Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future · 2026-06-15 · 34 min
Had an AHA or Insight? Share it: Alice Kao on daily authorship, childhood trauma, and six climbing gyms. When Alice Kao was three years old, her mother walked out the door carrying two large suitcases and did not turn around. When she was fourteen, her mother dropped her off alone in America near a school with some cash and left. Alice spent the next thirty years running a story about what that meant , that she was not smart enough, not pretty enough, not worth staying for. That story became the engine. It drove her through surviving alone as a teenager in a country where she did not belong, through a devastating heartbreak in Hong Kong, through building Sender One Climbing into six locations across Southern California and raising six million dollars from 115 community investors. Then she found out the way she interpreted her story was dead wrong. The facts were not what she had believed for thirty years. The wound was real. The story was not. And the voice that generated it is still there every single morning. It still wants to tell that story.
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