Clean Leap Presents
The Academy Speaker Series
Are you ready for a change?
Every founder in this series left something behind to build something real: a corporate title, a pension, a paycheck that showed up on time. The Academy Speaker Series is a live conversation with the people who made that trade, and it skips the polished conference version of their story for the specific one: the tradeoff that actually cost them, the stretch that didn't work, and the point where the math finally did.
Each session runs 60 minutes, live, with the last 15 open for audience questions. No slides full of platitudes about "following your passion." Just a founder or nonprofit leader walking through exactly how they built what they have now, including the parts that almost didn't happen.
This series is built for a specific reader: the professional weighing an exit they haven't told their manager about, the career-changer past the "am I too old for this" question, and the Clean Leap mentors and volunteers deciding whether to bring their own expertise into a business of their own. Every session is recorded, so a missed date doesn't mean a missed conversation.
Session 1: Redefining "Rich" Through Entrepreneurship
Three people. Three exits from a stable career. Three different definitions of what "making it" turned out to mean once they were the ones deciding.
This first panel brings together a CFO who left a secure executive track to build her own practice, a former firefighter who turned two decades of public service into an education platform that helps people find their purpose, and a nonprofit founder who traded a guaranteed paycheck for a mission with no guaranteed funding. None of them left chasing more money. All three would tell you the leap paid off anyway, just not in the currency they expected going in.
Expect specifics, not a highlight reel: what year one actually looked like, the decision each of them almost walked back, and the exact tradeoff they made to get what they have now. If you're circling your own version of this decision, this is the conversation to sit in on before you make it.
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