Choose your path
Why I started
The Honest Founder.
I founded my first company e-bot7 with a mission to transform customer service through AI. What started in a small room grew into a company with more than 130 employees, hundreds of customers, and ultimately a $60M exit.
From the outside, it looked like I had everything I had worked for: a fast-growing company, investors, awards, and a successful exit. But behind the scenes, I was burned out. Around the same time, I lost my mother. It was one of the hardest periods of my life and forced me to question what success actually meant.
The Honest Founder started as a way to share the lessons I wish someone had told me earlier.
Today it has grown into a newsletter and vetted founder community where ambitious founders can learn from each other, build meaningful relationships, and talk honestly about the challenges of building a company.
Featured in
Founders.
Here's what they say.
Kiyan Foroughi
Founder & CEO Needle (3x Founder)
Xaver gets it. Real operator who's built and scaled AI companies, dealt with the dark side (burnout), and came out with actual wisdom instead of just war stories. Our convo felt like talking to a founder who's been in the trenches. He gave me a helpful framework for thinking about automation timing with AI.
If you're scaling a company (especially B2B/AI) and want honest feedback from someone who won't blow smoke, book this.
Michael Beches
Co-Founder Tokapi
Working with Xaver was honestly one of the best decisions we made this year. I came in expecting some high-level advice, but he immediately got hands-on and helped us cut through the chaos.
He understood our situation in minutes and pointed out blind spots we didn’t even realise we had. The clarity we walked away with was huge suddenly the next steps felt obvious instead of overwhelming.
Valentin Belser
CEO & Co-Founder Delicious Data
Before working with Xaver, our onboarding was outdated and honestly… we knew it, but we kept pushing it aside. It was clearly hurting retention, yet we didn’t have a clear strategy for how to fix it. Xaver came in with a completely fresh perspective. He challenged our assumptions, walked us through what actually matters in those first user moments, and helped us rebuild the entire flow from the ground up. Working with him was like having a founder who has ‘been there’ sit next to us and show us what really moves the needle.
Catalina Turlea
Co-Founder & ex-CTO @nilo
I reached out to Xaver as I was searching for advice from experienced founders. He openly shared his experience and gave me really actionable advice. I am grateful for the change to have these conversations with Xaver, they were extremely helpful, insightful and helped me navigate a quite tough situation with confidence. Would totally recommend! Thank you, Xaver
Sebastian Flick
CEO & Co-Founder Branchly
We were completely stuck on what to build next. Every idea felt half-baked, and our internal brainstorming sessions went nowhere. So we booked a session with Xaver and honestly, it changed everything.
He didn’t give us generic advice. He asked a few tough questions.
Adam Probst
CEO & Founder ZenML
We closed our $3.7M round in just 8 weeks after Xaver helped us reshape the narrative- It changed everything for us so thanks a lot again!!
Jonas Schoebel
Co-Founder Dais Group
We were struggling to get revenue off the ground. After working with Xaver, our growth rate jumped from 68% to 122%. His input made a huge difference. Jonas Schoebel.
Christina Amara
Founder āera (Ex Amazon)
Xaver’s advice is genuinely powerful. He is sharp, incredibly smart, gives no BS feedback, shares very open and unfiltered thoughts, strong recommendations. In one session he surfaced blind spots I didn’t even know I had and reframed how I think about product, focus, and scaling as a founder. His guidance is direct, practical and grounded in real experience, not theory. He also shared several high-leverage insights about building, momentum and product development. If you want honest, fast clarity from someone who’s actually built at scale, I’d absolutely recommend him.
Nick van Heyningen
Senior Legal Counsel
Thanks for the guidance Xaver, talked about MVP, ideation and AI. Xaver has tons of experience in the field and as a founder knows the ropes well. Also a super nice guy, highly recommend :)
