The entrepreneur’s life seems to involve endless toil and anxiety punctuated by the occasional success and, sometimes, an hour of cheerful distraction. That’s how it is for me, anyway. So when I strolled into a primitive flour mill at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate in Alexandria, Virginia, one evening in October, I thought I was in for the distraction part of my chosen field.

I assumed Washington’s famous plantation would serve as a mere backdrop for the intensive two-day leadership workshop the Tugboat Institute set up for us. Hell, what could a wealthy ex-president in a powdered wig possibly teach a bootstrapping tech-savvy modern businessman like me?