Hi, I’m Thomas Knoll

6x founder · 4x startup employee · 2x exits · 100x products shipped · 1000x failures & lessons learned · 1200+ mentor sessions · 300+ long-term coaching clients · 1 ikigai — I help leaders turn small moments into big outcomes.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve held mentor sessions with over 1,200 founders and leaders through Techstars, 500Global, SXSW, Revelry, Hatchet Ventures, Gener8or, BETA.MN, and other entrepreneur organizations. And I got to work with more than 300 of them for 3+ months.

What I’ve learned is: (1) we are all carrying a lot of the same kinds of resistance, fear, friction, and weight, but (2) it can be understood and unburdened when we get curious.

My Ikigai [1] is guiding people through Self Healing Leadership – a practice designed to help leaders recognize the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that create resistance in their decisions, conversations, and actions; heal and reintegrate whatever holds them back or they are holding back; and lead from their truest Self.

Accomplishing that mission has taken on a few forms:

  • 🚀 I am launching GetElevenApp to make everyone’s 1:1s massively more valuable and to help leaders grow their impact.
  • 🏕️ I host a Community of Leaders who look inside themselves to change the way they lead others

If you’re curious about any of these projects, subscribe here to follow along.

  1. Ikigai, for me, is a single word that sums up all the best parts of things like: calling, purpose, mission, life’s work, “shit I’m great at and love doing,” or Dr. Gay Hendricks concept of the Zone of Genius. Or we can just use Wikipedia’s official definition: Ikigai (生き甲斐, lit. ’a reason for being’) is a Japanese concept referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living. ↩︎