before CRED acquired it. Twenty years of climbing, and I didn’t pause once.
The body had been keeping score the entire time. I just hadn’t been reading the ledger. A slipped disc came first. Then a stroke. Some founders break in the boardroom. I broke in the body, and the company kept running long after I couldn’t.
What followed wasn’t a side project or a retreat. It was the actual work: Vipassana, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras read and re-read, studying what Phil Jackson did with the Bulls and what George Mumford did with Kobe and Jordan, Federer’s pre-serve breath, Annika Sörenstam’s line in the grass. The principles behind championship composure, translated for a founder’s day.
I started writing this because the founders I know are fluent in growth loops, OKRs, and 360 feedback, but nobody teaches the inner game. The part where you learn to sit with pressure, failure, and your own ego without letting them run the show.
I wasn’t looking for an audience. I was looking for a place to think out loud about what actually holds a person together while they’re building something. Turned out other founders were looking for the same thing.
The Deliberate Pause is Monday essays on founder psychology: pressure, identity, failure, and the practices that keep you whole while you’re carrying something heavy. Each one pairs something real I’ve lived through with the research or discipline behind it, not another framework promising certainty, but a brutally honest insight into what’s actually happening underneath the hustle.
If you’re building something and it’s costing you more than it should, or you’ve already built and sold, and you’re still figuring out what that cost you, join me on my journey.
Every Monday, one essay.
