Life is Brazil part.1

Dani's HH, Naval is back, Hiring framework, Dan in Brazil and much more...

Apr 07, 2025

Hello ladies and gentlemen,

I hope you are doing great and life is exciting.

The last time I was here was on the 31st of January and that one post got the most views of any of my articles. Kudos to me.

Q1 was intense. Back to training - first race of the season is coming up - , business trip to Brazil - you'll see more of that below - and WE got it's first international client in London, UK.

WE is building an EdTech for the film industry for the UK market. Lots of learning and extremely excited to have our first global client.

Expanding on WE's mission and what we are up to, a few highlights:

WE now has it's own youtube and spotify channel; we continue to host a weekly chat in Brazil with founders, entrepreneurs, investors and DEVs; we now have over 200 in the WE community;
WE POD, our content initiative, has a 5 star agenda for April - follow here - every Tuesday we invite a superstar guest to chat and inspire our community of entrepreneurs, executives, and DEVs;
WE is targeting 5 new projects in Q2 - send me an email if you want to chat - daniel@weheartimpact.com

“I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I’m not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble minded as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, become mine - a possession for all time.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hiring Framework

I had an amazing chat with a high-performance friend of mine and during our chat he mentioned something that I thought was very intelligent and a great hiring framework:

"When hiring high-performance talent, look for someone who can replace you in a 2-3 year window".

I understand that he is not just looking for someone who does a great job and is a great teammate, but in every single candidate he is looking for someone who can eventually sit in his command chair and do a better job than him.

SMART! Thanks FT.

I also had an insight that I would like to share:

Job Interview question for Candidates Working with a Founder/Entrepreneur

Ask: "If you were in my shoes, what would you do?"

This question flips the script—and that’s exactly the point.
👉🏿 You want them to ask: “What’s your role?”
That’s your cue to briefly pitch your current context and challenges. (Life is all about context and perception!)

Then, they must respond with three (to keep it simple) clear actions they’d take and how they’d execute each one.

What you're really testing:

You are looking at how well she understood your context; how she structured the information; how creative she was in thinking about actions; her ability to engage people and deliver a compelling narrative; and how she structured the execution and the details connected to each step.

This question reveals how they think, act, and lead—exactly what you need from someone working side by side with a founder.

🎯Last but not least…..

This is a line I like to use in my first conversation with a founder who's pitching their idea or startup. My goal is to fully understand the problem they're tackling and how they connect the dots.

"There’s no right or wrong in this call—just your best attempt at the truth. I want to understand the context and how you landed on this vision and thesis."

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Trip to Brazil ❤️ 🇧🇷

It's always great to come home.

In March I was able to spend 10 days in Brazil, travelling between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. This time I had a friend with me on the trip, my good friend and kick ass entrepreneur turned VC; Maex Ament.

It was a great time and it was great to see so many friends - revisiting stories from the past but also working hard to build the future.

Being in São Paulo was a great opportunity to reconnect with founders and investors and to explore the local scene, but it was also a chance to make new connections and to hang out with some amazing people.

Maex and Earth in Brazil

One of the main reasons for being in São Paulo was to expose Maex and his fund; Earth - Duda and Clara are LPs :-) - to potential investors and the Brazilian climate tech ecosystem (kudos to Guilherme Penna of Silence VC).

We managed to pitch Earth to high-profile investors, but to be honest I was impressed by the negative atmosphere among the investors. I mean, Brazil is not doing well, the political scenario is a disaster, the economy is struggling and you can get 15% yeld just by investing in zero risk "CDB".

If all the wealthy people are playing it safe and not taking risks, how can Brazil grow? If the wealthy are playing the protect-next-generation-wealth game, who will take the risk to build the future?

It’s sad and risky.

I've also heard from different VCs that they're struggling to raise their next funds and that's because these LPs don't want to take the risk in this asset class.

Earth

Earth is a €50m venture capital fund investing in the next generation of businesses tackling society’s biggest challenge - the climate crisis.

Founded by Maex and Philip, serial entrepreneurs who have founded five B2B ventures, including two unicorns Taulia + Centrifuge. They have raised +$300m, worked with hundreds of employees, made +100 angel investments, and advised +20 start-ups including Highradius from pre-Series A onward. They commit themselves to building Earth - to fight the climate crisis - leveraging their experience, network, and passion.

The vast majority of climate businesses are B2B, selling to enterprises and SMEs. Yet, very few founders or climate scientists with cutting-edge technologies have deep knowledge of scaling businesses, especially in the enterprise space.

We bring deep expertise in B2B - across FinTech, enterprise SaaS & supply chain, including at scale in the US - something that is lacking in European funds. Having seen success elsewhere, we now see our calling as using this experience to support top climate founders at pre-seed and seed.

Dani’s Happy Hour

First of All: Thanks for showing up and celebrating life with me.

For the second year in a row, I organized a happy hour event to get some amazing people together in the same room to celebrate life, friendship, and business. I had 120 people on my guest list and it took me weeks to put it together.

It rained every single day we were in São Paulo and when it rains you have to be prepared for bad traffic and a logistical nightmare.

On the day of the event, I had one eye on my meetings and the other on the sky. A few hours before the event, the sky in São Paulo was pitch black and I could see that it was going to rain and my event was going to fail. Well, STOIC - there are some things you can't control and you shouldn't waste your energy worrying about them.

But the wind blew the dark cloud away and 1 hour before the event we had a vanilla sky and a beautiful sunset. Marcelo Franco - Verve Capital - sent me a message saying: "You are lucky dude." - And he was right, we were lucky and we had a great time with some of the best people in my life.

❤️ Thank you all for coming and March 2026 is going to be epic.

If you want to see what we got up to: pictures.

Dan’s Gift 🧠 From the World Wide Web

“Fulfilment cannot come when the present moment is little more than a struggle to bear in order to attain the future, because that future is destined to become nothing more than the struggle of a new present, and the glorious end state never arrives. The focus must be on the walk that is life with its string of present moment.”

He is back! Naval is back and this is a must see interview.
(I don't think I have anything else to add!)

Jared Herenson - Why we can’t focus!

Our attention spans are declining, and the problem is getting worse. Why is this happening, and what can we do about it?

The beloved Simon Sinek and the badass Jocko talk leadership.
Humble Leaders Lead Better Teams with Retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink

ACQUIRED - RenTec

Renaissance Technologies is the best performing investment firm of all time. And yet no one at RenTec would consider themselves an “investor”, at least in any traditional sense of the word. It’d rather be more accurate to call them scientists — scientists who’ve discovered a system of math, computers and artificial intelligence that has evolved into the greatest money making machine the world has ever seen. And boy does it work: RenTec’s alchemic colossus has posted annual returns in the firm’s flagship Medallion Fund of 68% gross and 40% net over the past 34 years, while never once losing money.

🧨 High Agency (Thanks Maex for this treasure)

High Agency in a Question

You wake up in a 3rd world jail cell. You’re only allowed to call one person you know to get you out of there. Who do you call?

Read it here: https://www.highagency.com/