Anne-Laure Le Cunff

You may recognize Anne-Laure Le Cunff from her Maker Mind newsletter, which provides over 30,000 readers with mindful productivity tips at the intersection of neuroscience and entrepreneurship.

Earlier in her career, Anne-Laure led Global Marketing at Google for their digital health products, including Google Fit. She realized that she wanted to help people become happier and healthier humans but felt she lacked the qualifications. Since she had always been curious about how the brain works, she left Google and decided to go back to school to study neuroscience.

She realized that a lot of what she was learning about the brain could be applied to the everyday life of entrepreneurs and knowledge workers such as herself — because in those lines of work, our brains are our biggest asset. She started documenting her journey and learnings online. What began as a personal blog, Ness Labs has become a platform featuring content, coaching, and a community for people who want to be more productive and creative without sacrificing their mental health.

Anne-Laure geeks out about creativity and is a big fan of note-taking as a way to collect and connect ideas.

🤓 I geek out about…

Metacognition, mindful productivity, creativity, tools for thought, and in general anything that can help us make the most of the human mind.

🎒 I collect…

Notes! I’m a big fan of note-taking to collect and connect ideas. It’s such a powerful way to get compound interest on your thoughts.

💬 My friends ask me for advice about…

Relationships, career stuff, and mental health.

🧰 How my weird obsessions show up in my work…

I’m obsessed with the brain, and it definitely shows in my work. I write about neuroscience, I tweet about brain myths, I post pictures of psychedelic mushrooms, and I create videos explaining how the mind works.

🌱 What form(s) of growth is/are most important for your company?

The cornerstone of Ness Labs is its community, whether it’s readers of the newsletter or members of the private forums. I’m not talking about the size of the community, but rather its quality: how engaged are people, how much value are they getting from interacting with each other? This is the kind of growth I truly care about.

🌤️ A thing that makes me hopeful about the future of business:

Seeing so many successful bootstrapped businesses. Of course, venture capital is essential for some types of businesses, but the Internet has made it easier than ever to create a company without raising capital. The increasing diversity of entrepreneurs makes me hopeful that we will see lots of innovation in crucial yet traditionally poorly covered areas of innovation.

💭 I wish more companies would…

Take the mental health of their employees seriously. Too many companies are paying lip service by offering a workshop or two a few times a year, but very few are really investing in their employees’ mental health and offering substantial support as well as the psychological safety needed to speak up when one needs help.

❓ A question I love:

What is your biggest fear?

You can connect with Anne-Laure on Twitter.