Samia Gore: The Entrepreneur on a Mission to Make Sure Founders Don’t Burn Out Before They Break Through

Through her Miami‑based nonprofit FoundnWell, Gore is providing free, culturally fluent mental health care and community support for entrepreneurs building under pressure.

In the world of entrepreneurship, hustle culture often takes center stage — but behind the glossy headlines and success stories lies a quieter truth: founders are burning out. For minority entrepreneurs, that pressure is compounded by systemic barriers, funding gaps, and the constant push to prove themselves in spaces that weren’t built with them in mind. Samia Gore, a Miami‑based wellness entrepreneur, knows this reality all too well. After years of leading her own thriving company, she faced the kind of anxiety, exhaustion, and isolation that statistics say affect more than 80% of entrepreneurs at some point in their journey.

That lived experience inspired Samia to create FoundnWell, a nonprofit company dedicated to providing free, culturally competent mental health support for minority founders. From group therapy and healing‑centered programming to in‑person meetups that foster authentic community, FoundnWell is on a mission to make mental wellness as essential as a business plan. For Samia, it’s not just about surviving entrepreneurship, it’s about building a future where founders can thrive without sacrificing their health in the process.

In this conversation, Samia shares the personal journey that shaped FoundnWell, the unique mental health challenges minority entrepreneurs face, and how she’s creating a "village" of support in Miami and beyond. From intimate mental health brunches to ambitious plans to bring the conversation to venture capitalists, she’s reshaping the narrative around what it really means to be a successful founder, and why being well is the foundation of it all.

You describe FoundnWell as a return to self. Can you unpack what that means for you personally and the individuals you hope to reach?

FoundnWell is a platform that provides free mental health services to minority founders and entrepreneurs. Being a minority founder and entrepreneur, I have struggled in the past with mental health. Just being an entrepreneur and the stress that comes with it, the anxiety that comes with it. Sometimes, even the depression that comes with it.

80% of entrepreneurs face some level of mental health disability at some time on their journey, whether it be anxiety or depression. It's very normal, but people don't really talk about it. Some founders and entrepreneurs don't have the resources to seek help for it. FoundnWell is a platform that was formed out of my own journey, but it's to offer those resources to founders and entrepreneurs, and offer them for free. 

What inspired you to transition from supplements with Body Complete Rx to mental wellness with FoundnWell? Was there any defining moment that pushed you to create this platform? 

It's not really a move. I still own Body Complete Rx. It's a company that I started a little bit ago, it'll be nine years, actually, in September. Over the years, there have been seasons where I've dealt with anxiety, heavy anxiety, just being an entrepreneur, and the changes that happen when you own your own company and things are on you. I didn't really have a lot of people to talk to. I didn't really have a lot of people that understood that journey as an entrepreneur and how, yes, it can be so rewarding, it can be a great experience, being able to own your own company and have a thriving business, but no matter how successful your company is, that does not keep you from experiencing moments of doubt, moments of anxiety, sometimes moments of depression just from the stress of it all.

That's what led me to form FoundnWell, which I feel like is a really complete ecosystem of myself being in the wellness space. Body Complete RX is a wellness brand that focuses on supplements, and FoundnWell is a wellness brand that focuses on mental health. For me, it's not like a transition out. It's more of a completeness of who I am as a person, and who most entrepreneurs are as people. We're sometimes expected to operate on a superhuman level, but at the end of the day, we're all humans, and we've all experienced difficulties in our journey. That's how FoundnWell came about. 

What unique challenges do you think these minority entrepreneur groups face in high-performance spaces that other people may miss or not totally understand?

FoundnWell is focusing on minority founders and entrepreneurs specifically because we face challenges that other entrepreneurs do not face. So, when I say 'other,' I mean specifically white male entrepreneurs. We face challenges when it comes to funding. We're underfunded and underrepresented in the funding space for our companies. A lot of us are carrying the burden of bootstrapping multimillion-dollar companies because we don't have access to certain capital. It's harder for us to enter that space. 

When I say minorities, I don't just mean Black women. Asian women, Asian men, African American women, African American men, women in general are overall considered minorities when it comes to entrepreneurial spaces, and we face challenges that our counterparts don't always necessarily face.

Why was it important to you that FoundnWell offers culturally competent therapy? How does that shift the healing process compared to more traditional models?

It's important to me because again, not everybody understands your struggle. If you're a woman, you may prefer to have a woman therapist because you may feel like that woman connects with you more. Same with minority founders. It's important for me to have a space where minority founders have access to other minority founders and therapists who have familiarity with having conversations with minorities who have different difficulties that I just expressed, because they relate to them more, and they can understand them more. And also, it just gives a level of comfort when it comes to having certain conversations. I wouldn't want to have a white male therapist talking to me about my struggles as a minority woman and entrepreneur because he wouldn't necessarily understand that. 

What does "creating the village" look like in real terms at FoundnWell? Can you share a little bit about the community-building aspect of the platform? 

Currently, our community building aspect has been doing public or open meetups. We had a meetup in Chicago in May of 2024 and had Everette as a guest. Everette is the CEO of Kickstarter, and he is a minority founder as well. He's someone who has been very vocal about his own mental health struggles as a founder and entrepreneur. So, creating safe spaces where we can actually meet up in person and have open dialogue. Our most recent meetup was in Miami during the American Black Film Festival Week, and that was just several weeks ago. We had a brunch for founders. It was a mental health brunch, where we again were able to connect and bring founders together. We can be real and have a conversation about mental health and open up the dialogue, and actually connect with others who are like ourselves, who also understand the struggles that we may face. 

How was that event in Miami? Were there any standout moments you would like to share?

Yeah, absolutely.
It was a wonderful event. Everybody who walked away from the event said they were happy that they were able to attend and connect with other founders again. People they can continue to have relationships with outside of the event. Amber Dee, who is the therapist on staff for FoundnWell, was able to speak specifically to the statistics surrounding minority founders and entrepreneurs, and also speak directly about what she sees as a therapist on a daily basis with founders and entrepreneurs, and how that connects along the way. So that was one particular point in the brunch, people resonated with that conversation specifically. 

How do you hope FoundnWell changes the mental wellness space in the long term?

I hope that it changes mental health. I hope it changes the conversation. I feel that as founders and entrepreneurs, not even minority founders and entrepreneurs, but all founders and entrepreneurs are expected to be kind of superhuman. You're running companies, you have employees, you have staff, and people are looking for you to lead, but they don't understand that. You may be leading and also struggling. And that's okay. And that's where I want FoundnWell to have that voice to say, hey, it's okay. You don't have to appear to be this super strong person all the time who doesn't have any challenges. It's okay to say, "You know what, I need to step away for maybe a day or two to take some rest for myself so I can be mentally well to run this business." We're carrying a lot on our backs, and especially if we're funded by big VCs and companies, they are looking at us to produce revenue and the bottom line for them. But you can't get to that bottom line number that you're looking to get, even as a VC, if your founder is not mentally stable or they're not well. So mental health is that, really, to me. It's the foundation of any successful founder or entrepreneur, and the foundation of any business being successful. You can't have someone at the top leading a business who is not well. 

As a Black woman leading two powerful wellness brands, what advice would you give to other minority founders who are navigating entrepreneurship burnout? 

My advice that I would give is that one, it's important to always take time for yourself. When I started my company, for the first maybe five, six years, I never really took time for myself because of the pressures of having a business, running a business, and wanting to make sure that everybody else was well, but me. I guess my advice would be to always make sure that you're checking in on yourself. If you're feeling depressed or if you're feeling anxiety, if you're feeling any of these things, know that you're not the first person and you won't be the last person to feel those things and also know that there is a community of other founders and entrepreneurs that you can talk to who also experience the same things that you're experiencing and who can relate to you. 

Sometimes we keep things in. It's like we try to hold things in, keep things under wraps. We don't want anybody to know that maybe we might be struggling a little bit. And I think that does more harm than good. We're not on a one-man island; this is a community. Anybody who is a founder or entrepreneur is someone who should have access to FoundnWell and should know that we can be founders and we can be well, which is the whole reason why the business's name is FoundnWell. You're a founder, and you're also well. 

Miami is a melting pot of cultures, ambition, creativity -- but also a lot of pressure. How do you see FoundnWell specifically supporting Miami's diverse community of founders and entrepreneurs?

Miami is a growing hub of entrepreneurs. I just moved to Miami in February, and it's a booming community. It's growing with young entrepreneurs in different fields and businesses. And what I see is, again, there is no community that is specifically talking about what we're talking about with FoundnWell, when it comes to mental health. You have meetups in Miami for founders just to mingle, meet and greets, things like that. But nothing that the basis of it is an organization that focuses on mental health. So, me being even involved in an event that FoundnWell has, if I'm an entrepreneur, it's like I'm okay with saying, hey, mental health is important, and it's really the base of my company.

So like I said, Miami is a growing space, and I think the presence of FoundnWell in Miami is very important, and it will be important for founders to come out and be involved with the meetups we'll be having in Miami. 

As someone leading a culturally rooted wellness brand in a city that is as dynamic and fast-paced as Miami, how do you stay grounded here? Do you have any rituals or local spaces that help you recharge?

I found my own grounding activities over the years just by figuring out what works for me. So being able to turn things off, going to the water, spending time by the water, that's not for everybody, but that for me helps to calm and ground my spirit. Taking time to read and just being silent sometimes.
Miami is a buzzing city. Some people like all that buzz all the time, and for some people, it can be overstimulating. 

I think it's about like each founder finding and figuring out what works for them when it comes to settling their mind and their spirit. How do they ground themselves? Whether it be exercise, Miami's big on fitness. A lot of people in Miami are in the fitness field and industry. Whether it be finding a local group fitness class or a local activity that you can do with other people or even by yourself, that may be something that entrepreneurs can seek out. It depends on your own personality, what works for you. My advice is to find what works for you.

What's next for you and for FoundnWell? Are there any upcoming initiatives, events, or collaborations we should all be watching out for? 

Yeah, so right now, we're planning an event, not in Miami, though, an event in the Hamptons in August of 2025. We will bring together some of the top VCs in the world to have this conversation. FoundnWell again is an organization that's meant to support founders and entrepreneurs, and a lot of these VCs put their investment into the business of the founder, but do not invest in the founder's mental health. That is where this conversation needs to really start to go, how we can start to incorporate mental health services into investments that VCs are making into businesses. When I say VCs, I mean venture capitalists. 

So, a lot of times, not a lot of times, all the time, the investment that a VC puts into a company is mainly geared towards just the business aspect of the company, not taking into account the founder's mental health, which could make or break the whole company. We want VCs to start to recognize the importance of not just investing in a founder's company, but also setting aside investment for the founders to actually be well mentally.

Learn more about FoundnWell at foundnwell.com and follow them on Instagram @foundnwell. Keep up to date with Samia Gore’s journey by following her on Instagram @samiagore. 

By ML Staff. Photos/FoundnWell