Infiheal Speaks at LSE's Founder-Funder Dialogues, Resilient Founders Programme
Infiheal's Founder and CEO, Srishti Srivastava, was invited to take part in Founder-Funder Dialogues, hosted by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and LSE Generate, as part of the Resilient Founders programme supported by the British Council, held at ATLAS SkillTech University. It was one of those sessions that resonates well beyond the room it happens in, the kind you walk out of having learned something you didn't expect to.
An Unconventional Format, By Design
What set this session apart was its format. Rather than founders presenting polished, rehearsed versions of their journeys, the conversation was built around founders being genuinely honest about their mental health, including the parts of the entrepreneurial experience that rarely make it into pitch decks or panel soundbites. That shift in format made all the difference. It changed what people were willing to say, and how deeply the conversation was able to go once the usual performance fell away.
For Srishti, that honesty created space for a different kind of dialogue, one where founders could speak plainly about uncertainty, doubt, and the emotional weight of building something from nothing, without needing to soften it for an audience.
Building a Company Is Shaped by the Person Building It
A theme that came through strongly across the room was just how much the experience of building a company is shaped by the individual doing the building, not just their strategy or execution, but who they are while making impossibly uncertain decisions. Every founder in that room had made calls under conditions that no framework, mentor, or business school case study fully prepares you for. And every one of them had grown through those decisions in ways that are genuinely difficult to put into words, yet immediately recognisable when you're sitting across from someone who has actually lived through it.
That kind of recognition, the sense of being understood by people who have been in similarly uncertain terrain, was a large part of what made the Resilient Founders setting valuable. It wasn't about advice. It was about being seen.
The Startup Ecosystem Still Has Work to Do
The conversation also included an honest acknowledgement of where the startup ecosystem continues to fall short: in making genuine space for the mental and emotional dimensions of entrepreneurship. Too often, this gets treated as a peripheral concern, something to address once the metrics are healthy and the fundraising is sorted. But for founders to sustain themselves and their organisations over the long term, that cannot remain an afterthought. It has to be treated as central to the work itself, not separate from it.
Srishti has emphasised, both in this session and consistently in her broader work, that conversations like this one are worth having far more often, and in far more rooms than just the ones specifically designed for them. Mental health and entrepreneurship are not adjacent topics that occasionally intersect. For anyone building something real, they are deeply, inseparably connected.
An Open Invitation to Keep the Dialogue Going
Sessions like Founder-Funder Dialogues matter precisely because they normalise a kind of honesty that founders rarely get permission to express elsewhere. Infiheal remains genuinely keen to keep this conversation going, and welcomes hearing from others navigating similar terrain, their thoughts, their experiences, and the parts of the founder journey that don't usually make it into the highlight reel.
