Terry Kim's path runs from U.S. military service to founding a Y Combinator-backed education company to studying with shamans, and he doesn't treat any one chapter as more important than the others. When Terry Kim joined Sean Kelly on the Digital Social Hour, the conversation moved freely between all three.
It's a wide-ranging look at how military discipline, startup pressure, and a personal spiritual practice, including a psychedelic ceremony in the Amazon, all shaped the way he leads and grounds himself today.
About Terry Kim
Terry Kim is a U.S. military veteran who went on to found NGT Academy, a network-engineering training company that went through Y Combinator and has raised more than $18 million. His path from service member to startup founder has run alongside a parallel personal journey into spirituality.
That journey has included studying with shamans and adopting practices like 'monk mode,' periods of intense focus and simplicity, as ways to ground himself amid the demands of building a company. By his own account, those practices now shape how he leads and how he grows.
What Terry Kim and Sean Kelly Talked About
- What Terry Kim's time in the military taught him before becoming a founder
- How he built NGT Academy into a Y Combinator-backed training company
- His personal account of a psychedelic ceremony in the Amazon and what it meant to him
- What 'monk mode' looks like in his own routine, by his description
- Lessons he says he's taken from studying with shamans
- How he balances startup leadership with an ongoing personal spiritual practice
- Why he sees spirituality as central to how he leads, not separate from it
- What grounded focus looks like for a founder running a fast-growing company
Why This Conversation Matters
Terry Kim's path from military service to startup founder to spiritual seeker doesn't follow a typical script, and that's what makes this conversation worth hearing. It's a personal account of how service, entrepreneurship, and spirituality can inform each other, told as his own experience rather than a template for anyone else.
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube
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About Sean Kelly & the Digital Social Hour
Sean Kelly is an entrepreneur and the host of the Digital Social Hour, one of the fastest-growing interview podcasts in the world, where he sits down with entrepreneurs, athletes, creators, and cultural voices for candid, long-form conversations. The show draws over 100 million views a month across platforms. Explore more guest features on SeanKelly.io.
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