2025 is now.
Funding Fantastic Founders, Ironman, WE and everything else... The time is now.
Hello boys and girls,
This is my first of the year and I would like to invite you to meditate on your goals and priorities for 2025.
Stay present. Breathe. Don't sell yourself short. Embrace your setbacks. Fight hard. Share your passion. Share your knowledge. Never stop learning. Love yourself.
“Since where you place your attention is where you place your energy, then if you keep placing your awareness on your known life, your energy is invested in that familiar life. But if you were to invest your energy in the unknown field of possibilities beyond space and time, and you instead became a consciousness (a thought in quantum potential), you’d be drawing a new experience to yourself.”
- Joe Dispenza
My motto for 2025 (and beyond). Should I tattoo it?
Huge celebration as Music.ai raises its massive Series A. I've been an investor in Moises, now Music.ai, since 2021 - the very first outside round - and I couldn't be more excited for Geraldo and his band. They are going to change the way people connect with music - mark my words.
Music.ai raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Connect Ventures and Monashees, with participation from Kickstart, Samsung Next, Toba Capital, Valutia, Pelion, Mindset Ventures and some of the brightest minds in the music industry including Steve Aoki, Freddy Wexler, 3LAU and Alexander23.
Talking about my Ironman plans for 2025: It's all about Kona 2026. The whole season is about getting to two key races and doing my best at them; Ironman Vitoria Gasteiz in July and Ironman Barcelona in October.
I have reason to believe - in 2024 I was the 8th best Portuguese in the 40-44 age group and I'm now a Silver AWA.
I'm looking forward to every training session to get to my best, both physically and mentally.
Let us get down to business
and make the most of your time here with me.
Books I’m now reading:
From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life - by Arthur Brooks
I have now given this book to 6 friends and this is the second time I have done so. Amazing book! It gives you so much to think about - especially if you are past your 40s. How do you reinvent yourself and make the second part of your life more impactful than the first? That's what this book is all about. Go for it!
This is my third year trying to read this book one chapter a day for many weeks - I failed the last two times, but if "Consistency Makes You Unstoppable" - I better embrace what I preach. It's an amazing book, easily in the top 10 in the history of mankind, but it's very challenging to stick to. I better not go off the rails!
I got this reading list from Bill Gates and it seems perfect for the time we live in. How to develop better and more meaningful relationships with other people! In the age of AI and short attention spans, this book promises a radical change. I'm now 40% through and it's delivering. I highly recommend it.
WE’s update (check our website here)
At WE Heart Impact, we ended last year super excited about what we could experiment with in 2025 and spent the first two weeks of this year organizing and structuring our approach to our mission.
WE decided to experiment with three approaches:
1. Building startups for mid-sized organizations - We did a few experiments in 2024 and we delivered big time. We validated some of our proprietary frameworks, our approach to innovation, our ability to recruit and motivate amazing people, and our promise to our customers and partners.
Target: 12 projects in 2025.
2. EIR - WE's proprietary methodology for creating and delivering Entrepreneur in Residence programmes for organisations. We have spent a lot of time on this over the last year, interacting with industry leaders, and believe we are now ready to test and validate.
Target: 4 programmes in 2025 + 2 WE programmes.
WE will run an EIR programme from March-June 2025, 100% focused on DEVs. If you would like to know more please email daniel@weheartimpact.com
3. FFF - the rebirth of FFF.
WE killed the Family Friends and Fools model to create the Funding Fantastic Founders model.
Every legacy company had it's "Day 1".
Every great founder started from scratch.
WE created our FFF - Funding Fantastic Founders - investment vehicle to partner with amazing founders in the early days of their startups.
WE will lead the rebirth of the FFF, combining access to early capital with lots of hands-on work. WE will work side-by-side with founders in the early days of their companies, preparing them to raise a solid pre-seed round or enter the best accelerator programmes in the world.
The facts:
Geography: WE heart the free world.
Industry or Sector: Agnostic, but WE like things WE can understand and process.
Stage: Early. 1st Capital Committed. WE mean ideation stage, founders coming together, structuring a thesis, MVP is live and crashing…
Investment: $25,000.
Terms: Negotiable.
Need to know:
WE only invest if we work together;
WE are co-founders as a service;
WE only invest if founders are full-time or about to become full-time;
WE have access to some of the best funds in the world; and we are LPs to some of them;
WE love the underdog. The impossible doesn’t stand a chance.
👉🏿 If you want to know more - explore here.
I was chosen to be the LT;DV ambassador in Brazil and the truth is that WE has been a TL;DV heavy user for a long time and in late 2024 we integrated the platform with our Notion library and now all our calls go into this database where we can track every interaction and never miss a thing.
In 2024 I went through 3 Moleskines and to be honest I have no idea where they are now, let alone how to find the information I have collected over the year. So now we hope to be able to better track our interactions and organise our learning - our ultimate IP.
I have put this on the WE website and you can follow the steps to do the same for your business.
High-quality content for Early stage Founders.
If you are in the early days of your business or still working on your thesis, these next episodes are real gems for you - go for it.
1. Lenny Podcast with Jen Abel
Jen Abel is the co-founder of Jellyfish, where she and her team have worked with over 300 early-stage founders to learn how to sell, do early customer discovery, and set up a repeatable sales motion on the way to their first $1M ARR. In our conversation, Jen shares:
• Why founder-led sales is so crucial early on
• The sales process, step by step
• How to craft effective outreach messages
• Where to find leads
• What three channels work best for outreach
• What to say on your first call
• How to maintain momentum
• Strategies for navigating procurement and closing deals • Common pitfalls in the sales process and how to avoid them
2. Lenny podcast with Michael Margolis
Michael Margolis has been a UX research partner at Google Ventures (GV) for nearly 15 years. He has developed a unique approach to helping startups identify their “bullseye customer”—the specific subset of their target market who initially is most likely to adopt their product. Michael has conducted over 300 hands-on research sprints with GV portfolio companies across various industries and helped develop the “design sprint” process made famous by the book Sprint. In our conversation, we discuss:
• The step-by-step process of running a bullseye customer sprint
• The most common mistakes founders make when picking their first customers
• Practical tips for conducting effective customer interviews
• How to create simple but effective prototypes for user research
• The power of “watch parties” in aligning teams around customer insights
• How to apply these methods beyond typical tech startups
👉🏿🧠 Complementary material: Learnmorefaster.com
3. Lenny podcast with Arielle Jackson
What makes a great brand? After working at Google and Square, Arielle Jackson has spent the past eight years consulting startups on how to create powerful messaging that works.
I personally believe that one of the most powerful changes that anyone can make for themselves is to understand how their mind works and to master how to change and control it in favour of the best outcome of any given situation.
Frankly, starting anything with the right mindset is a battle half won.
I will share some information so that everyone can start to explore and figure things out.
1. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dwek.
Carol Dweck coined the term, and she is the absolute queen of the room. Reading her book is the best first step on the journey.
2. How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset with Dr Huberman
Dr Huberman is one of my favourites. He explores the subject and brings simple pills to better understand the approach.
3. Change your mindset, change the game | Dr. Alia Crum
Dr. Crum says the biggest game changer is “YOU, by harnessing the power of your mind." She explores scientific results that show the influence of the mindset on the body, and how changing the subjective mindset produced different outcomes.
Dr. Crum's work is inspired in part by the placebo effect, and has implications that stretch far beyond the realm of medicine. Dr. Crum is a professor, psychologist, and researcher investigating how mindsets affect health and behavior.
Prof G has recently caught my attention. I can relate to many of his world views and I think he is one of the most talented communicators out there at the moment.
Every year he shares his predictions for the coming year here and here is his prediction for 2025. I like most of them.
🇧🇷 Uma nota pessoal para meus amigos Brasileiros.
O meu maior investimento dos últimos anos: Veronica.
Há três anos eu decidi financiar a formacao universitaria de uma pessoa em homenagem a minha mãe, Ana Maria.
Eu só tinha uma exigência: formação em pedagogia, a primeira da mamãe.
Nesse vídeo a Verônica conta a sua história de coragem e determinação nessa trajetória. Agora a 2 semesters de se formar, ela me inspira a fazer mais pelo próximo.
Orgulho enorme da Verônica.
Hecho con amor en Madrid.
Nothing but love to you all.
Dan