Founder Money Lab

What if your money models are quietly shaping your startup?

How Your Relationship with Money Influences Your Startup's Key Decisions, and not just those..

Being or becoming a founder means making economic decisions under pressure, uncertainty and ambition. How much capital to raise? At what price? With which investors? How much salary to pay? How to divide equity and responsibility? How much to risk? How much to grow? What price should you give to your product? When to say yes, when to say no? These decisions seem rational, but they rarely are at all. 

Money activates deep personal patterns: fear of scarcity, need for control, desire for recognition, anxiety about failure, difficulty in asking, relationship with value, ambition, status, security, freedom. In a startup, these patterns do not remain private. They get into the way you as a founder lead, negotiate, hire people, raise capital, build culture, and make decisions under pressure.

Founder Money Lab is a 3-session experiential path designed for existing and aspiring startup founders who want to explore their relationship with money as a lever of entrepreneurial lucidity. It is a practical and profound space to observe how your money experience influences the way you decide, lead, and build an organization.

Who is it for?

For aspiring, new, and experienced founders and co-founders who:

• are building or preparing to build a startup, organization or NGO;
• are approaching or navigating fundraising;
• want to make more intentional financial decisions; 
• feel tension around capital, pricing, growth, valuation or risk;
• want to build a healthier culture around money from the beginning;
• are curious about the relationship between personal patterns and organizational behavior. 

What can you expect?

At the end of the course you will have more clarity on:

• what personal patterns emerge when it comes to money; 
• how these patterns influence your decisions as a founder;  
• how to distinguish decisions driven by strategy from decisions driven by automatisms; 
• how to begin transforming the beliefs and habitual patterns that are not serving you at the moment;
• how does our larger socio-economic system influence our money-related decisions in organizations.

Why now?

Financial decisions do more than shape the business model. They shape culture, relationships, pace, trust, power, and the emotional climate of the organization. The way founders experience money often becomes the way organizations experience pressure, growth, compensation, scarcity, value and success. Bringing awareness to this early, or even late, can prevent or adjust patterns that later become costly, both economically and humanly.

When do we meet?

Session 1: June 19 | 12 PM - 14:30 PM CET | Where am I
Session 2: June 22 | 12 PM - 15:00 PM CET | The Money Game
Session 3: June 24 | 12 PM - 14:30 PM CET | Prototyping the future

Note: If you are unable to pay for the “supported” ticket, please reach out on support@commonground.now. We will find a creative solution together.

Kindly note that if you sign up for this program as an individual, you are subject to paying UK VAT. However, if you are an organization outside of the UK and if you need a direct invoice without UK VAT, kindly send us as email on support@commonground.now. 

More About the Sessions

Session 1: Where am I?

In this first session, we will map how money currently operates in the startup ecosystem — through incentives, success narratives, power dynamics, funding expectations and hidden assumptions. You will explore your own money story and begin to see how it may influence your decisions as a founder: how you relate to growth, risk, control, pricing, fundraising, equity, trust and transparency.

The aim is to gain clarity on where you stand today, both personally and as part of the wider system your company is emerging from.

Session 2: The Money Game

Through the Money Game you will experience how money activates emotions, beliefs, strategies and relational patterns. This session will help you see which money beliefs and automatic responses may be shaping your business decisions, not only around financial success, but also around trust, power, delegation, transparency, control and value creation. The purpose is not to judge these patterns, but to make them visible so that new choices become possible.

The Money Game is a gamified experiential process originally designed by the Findhorn community in Scotland and later adapted into a virtual format by Greaterthan. Conducted in groups of 6–12 participants over multiple rounds, the experience combines gameplay with silence, journaling, and reflective dialogue. Participants are invited to turn inward, observe their responses, and make meaning of their experiences in real time. Along the way, difficult emotions and hidden dynamics may surface, not as obstacles, but as fertile ground for personal insight, relational healing, and collective growth.

Kindly note that to be able to participate in the Money game, you are required to "bring" a meaningful amount of money that you are comfortable letting go of, but that is enough to "trigger" your learning within. To learn more about the money game, read here: http://greaterthan.works/moneygame

Session 3: Prototyping the Future

In the final session, you will transform one limiting money belief into a more conscious founder strategy. Through a peer-supported micro-agreement, you will design a small 21-day experiment: a concrete action that helps you practice a new way of relating to money, value, risk or power.

The aim is to turn insight into action, and to create a first visible shift that can support the vitality, clarity and resilience of your business.

Meet your hosts

Ashish Arora

Ashish works at the intersection of inner transformation and regenerative culture-building. His current focus is on supporting founders to explore their inner worlds, especially their relationship with money, and to align their personal growth with the cultures they are cultivating in their organizations. He leads The Money Pilgrimage experience for the Indian Startup Ecosystem.

Rooted in the larger vision of transforming socio-economic systems to serve all life, Ashish brings a systems lens to his work as a facilitator and organizational consultant. His work is grounded in the belief that inner transformation and outer impact are deeply interconnected. As a founder of Sahaj Foundation, he leads dialogues to understand the gaps of our present socio-economic systems, and retreats to guide people to follow their hearts' calling. As a cofounder of The Vriksh Initiative he supports the journey of early-stage grassroots leaders across India.

Manuela Pagani Larghi

Manuela is an economist and counsellor. She spent fifteen years of his working life in financial institutions, working as a financial consultant and client relationship manager.

Since the birth of her daughter in 2013, she has reconnected with her deep purpose and since then she’s at the service of individual and systemic change. She is passionate, practitioner and researcher of Theory U. She has been working for years on the theme of our deep relationship with money, which she believes is one of the key gateways to inner work and world transformation.

She is a micro-entrepreneur (she founded the first private social enterprise in Ticino in 2023, named www.duduum.ch), co-founder of Impact Hub Ticino, co-author of action-research articles and co-translator of Scharmer and Kaufer’s book “Presencing”.