I hear it a lot in the community: one big failure, the kind the whole market can see, ends a career. Muli Mandel is the counter-proof. He was part of a pharma company that went public on the Canadian exchange and fell in a clinical trial, and then went on to found a group of companies that survived a market collapsing around it. Recovering from business failure, in his case, is not one chapter of the story. It is the method.

From the Lab to the Question "Where Am I Living Most Precisely"

Muli, 50, lives in Atlit, is married to Gili and is the father of Romi, 16. Today he is an entrepreneur, a director in the companies he founded, and above all a mentor to executives, founders and teams at complex moments and at crossroads of decision, change and crisis. He started the road there far from any boardroom, with a PhD in neuroscience with distinction.

He started a postdoc, and that is where the feeling came that he was in the wrong place. "I'm a people person, an entrepreneurship person, and I had a need for the energy of doing and building," he says. "I understood I would be good as a researcher, but my passion was somewhere else."

Leaving wasn't simple. He was in his early thirties, having built himself for an academic track. What opened the door were two people, Dror Israeli and Erez Keli, who would later be the owner and CEO of the first company that gave him a chance in the business world. In hindsight he puts the decision in one sentence: "The question wasn't 'where do I succeed more' but 'where do I live most precisely.' Many of the executives I meet today are exactly there, succeeding on the outside and feeling out of place on the inside."

One Trial, and the Lesson That Stayed

Alon Therapeutics was a pharma company founded by Prof. Ilana Gozes, Muli's PhD supervisor. The drug developed there was based in part on his research, and was meant to stop brain cells from dying in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The initial capital came from the Estée Lauder research fund, a Canadian group invested next, and very quickly the company went public on the Canadian exchange to raise the sums needed for clinical trials.

Then the clinical trials failed. Muli doesn't dress it up, but he doesn't dramatize it either: "The failure in the clinical trials wasn't easy, but I didn't take it too hard. I'm a great believer in the path, and even then I knew to be grateful for the gifts I received in that chapter." Being part of a company like that as a PhD student, so early in his career, taught him a great deal. Above all it sharpened one thing: industry, not academia.

That is the lesson I take from this chapter for anyone facing a very public fall today. Muli got it relatively early in his career, and that is what let him prepare for the next chapters without carrying the fall as an identity. In the rapid-fire round he put it in one line. What do you learn more from, failure or success? "From failure, when you learn there is no such thing as failure. And from success, when you beat your pride."

Recovering From Business Failure in an Industry That Collapsed Around You

Muli co-founded Cannasoul with Prof. Dedi Meiri, with a vision of bringing breakthrough research to lead the cannabis industry, which was then growing fast in Israel and worldwide. They built the company at the peak of the cannabis hype, and fairly quickly the market turned extremely volatile, inside a regulatory field with no certainty.

The list of what they went through since reads like a summary of the decade: the hype wave breaking, the Covid pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war that affected the IPO of one of the subsidiaries, and then October 7. Many companies in the field didn't survive that roller coaster, and billions of shekels of investment were lost. Cannasoul survived, is active today, and is considered a leading scientific body in its field in Israel and abroad.

How? Muli names three things. The first is differentiation: while most companies went for growing and manufacturing, Cannasoul made scientific excellence its flag, science that would bring order to a world where a drug is accessible to patients without the scientific basis it needs. The second is the team, "a team of champions who held on together to a shared belief and vision even when it was very hard and uncertain." The third is the investors, who in his words became real family, and in the stages of uncertainty and cash-flow strain that made all the difference.

"In hindsight, the important decisions weren't always strategic but human," he sums up. "Investing in relationships, in trust, and in the ability to reflect the situation even when it's hard. That is what holds an organization." This is the sentence I wrote down for myself after the conversation: management is first of all people and trust, and only then science and IP.

What He Would Do Differently: Arrogance and Corporate Structure

Muli doesn't deal in regrets, and believes everything happened the way it needed to. But when pressed, he gives two concrete answers. The first is personal: with the knowledge he has today, he would have been less arrogant at the start. The second is structural: he would have built the last group of companies differently, "in a way that would have let me raise much more easily in times of crisis."

That is a lesson few founders say out loud. "There are consequences to the corporate structure in which a group of companies is built, and it's important to invest thought in it and put the emphasis on a forward-looking view." Anyone building an umbrella of subsidiaries today should keep that sentence.

For anyone raising right now, his tip: "Prepare yourself to tell the story a thousand times with passion, as if it were the first time, and with every rejection be glad for the practice you got for the next one."

The Golden Cage at 42, and a New Formula for Success

At 42, Muli left a VP role at one of Israel's leading marketing companies in the medical field. Close to 70 people under him, hundreds of millions of shekels in his responsibility, and a very high salary. From the outside, the golden cage at its finest. "Around 40 was a moment of sobering up for me," he says. "I understood that external success without inner quiet is a bad deal."

That is the most precise definition of Life ROI I have heard: not just salary against hours, but how much of that salary remains after you deduct the inner price. That is where he went deeper into the spiritual world, "not as an escape but as a complement." The decade that followed taught him, in his words, "that real success is measured not only in numbers but also in the quality of relationships, in inner freedom, and in the ability to get up in the morning with passion."

Both-And: Kabbalah in the Boardroom

I opened the interview by calling him the dictionary definition of both-and: a scientist and a businessman, a windsurfer and a student of Kabbalah. The obvious question is whether the wisdom of Kabbalah helps when you have to fire an employee or run a tough negotiation with investors. His answer is sharp: "Unequivocally yes. The wisdom of Kabbalah doesn't help you 'be nice.' It helps you be precise."

It teaches, he says, to see which forces are at work inside us and what drives us to behave the way we do. And the bottom line for managers: "A manager isn't measured only by the decisions he makes, but by the space he creates around him, even when he has to fire someone."

On both-and itself he is careful. "There's a very individual element to it. For some people both-and suits their character and for some it doesn't." But when it works, it works for one reason: "Spirituality doesn't come to escape reality but to meet it more deeply and meaningfully. Spiritual depth doesn't lower the pressure, it redefines worldviews. It lets me be inside a hard fundraising round or a quarterly report without losing myself along the way." That is a portfolio career in the broad sense of the term: not just several sources of income, but several anchors holding one person.

In practice, he trains, as he puts it, "in the gym of Kabbalah" with a regular group that studies with him, and the sea is always there to remind him of the infinite and how everything changes and passes. The habits he recommends to every founder and manager are short: know how to stop and listen inward, especially in moments of overload and uncertainty. Sport is mandatory, for him swimming. A spiritual practice, for him the sea and Kabbalah. And most important, make sure you are always a positive influence on others. His must-read for managers: The Tao of Leadership by John Heider.

The Next Chapter: Brain Health, Not Just Longevity

Muli's next chapter takes him back to the place where he grew up professionally, brain health. His thesis is simple and unsettling: advanced medicine is extending the life of the body faster than our ability to keep the brain healthy, and that is expected to bring an epidemic of dementia and neurodegeneration among older people with a healthy body and a degenerated brain.

He is now exploring the launch of brain-health clinics for cognitive improvement and cognitive enhancement using new technologies. "My vision is to move from medicine that treats disease to medicine that cultivates capacity. Not just to extend life, but to keep a sharp mind, presence and a living consciousness for years." The venture is at its very beginning, and he promised to keep us posted.

What Muli Is Asking of the Community

Shortly after October 7, Muli joined, at the founders' request, the board of Planetherapy, an international nonprofit that provides free therapy and emotional support to those affected by October 7 and the war in the secondary circles, and to victims of violence, terror and antisemitism in Israel and around the world. The organization works through hundreds of volunteer therapists. "Being part of such a large group of people who want to give their time, their experience and their money fills me in a way that resembles nothing I experienced in the business world."

His ask of the Lost in Y community is a single, concrete one: if you know someone around you who needs help, support or mental-health care and cannot afford it, send them to the Planetherapy website. In a short process they can receive treatment, support or guidance from top therapists, at no cost. And anyone who is at a crossroads themselves, an executive or founder facing a hard decision, a crisis or burnout: Muli said he is available privately for any question, thought or wish to connect.