Czech Executive Richard Singer Builds AI Leadership School With Bhutan's King

Richard Singer's Second Act: Leadership Training From Prague to Bhutan

Richard Singer, a Czech executive who once ran White & Case for Central and Eastern Europe and spent 11 years as chief operating officer for Dentons' European operations, has launched a new venture aimed at the top of the corporate world. Radically Human Ventures (RHV), founded with three MBA classmates — Slovak industrialist Vojtech Pánik, Portuguese investment banker Miguel Oliveira and former pharma executive Riad Fanus — plans to train C-level managers of the world's largest companies through a mix of personal mentoring and AI trained on the methods of prominent leadership figures.

The commercial pitch is deliberately exclusive. A week-long intensive program with one of the venture's marquee names is priced at $300,000 to $500,000 per person for a group of 20 managers. The roster cited includes leadership author Nicholas Janni, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard Law lecturer Erika Ariel Fox, Zander Grashow, who has worked with Google, HBO and IBM, and Daniel Goleman, the influential emotional-intelligence author. Singer's stated ambition is to reach 100,000 of the world's most prominent business leaders — roughly 20,000 through personal programs and the rest through AI-fed mentoring — in a leadership-development market he estimates at more than $200 billion.

The venture's backstory is intensely personal. On 26 March 2024, Singer suffered a Stanford type B aortic dissection while flying to Frankfurt; he turned back to Prague and was rushed from the plane to an ambulance. After emergency treatment at the Central Military Hospital and IKEM, he says he decided to focus his career on something that would help the world — which eventually led him to Bhutan.

RHV is now among the first 100 founding companies of Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC), a special economic zone being built around the existing town of Gelephu, where an international airport is under construction. Danish architectural studio BIG prepared the urban concept, and the ambition is a technology metropolis of one million residents, inspired by Singapore and Abu Dhabi and anchored in Bhutan's Buddhist heritage. Bhutan's king, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, is driving the project in response to rapid emigration — a diaspora of about 25,000 Bhutanese now lives in Australia's Perth alone, from a national population of roughly 800,000. The country's royal fund has a track record of unconventional bets; in October 2024 the state held 13,000 bitcoins, worth about 22 billion Czech crowns at the time, mined at data centers powered by Himalayan hydropower.

How the Gelephu Deal and AI Mentors Add Up

What Singer Is Actually Selling

The model rests on two very different tiers. At $300,000 to $500,000 for a week-long group program, the personal tier sits far above typical top-tier university executive courses, which usually run in the tens of thousands of dollars. That positions RHV as a luxury product whose credibility depends entirely on the named mentors being genuinely present — or at least genuinely involved — rather than simply licensing their names and methods to an AI system. The second tier, AI-driven mentoring, is where scale becomes plausible, but it is also the part most exposed to competition, since nothing stops existing executive-education providers from building their own AI coaching layers.

Why Bhutan — and Why Now

The Gelephu connection gives RHV something no Western competitor has: an early-mover position inside a government-backed economic experiment with royal patronage. The king's motivation is concrete demographic pressure — the Perth diaspora alone represents roughly 3 percent of Bhutan's population — and the royal fund has already shown it can convert national assets, in this case Himalayan water, into high-value digital infrastructure. For a new company with no disclosed external investors beyond its four founders, being among the first 100 founding businesses in GMC is a low-cost way to gain visibility and preferential access if the zone's incentives materialize. The risk is that GMC is still largely a blueprint: the airport is under construction, the regulatory framework for the special economic zone is not yet proven in practice, and the one-million-resident target is decades away from being testable.

Stress-Testing the Numbers

Singer's near-term targets are worth examining against the price point. Revenue of $100 million within about three years at roughly 50 percent profit would require only 200 to 330 paying participants a year at the average $400,000 price — a demanding but not absurd sales goal for a global C-level offering, and far short of the 20,000 personal-program leaders he mentions as a longer-term ambition. That gap suggests the $100 million target is achievable only if the AI-licensed tier gains real corporate adoption, while the ultra-premium programs act as a flagship and credibility anchor. The broader $200 billion market estimate is consistent with global corporate-training spending, but RHV's share of it is entirely aspirational at this point, with no customer figures disclosed.

What to Watch as Gelephu Mindfulness City and RHV Take Shape

• Prospective clients: at $300,000–500,000 per person for a week-long group program, the price sits far above typical top-tier university executive courses. Confirm whether the named figures — Nicholas Janni, Erika Ariel Fox, Zander Grashow, Daniel Goleman — personally mentor participants or only license their methods to the AI layer.
• Companies weighing Gelephu: treat RHV's first-100 founding-company status as an early-mover signal, but wait for the concrete special economic zone framework — incentives, tax terms, investment protections — before committing; the airport is still under construction.
• Investors: RHV's only disclosed backers are the four founders, and no customer numbers have been published. The testable milestones are Singer's stated $100 million revenue target in about three years and a possible listing in roughly seven years.
• Bhutan watchers: the metric to track is migration — a Perth diaspora of about 25,000 from a population of roughly 800,000 is the demographic pressure the entire GMC project is meant to reverse.