One of the benefits of being a paid subscriber to my substack moving forward is that you’ll be able to get early access to select chapters and content from my upcoming books (and extras from my previous books). This is the first post of this kind, only for subscribers - the Introduction to my new book, The Zen Entrepreneur and the Dream, which will be released in the next few months. Pre-order the full book here.
Introduction to The Zen Entrepreneur and the Dream
What This Book Is About
This book is about my adventures in both the startup and the spiritual or “new age” scenes in the 1990s, following my graduation from MIT. The years covered in this book roughly followed the so-called “dot-com boom.”
It isn’t easy to write a book about the intersections of these two worlds. For one thing, the participants of those two scenes were, for the most part, mutually exclusive. For another, attempts to integrate these two worlds usually rely on cliches (“visualize what you want”, “follow these steps and you too will be a great success!”).
Unfortunately, the reality, as anyone who tries to integrate their spiritual life with their business life can tell you, is much messier and more complicated.
Our professional lives are intertwined with our spiritual development in ways that I certainly didn’t expect as a young entrepreneur. Moreover, these complications are rarely acknowledged in either the business or spiritual literature.
The internet has allowed for a superficial bridging between East and West. In the West, we have yoga studios on almost every corner in major cities, and mindfulness is taught by major employers like Google for stress reduction. Meanwhile, in India and China, startups are booming, and materialism runs rampant, perhaps more than it ever did here in the West.
Despite this surface-level mixing, a deeper integration of East and West has eluded both sides.
The deeper issues we face in our spiritual lives and in our careers are still kept separate. In this book, I’ll relate some of the reasons why I came to believe that our challenges in the world of business are based on the same inner challenges that impede our spiritual growth.
In short, the life lessons that we are here to learn spiritually are manifested in the two arenas we spend most of our time in: our professional/work life and our relationship/personal life.
For those interested in entrepreneurship:
I have often compared the founder’s journey to the stages of the hero’s journey of Joseph Campbell.[1]
My first book, Zen Entrepreneurship, was about the early stages of the hero’s journey: “The Call to Adventure”, “The Refusal”, “Meeting with a Mentor”, “Crossing the Threshold”, and even “Supernatural Aid.”
I have now come to the conclusion that the most important stages of the hero’s journey are the “darker” ones, such as “Road of Trials”, a “Visit to the Underworld”, and “The Journey Back” to the ordinary world.
Those are the stages that this book is about. I’m also trying to give readers a sense of what running a venture-backed startup was really like vs. the almost romanticized version that is presented by the (relatively few) mega-success stories the public is fed.
For those interested in spiritual adventures:
Many spiritual memoirs tell of apprenticeship with a guru-like figure, and Zen Entrepreneurship was no different, though I encapsulated teachings from many sources into the character I called Ramaswami.
This book, on the other hand, is about conducting a spiritual search in the absence of a single “guru”, a more realistic path for most of us in the modern world. This includes the struggle to integrate what we have learned from different places into our lives and careers.
What this book is really about, then, is learning to weave the different threads of our life - professional, personal, and spiritual – together into the dreamlike tapestry that we (mistakenly) call “waking life.”
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of
The ambiguous use of the word dream in the title is deliberate.
At one level, it refers to the use and purpose of nighttime dreams and waking visions on our path of spiritual growth, a subject I spent many waking and sleeping hours exploring (and continue to do so) as part of my esoteric studies. Almost all the spiritual traditions use dreams as a metaphor for life as being an illusory or temporary world, not just in Buddhism and Hinduism. There are elements of this metaphor in the esoteric sects of the major monotheistic religions, namely the Sufis, Kabbalists and the Gnostics. Most native cultures place dreams and dreaming as a key part of their shamanic worldview as well.
At another level, the title is also about the “dream” of every entrepreneur to “hit it big” and make millions of dollars from their startup. This book is then also about what happens when our pursuit of that dream goes sour, an all-too-common occurrence.
Today in Silicon Valley and beyond, I think there is almost too much focus on the financial part of the dream to the exclusion of other considerations or definitions of success or value in the startup journey.
Any startup that doesn’t sell for bazillions of dollars is considered a failure, and any personal or professional achievements along the way are simply written off as “input” that you can utilize to be more financially successful in the future. This single-minded focus on the financial axis of startup success can be damaging to our self-esteem and to lessons that we are here to learn in this life.
But what if the personal journey of the entrepreneur is just as important as the financial outcome of the startup itself? In this case, the journey truly is the destination.
I started meditating, a path of personal growth, because I thought it would help me with the challenges of my career. What I realized was that I had it backwards. In some sense, the challenges in my career and in my life were being presented to help me in my personal and spiritual growth. They were, it turns out, an important and vital part of my path!
What Makes These Books Unique
Publishing Zen Entrepreneurship (my very first book) presented some unique challenges. It was rejected by every minor and major publisher I sent it to.
Unbeknownst to me (at the time), I had committed a grave sin in the world of publishing. I had created a book that was, using a term coined by Ursula K. Le Guin, un-genrifiable.
It wasn’t clear if Zen Entrepreneurship was memoir, self-help, how-to, new age (or mind/body/spirit), career development, or startup/business book. The publishing industry didn’t know which shelf to put it on.
The truth is it was all of these at once. Both Zen Entrepreneurship and the current book could nicely fit on any of these shelves.
It wasn’t until the second edition was published in 2013 that the book gained a small but enthusiastic audience, not just in the US; it was translated into a Russian edition (and more recently in Brazil in Portuguese).
If the emails I’ve received over the years from readers are any indication, Zen Entrepreneurship has made a real impact on people’s lives precisely because it crossed genres. Readers went back to it again and again because the struggles it describes are universal.
How I Came to Write This Book
Mission accomplished, I thought, and I moved on to other startups and writing projects.
A number of years later, I was at lunch with a Russian classmate of mine from business school. He asked me when I would release a sequel to Zen Entrepreneurship (whose title for the Russian edition had been translated into Business in the Lotus Position).
He suggested that all of my Russian readers would like to know what happened next after the end of the first book.
I protested. I didn’t think I had very many Russian readers, and a sequel wasn’t really necessary. I argued (perhaps trying to convince myself as much as him) that I had tied things up very nicely at the end of the first book. The startup had moved beyond the initial formative stages, and my mentor, Ramaswami, had left for the Himalayas, effectively ending my apprenticeship.
Reluctantly, I began to recognize the funny feeling that tells me something is a “clue” in my own personal treasure hunt. The clue kept bubbling back up and wouldn’t let me go.
Eventually, after I had become a more successful author with a number of books to my name, I gave in to the clue and began to write this book.
What’s New in This Book
In this book, in addition to completing the story of my first startup, Brainstorm, I also included some of the more esoteric spiritual episodes that I left out of Zen Entrepreneurship. Perhaps I was worried about what respectable businesspersons, scientists and venture capitalists might think of me!
As I’ve gotten older, I have found myself caring less and less what more “respectable” (and often narrow-minded) people think. We are who we are and masking that to appear respectable is no longer something that I am willing to do.
I also completely left out of my first book the story of my personal life, and how my relationship with my first girlfriend, Ellen, formed and evolved during the years recounted in Zen Entrepreneurship (we met at, of all places, a meditation seminar). Our relationship was a bit like a roller coaster ride which followed the ups and downs of my first startup.
A life story isn’t complete without accounting for both career and love, and I’ve tried to correct this oversight by including some important episodes of turbulence that Ellen and I encountered during these years as a central part of the narrative of this new book.
A Word About the Structure of this Book
This book is based on real events which took place almost 30 years ago. In some cases, I am sure I have misremembered some details. In other cases, I have deliberately re-arranged events and combined characters in order to protect privacy and/or for the sake of the narrative.
As I did with Zen Entrepreneurship, I’ve added summaries of the spiritual and business lessons from most chapters, complete with exercises for you to try. So as not to interrupt the narrative flow, I have put these at the end of each of the five parts of the book. Readers have found these summaries to be useful, but it is entirely appropriate to skip these in your first read.
How To Read This Book
There are several different framings you can use to read this book, and you’ll get something different with each one.
You can read this book as a tale of a young entrepreneur and the evolution of his startup, just like any other book on the (nowadays increasingly virtual) business bookshelves.
Or you can read it as a story of a spiritual seeker on a continuing mystical journey, just like any book you might find in what is now called the mind/body/spirit bookshelf.
Finally, you can even read it as a romance novel – a story of a nerdy, ambitious boy and an artistic, creative (and very patient) girl.
However you choose to read it, my hope is that this book will inspire you to bridge the seemingly ever-widening gap between our professional, personal and spiritual lives. In truth, you may realize that they are not so far apart.
For those who struggle, as I did, to bring these spheres of our lives into harmony, I hope this book will help you to see and transcend your own patterns and walk your own Warrior’s Path — the unique combination of lessons you are here to learn, and the contribution you are here to make.
— Rizwan Virk,
Mountain View, CA & Cambridge, MA, June, 2026
Order Zen Entrepreneurship.
Pre-order The Zen Entrepreneur and the Dream.
[1] Fore more on how the hero’s journey stages apply to entrepreneurship, see my book Startup Myths & Models, and my academic articles about this.