#79, Shegun Otulana, Founder and CEO of Harmony Venture Labs—From Nigeria to unicorn founder; bootstrapping a profitable business; learning to embrace feedback
From Start-Up to Grown-Up
Intro
This chapter explores the speaker's transition from Nigeria to the U.S. as an immigrant entrepreneur, highlighting the challenges and cultural advantages of their journey. It emphasizes the significance of vulnerability and cultural identity in fostering a successful entrepreneurial mindset.
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Speaker 1
I mean, that's
Speaker 2
where I would hide if I was trying to hide from a civilization. It's the ocean. It's clear. They can't get in there. They can't breathe under there. It's a perfect place to hide. You
Speaker 1
know what I've been saying for a while, the last few weeks at least? I think maybe what the aliens are is custodians. I think maybe they're just here. They're like some sort of an autonomous creation that's designed to accelerate our evolution, stop us from blowing ourselves up, and make sure that we build the quantum computer with AI. Right. This is like it's all a part of this like endless cycle of integration in the great universe. This, and like, we're at this like, I don't want to get out of my cocoon. We're in that stage. We're in this like bizarre, strange, you know, Australopithecus wandering around in the grass fields. We're in this weird stage where we're we're gonna launch into some completely new way of interfacing with the universe itself yeah and it's gonna happen whether you like it or not yeah and this is just what's happening right now and that's why everything's so chaotic okay like mckenna used to talk about this dude i used to talk about how the end of civilization it's not gonna be it's not gonna be a whimper it going to be people screaming in agony and flailing and trying to hold on to the past. Hold on to the way. I'm doing Norman Rockwell paintings. I'm going to bake my own fucking bread. You're trying to do a waltz and a rave. How many fucking genders? What are you saying? Why are these fucking drones?
Speaker 2
They're drones, goddammit. It's the meltdown. you know, what you're saying, so if you look at like Crick, I think it was Crick, wrote the, he wrote a paper theorizing about directed panspermia, which is where you put it. So, okay, directed panspermia, I get some kind of nanobot, which is, I guess you could say that's what DNA is, nanobot precursor. Essentially, like, well, I think it's weird. And maybe I don't understand what he's doing completely. It's weird to me that Musk wants to send humans to Mars because it seems like it would make way more sense pre sending humans to send drones, robots to construct whatever it is you need to survive on Mars, to go in the caves, build the fucking... Well, that's the
Speaker 1
plan, Duncan.
Speaker 2
Oh, really? So it's not people first? Yeah, the first
Speaker 1
voyage to Mars is going to be unmanned. Okay, great. Yeah. That makes sense. I think they have to do that. They have to have a certain amount of supplies, because I think they can only come back in two years.
Speaker 2
But I don't even mean supplies. I mean, if we jump for 20 years. How about missing
Speaker 1
that bus? The Mars bus? The two-year bus? Oh, Duncan, you were late. You slept in. That's hilarious. Yeah, you missed the
Speaker 2
bus. You watched the rocket go up.
Speaker 1
No. No. Nobody woke me? You cocksuckers. Imagine if you're like, Duncan is such a fucking douchebag. Let's leave him here. Let's leave him on Mars. There's plenty of potatoes. He can live. That is so him here. Fuck him. Make him fertilize his potatoes with his own shit.
Speaker 2
Damon. Yeah, like Matt Damon did in that Marsha movie. Dude, so...
Speaker 1
You...
Speaker 2
So obviously, like, the way you're gonna wanna colonize habitable worlds is you create not just this nanobot, but you make it so the nanobot can only survive in environments that you would live in. Meaning, and then encoded in the nanobot is the end destination, what you're talking about. The quantum computers, some kind of AI that then will naturally uncover faster than light travel, wormholes, whatever the fuck it is. And then when the wormholes open up you can instantaneously travel to a bitable Planets right so can I tell you Terence
Speaker 1
Howard's idea? Yeah, it's a great idea. Yeah He thinks that we have it all wrong when it comes to the formation of planets and the creation of life He thinks what happens is the Sun is constantly ejecting things right? You see these coronal mass ejections crazy Millions of times like longer than you know the distance between whatever and whatever. I'm not an arm just scary be crazy bigger than earth right? That he thinks these particles coalesce in space outside of the gravity of the sun. And they orbit the sun. And very close at first. But then as time goes on, they move further and further away. And they get to a place where they're in this position like Earth is. And then they people. They flower. Just like when you plant a seed, when the water comes. So cool. He goes, and then it has to be sophisticated enough to adapt because the planet is eventually going to move out of the habitable zone. Wow. And he thinks that Mars at one point in time probably had civilization in life. And then as Mars got further and further and further out from the protection of the sun, it eventually got too cold and it eventually got hit by something. It lost its atmosphere. And now it's just desert. That's so cool. Well, now they know there's water on Mars. Yeah. They know. It used to be just the craziest of conspiracy theories. Oh, there's no water on Mars. There's no evidence of water. How could a society live there? But, you know, this is the nuttiest of nutty. But some remote viewer went to Mars a million years ago and said there were pyramids there. Sure. And there was a civilization there. Yeah. And, you know, there's tribes. No, actually, they think they came from the planet Sirius, right? Like the Dogon tribe. Yeah. They believe that all people came from another planet. Yeah. If you were in Mars and you're a thousand years advanced from us and they never figure out AI, so they could just go in a different direction. They're like super, super advanced, though, where they could travel through the space between the planets. And you get to a point where you're like, hey, guys, we got about a decade. Yeah. We got about one decade where life can exist on this fucking planet. We got to get off of this now Earth is ready. There's some monkeys there. There's a bunch of shit. Yeah, it's like, you know, we could we could just go there Yeah, we just go there well and then we just mucked around with that like these guys are developing like really slowly Like why don't we do that and then homo
Speaker 2
sapiensiens. Yay, look, Homo sapiens. There you go. Man, listen, whatever it is, I'm sure— It's
Speaker 1
definitely not what I just described. No!
Speaker 2
Whatever
Speaker 1
it is, it's not that. I wasn't believing it as I was saying it. I was like, that's crazy. But, dude,
Speaker 2
you know, I think— But maybe. You look at just the concept of epigenetics and what we're doing right now. You look at the statistical probability of DNA evolving based on the age of the planet. You look at these things. And not just that, you look at the mythologies of the world. It all points towards some kind of advanced intelligence, bioengineering a planet for some reason or another. I mean, even like, have you ever read the parable of the sower? You know that Jesus said, can you, do you mind pulling that up, Jamie? I don't have it memorized yet. The parable of the sower. How do you spell sower? Sower, S-O Oh, like a sow? Like sowing things? No, like planting seeds. S-O, sower of seeds, right? Planner, the parable of the sower. S-E But when you think about this, generally this is the idea of like there's people who are going to like understand Jesus as God. But if you look at it as an extraterrestrial intelligence, planting seeds on planets versus it becomes this like crazy. The sower is the, yeah, the parable of the so though seeing they do not see though hearing they do not hear or understand and then um where is it uh oh yeah um gotten it was then he told a farmer went out to sow a seed as he was scattering the some fell along the path and the birds ate it up. Some fell on rocky places where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil where it produced a crop. A hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear. Whoa. Listen to this. The
Speaker 1
disciples came to him and asked, why do you speak to the people in parables? He replied, because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. This is why I speak to them in parables. I'd be like, bro, what the fuck did you say? Can you break that down? If I had that guy on the podcast, if I had God on the podcast, I'd be like, okay,
Speaker 2
do
Speaker 1
you have friends? Okay. When you talk to friends, like you should, when you say like complicated things you should make them make sense. So I know you're smart. You made the whole universe. Yeah, I'm not being disrespectful, sir. But yeah, what did you say? Well,
Speaker 2
let me answer it in a parable. You see, imagine a flower growing from stone. Sometimes the stone is angry at the flower, but sometimes the stone glows with light. This is why. Is it because we
Speaker 1
teach kids that way, kind of? We kind of teach kids almost in parables. We teach kids like a simplistic form of
Speaker 2
everything. Well, I think it's an acknowledgement of a kind of spectrum of intelligence, right? It's like, right. The idea is like, let me give you a little data fractal here. That's
Speaker 1
why it's so rude when someone talks down to you. Oh, the worst. When someone's like, I don't know if you know, but let me explain to you. Oh, please. What's wrong with
Speaker 2
the way you're thinking? I can't wait to hear.
Speaker 1
It's the grossest way to talk to people ever. It
Speaker 2
is. It's an absolutely a sign of low intelligence if you're so idiotic that you think.
Speaker 1
And you're being mean. Yeah. But how do you feel it? But you're deciding to be mean about a point of discussion. That's right. That's what it is. You're deciding to be mean. Instead of saying, I have a lot of knowledge about this, if could if i could tell you what i know like this is why i believe what you're saying is not true yeah because i actually have a phd in this and this is how we know this and this is how we know that right and then you go oh that's essentially what eric weinstein did to terrence howard right so when terrence howard was on the podcast there was a lot of things that you're saying that were true and really fascinating and interesting. He's a very brilliant guy. Eric Weinstein is a legitimate Ph.D. in mathematics. Right. He's super fucking crazy, scary smart. And he said to him, he said, look, I'm not giving you peer review. He goes, I'm not a peer. You're not my peer. He goes, I'm an expert. I'm giving you an expert review. I'm saying you have a lot of really interesting ideas. Just stop teaching people. It's offensive to the people that actually do this for a living. That's all it is. It doesn't, you are like us. And this is what he said of him. He said, he's one of us. He just went down a different path. That's right. He's a brilliant guy who has a strong desire to understand the universe. Yeah. Strong desire to understand things. But you have to go down the path of peers You have to go down the path of you've got to be with all these other legitimate people to bounce these ideas about. And the only way you're really going to get if you have to find some online community of legitimate people that accept you. You have to be invited into something or you have to fucking attend a university like all the other ones did. That's that's how you find out, especially when it comes to shit like mathematics. you know when you're talking about like things like physics yeah boy you need do you need that's these are cold hard fact-based disciplines like you need to be around the people that are the cream of the crop of that that's it yeah that's right man and
Speaker 2
and that um i watched some of that, and I loved it because, well, that's what compassion looks like.
Speaker 1
You got to see also that Terrence is a good guy. Yeah, exactly. He didn't get upset. He didn't get angry. Yeah, it wasn't designed to humiliate. It wasn't at all. And it was also an acknowledgment that a lot of his ideas are really fucking good. That peopling idea is really fucking good. The other thing that he has that he invented? You've seen that linchpin thing that he invented? I saw something like that. It's like modular drone technology. Yeah. That can be used for construction and fucking moving giant girders and shit. Creates a vortex or something. Well, they all link together. It's like a geometric pattern. The nerdiest of nerdy things was Weinstein calling him out on the degree of the angle of one of the fucking calculations that he made. I don't even remember exactly what it was. He goes, you had to cheat that, right? Right. And he's like, yeah, I did. I did that to make it work. And he's like, ah. And they were like fucking with each other because he understood why there would be something problematic about linking all these specific geometric patterns. And then he had to make some slight adjustment to make them link up perfectly. I love that.
Speaker 2
Super nerd talk. Inside baseball, comedians do it too. When we're breaking down a joke to a minute pause or something, it's the same thing. But yeah, man, this is what I love when you read about the history of science. You read about like famous physicists getting in real like intense fights with each other. And you see that the process of discovering the truth does involve a kind of mutual curiosity, but not being afraid to say this is fucking wrong, but allowing the other person to fire back because you both know that via this conflict, potentially you discover something new. And that was the attitude. I mean, like this whole thing where suddenly normal people aren't supposed to engage in science is really fucked up when you look at like the history of science which used to be maniacs like newton who they analyzed his hair mercury in his fucking hair bro everything
Speaker 1
had poisoned it back then well
Speaker 2
no but he was experimenting with mercury he was interested he's like building scale at the temple of solomon you know like you you look at that and you see that now newton today you know somebody like don limbo would be like oh really so you're gonna believe isaac fucking newton with mercury in his hair and his little dollhouse like the temple of solomon oh yeah he's he's a real scientist that's not what they look like it's like these people were out of their fucking minds Sigmund Freud just injecting fucking liquid cocaine into his veins you look at like the history about his mom freaking out about his mom fucking shoving cigars up his ass I don't think he really did that but I wouldn't be surprised I wouldn't be surprised but you know you look at the history of what brilliant people who have shifted the culture actually behave like Tesla Fucking Tesla did like I don't know like he's in love with his pigeon in love with a pigeon didn't want to like the thought about Castrating himself because his sex drive was getting in the way of his research. So he's like I'll just chop my dick
Speaker 1
off. I think he did, dude. I think there was a description of him destroying his sexuality. Yeah, dude. So you sort
Speaker 2
of like realize that for whatever reason, the priest class of default reality of which Don Lemon is a high priest have suddenly created this ridiculous version of scientists, of philosophers, of intellectuals that are domesticated people normal fucking people is actually really awful in the sense that all of the like philosophers and scientists out there today who are like you know in their filthy fucking apartments who've been staring into a candle for like five hours they're not thinking like i'm a scientist they might be you don't know like this this this new basically like it appears that the power structures in the world want to create this homogenous version of humanity within which there's all these declawed people who completely align on a few
Speaker 1
ridiculous facts absolutely and you can make those people very clawed if you bond them together to attack anybody who doesn't stay in line that's right yeah that's
Speaker 2
right and that is what again like a coup or you get rid of the president.
Shegun Otulana is a seasoned entrepreneur, advisor, mentor and investor. Drawing from his experience as a bootstrapped startup founder who found incredible success, his mission is to empower the next generation of builders by sharing his lessons learned to guide their entrepreneurial journeys. In addition to mentoring founders in his community – many of whom have gone on to launch successful companies – he also enjoys sharing his insight with startup leaders, business associations, academic institutions and other growth-minded groups.
In 2013, Shegun founded TheraNest and its parent company, Therapy Brands, a software platform for mental, behavioral, substance and physical rehab providers and organizations. In 2021, he exited the business for $1.25 billion, the largest software exit on record in the state of Alabama.
Prior to establishing Therapy Brands, Shegun founded Zertis Technologies, a computer software consultancy company. Today, he continues his “idea lab” approach as the Founder of Harmony Venture Labs (HVL), an idea and growth studio that owns and operates a family of technology companies.
In this powerful episode of From Start-Up to Grown-Up, I sit down with Shegun Otulana, who bootstrapped his way from Nigeria to building a $1.25B healthcare tech company in Birmingham, Alabama.
What struck me most about Shegun's journey?
➡️ The power of constraints as blessings - limited funding forced profitable growth from day one
➡️ Culture needs rituals - it's not enough to have values, you must memorialize and celebrate them
➡️ Leadership growth requires vulnerability - others see you differently than you see yourself
One of my favorite insights: "Your nature is your nature, but you need to find people who complement what you don't bring to the table."
Shegun openly shared how he learned to build strong remote teams by finding cultural champions when that wasn't his natural strength.
When Shegun could only raise $250,000 in 10 months for his healthcare SaaS company, he turned that constraint into motivation.
Without the luxury of burning cash, he had to build profitably from day one.
Rather than seeing limited capital as a barrier, he viewed it as a blessing that forced disciplined growth - a mindset that ultimately led to a billion-dollar exit.
It's about intentionally designing incentive structures that make your team feel safe to experiment and learn.
Learn more about Shegun | Website
https://shegunotulana.com/
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