Noah Sherman, a Berlin-based founder, joins Sunny Ray to discuss his path from investment banking to building Silo, a personalized AI meditation app. Noah traces his journey from a formative high school exchange year in California, through roles at Deutsche Bank, wealth manager Liqid, and elderly care platform Marta, to discovering the AI tool Lovable in early 2025, which let him rapidly prototype what became Silo. He explains his frustration with existing meditation apps like Headspace, which offer thousands of sessions but never truly learn about the user, and how Silo instead generates tailor made meditations based on a person's real struggles and goals. The conversation ranges widely, touching on the parallels between prayer and meditation, the stigma around mental health in finance culture, the influence of his psychologist mother, and lessons on leadership, sales, and decision making pulled from his varied career. Throughout, Noah reflects on why meditation may be one of the highest leverage practices available, and how his winding path uniquely prepared him to build it.
Ex investment banker Noah Sherman explains why he left finance and elderly care to build Silo, an AI app that personalizes meditation.
Tell us about the app you're building.
We're building Silo, a personalized meditation app. You share your thoughts, struggles, goals, and desires, and the AI tailor makes a meditation just for you for that moment. We don't stop there, we take you on a journey to build a routine out of it. It's been going great, with amazing feedback from users, and there's a bunch of things we're improving on every day.
What's the unique insight versus an app like Headspace?
Headspace has thousands of meditations, but I always just picked one based on how much time I had, never one that actually fit my needs. It also never learned anything about me after years of use besides my login and rough patterns. Meditation is deeply personal, tied to your struggles and goals, so an app that doesn't grow with you felt odd to me.
What did that year in California teach you about yourself?
I learned what it means to be the odd one out, sitting alone at lunch before real friendships had formed. But all my host families were entrepreneurs, and I picked up this American mindset that if you want something you can do it, no dream is too big. That's something I feel Europe, especially Germany, is missing.
What pulled you into finance?
One of my host dads in California ran a grape farming and trading business and introduced me to the numbers and details of it. I got really eager and interested and thought I wanted to go somewhere where money played a role, so I joined an investment banking program at Deutsche Bank.
What did working in risk management and capital markets show you about how the system actually works?
A lot of it was just picking up the phone, hearing four numbers, saying four numbers back, and typing it in. Strip away the trading floor and the shiny suits and that's basically it. I loved the atmosphere and the incredibly smart, humble people, but the actual work was less glamorous than the jargon made it sound.
Was meditation part of that finance culture?
No, nobody ever talked about meditation or mental health there, if you did you were considered weak. My mom, who has a doctorate in psychology and worked on early AI back in the eighties, was the one who suggested I think about meditation given how intense my work life was going to be.
When did AI stop being a buzzword and start feeling like a tool you could actually build with?
It was February 2025 when I discovered Lovable, which was only two or three months old. I'd been struggling to build an onboarding flow with another website builder and it was awful. Then I wrote about five messages to Lovable and built a huge website. I felt like I had just discovered fire.
Was there a specific moment that planted the idea for Silo?
A lot of friends around me in Berlin were struggling with their mental health but didn't know how to get to therapy or where to even start. I started researching prevention tools and found every app felt the same, overloaded with fifty different articles and tools, completely one size fits all and not individualized at all.
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