Last month, we travelled to the heel of Italy’s boot – the beautiful Salento coastline – to host our fifth founder retreat, disConnect 2024. Getting the chance to spend quality time with founders and connecting them to each other makes this our favourite event of the year. And for this edition, we focused on a much-discussed but often misunderstood topic – resilience.

We all talk a lot about the need for resilience when it comes to company building – but too often it’s associated with digging in, grinding it out, and ultimately burning out.

That’s why we partnered with Jenny Campbell, author, founder and lead researcher from The Resilience Dynamic, on the retreat. As Jenny would say, resilience is actually about our ability to deal with change, and to maintain our resilience reserves so we can cope with what life – and business – throws at us. This is the key to achieving healthy high performance.

We all loved sharing our perspectives on our own, our teams’ and our organisations’ levels of resilience, and hearing about others. And more importantly seeing founders connect, relate and spend time together.

Here’s what some of them told us afterwards:

Matt Vagni, co-founder and CTO at Plain said

“It was fantastic - just to step out of the every-day for a few days, meet other founders. A great way to recharge the battery 🔋❤️”.

Nino Höglund, CPO and co-founder at Steep told us

“I really enjoyed meeting fellow founders who are facing similar challenges”.

disConnect ‘24 is a wrap – but we can’t wait til next year for the chance to reflect, connect, check in with ourselves and check out of the day to day.