My goal in life is to help people achieve sovereignty
(and to protect our planet)

That means different things at different stages of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
➤ For some, it’s the elevation of consciousness.
➤ For others, it’s feeding their family.

◇ After, managing billion-dollar transformation projects for FT100 and FT500 companies, 
◇ Helping launch tech unicorns, 
◇ And building my own startups, 
◇ I realized my greatest impact comes from connecting people to the capital, strategy, and structure needed to turn vision into reality.

𝗦𝗼 𝗜 𝗱𝗼 𝗮 𝗳𝗲𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀:

🔲 Chief Growth Officer @ FORUS 

A $200M impact fund and blockchain platform advancing financial inclusion and capital access across emerging markets. I lead global expansion, commercial strategy, and partnerships that align profitability with systemic change.


🔳 Investment Banking Managing Director @ Castle Placement 

Connecting founders with a global network of 110K institutional investors and 600K accredited investors, and structuring capital raises across venture, debt, and private equity markets. FINRA licenses 7 and 63.


🔲 Start-up Advisor @ Y42 

Guiding impact-driven founders on fundraising, go-to-market, and commercial strategy, with a focus on investor readiness, growth optimization, storytelling, and brand positioning.


▫️Previously, I founded startups in the climate and psychedelic spaces, worked in finance and strategy at Credit Suisse, JPMorgan, and Accenture, led corporate innovation projects and startup partnerships at Founders Intelligence, and served as Launcher and Managing Director at Crimson Education.

▪️To date, I have advised more than 100 companies on go-to-market, commercial optimization, growth strategy, and fundraising, helping founders scale sustainably from pre-seed to IPO.

▫️I hold a BA in Economics and Political Science from Columbia University and a PgD in Differential Psychology from the University of Edinburgh.

▪️Outside of business, I’m obsessed with the 4Ps of life: Psychics, Philosophy, Psychology and Psychedelics. I love traveling, fashion and photography. I’m a mixed-media visual artist, amateur bodybuilder, calisthenics and boxing enthusiast, and a former model represented by Elite.

I split my time between London, LA, SF, NYC, Rio de Janeiro, and Cape Town (so always somewhat jet lagged…)

Einstein figured this out. As a founder, you should too.
 
(And you don't need a 160-190 IQ for it.)
 
Founders waste months solving problems that don't exist.
 
⚠️ You add a feature because a prospect mentioned it once
⚠️ Build a dashboard no one asked for
⚠️ Create a pricing tier for a customer segment you haven't validated
 
Then six months later, 

you are maintaining complexity you can't monetize.
 
🧠 Einstein's entire method was elimination. 

He would strip a problem down until only the essential physics remained. Everything else was a distraction.
 
"Out of clutter, find simplicity," he said.
 
❌ Your product does not need 14 features. 
➡️ It needs the one thing customers will pay to make their problem go away.
 
❌ Your pitch does not need to cover every use case. 
➡️ It needs to answer: which pain point persists without this?
 
Einstein did not discover relativity by adding variables. His method was thought experiments that stripped problems to their essential physics.

He said, "Out of clutter, find simplicity"

So, stop confusing thoroughness with strategy. 

Investors don't fund encyclopedias.

They fund businesses.

(And yes, I do have a tattoo of E=MC2 😅😂🤓)

undefined undefined

Investor & CGO @ FORUS • Investment Bank MD @ Castle Placement • Strategist & Board Advisor to Frontier & Impact Ventures • Keynote Speaker • FINRA Licenses 7, 63

Founders complain about hard odds while ignoring this basic miracle 


We are alive.
 
I saw a post on IG that said, 
you exist because:

⚡ Gravity was calibrated within 1 in 10^40. 

⚡ We got a G-Type star when 75% are violent red dwarfs. 

⚡ Our sun didn't have a twin that would have flung Earth into darkness. 

⚡ Jupiter shields us from asteroids. 

⚡ A Mars-sized planet hit Earth at exactly the right angle to create the Moon.
 
If the dinosaur-killing asteroid had arrived minutes late, it would have hit the Atlantic. 

Smaller damage. 

Dinosaurs survive. You don't exist.
 
 👉🏻 Then 150,000 generations continued unbroken. 
 👉🏻 Your parents met (1 in 20,000). 
 👉🏻 That exact sperm met that exact egg (1 in 400 quadrillion).
 
Total probability: 1 in 10^2,685,000.
 
For reference, there are 10^80 atoms in the known universe.
 
Yet,

⚠️ Most founders operate as though nothing is a miracle. 
⚠️ They treat existence as baseline and success as owed.
 
🧠 But when you recognize the probability stack that had to execute perfectly for you to be here, operating from entitlement becomes untenable.
 
Einstein said you can live as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.
 
How are you choosing to live your life?

In 2025 I made a commitment
And this is what happened ⬇️

When you show up everyday 

(Technically not everyday, because I started posting in February, I took Burning Man off and have been on a hiatus for the holidays, but you get my point 😜).

That said, I wanted to leave you all with a note about what is possible when:

🐉 You believe in yourself
🐉 Show up diligently
🐉 Authentically share what you know and are passionate about

🫴🏻✨✨✨ 

This year wasn’t easy, I don’t have a home because I am in a new city or country every 2-3 weeks then… Why pay rent? 

Instead, I used the money to invest in myself:

⚡️ Travel to the events and meetings I knew would catalyze my next step 
⚡️ Checked off every medical treatment in my bucket list
⚡️ Hired a team to help me manage my brand and community

The last, felt so weird at first. 
How can I rationalize having employees to just manage “me” (as opposed to a company)?

But now CarinaCunha (dot) com has 3 employees and more are coming to help me better assist all of you reaching out! 

Could I have ever guessed a year ago when I was planning to come back to LinkedIn we would be here today? 

Not at all! 😶

But I couldn’t be happier 😆

Not because being one of the best in the world in a highly competitive niche doesn’t strike my ego a little… 😏 

But because by sharing myself with you, and having you receive it so well helped me feel the confidence to be more ME. 

And for those who don’t know my story…
Having permission to be myself, it’s one of the biggest gifts you could imagine (I come from a home where I was told I was worthless, unlovable, fundamentally broken, etc…)

So thank you 🙏🏻 

Whether I continue to post on LinkedIn or not (which of course I will 😉) your support helped me have the love and appreciation I never had growing up. 

For that I’m truly grateful 🤍

I hope you all have a beautiful end of the year and to an A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. 2026!!!

Let’s make some magic! 🪄

Carina Cunha

I avoid delivering proposals via email.
 
Many founders think sending a proposal is efficient. 
 
❗It’s an expensive mistake❗

(Data shows, face-to-face requests succeed 34 times more often than emails)
 
When someone sits alone with your proposal, 
you don't know what they are interpreting.
 
 👉🏻 They see the price without context
 👉🏻 They misunderstand a deliverable
 👉🏻 They compare you to three other proposals sitting in their inbox
 
And you are NOT there to clarify.
 
I run through proposals on a call. Live.
 
It is your single biggest leverage point to be able to hear their objections in real time. 
 
⚠️ If they say "this seems expensive," I can explain the value immediately.
 
⚠️ If they say "what does this deliverable actually include," I can clarify before they make assumptions.
 
⚠️ If they are quiet on a section, I know something is off and I can address it.  

When you send a proposal via email, you give up control.
 
 👉🏻 They read it alone
 👉🏻 They form opinions without you
 👉🏻 They circulate to other stakeholders with incorrect explanations 
 
And then they ghost because they convinced themselves it is not a fit.

Why in the world would you give up leverage voluntarily?

Betrayal has a pattern.


I have watched founders be ghosted by:

👻 Investors who promised funding
👻 Partners who abandoned mid-launch
👻 Advisors who add no value

Every scar came from someone who claimed they believed in the vision.

And when people breach commitments, they avoid you. 

That silence is admission.

And the same people who ghosted you during your trough, come back in your peak.

⚡ They see your company growing. 
⚡ Your name being mentioned. 
⚡ Your posts gaining traction.

Suddenly they remember you exist.

⚠️ They casually send "Hey, been thinking about you"
⚠️ They comment on your posts
⚠️ They want to grab coffee and "catch up"

But leaving when pressure rises was not about your situation. 

They left over character.

➡️ Character is not a function of how many zeros you have in your bank account.

Once someone shows themselves there is no going back. 

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

When life gives you lemons ⬇️



You go kite surfing in Panama 💁🏻‍♀️

Let's rewind…

One of my projects was delayed. So instead of filling up my routine with other work, I decided to meet a friend at a kite surfing school in Panama.

Kite surfing was on my bucket list of sports to take on so… why not?

That is pretty much the attitude that I take with most things in life: "If I can, I want, I shall"

As cliche as it sounds, I believe in living life to the fullest.

Thinking purely logically: "Time is our only limited resource"

It's my ultimate principle. So I went.

➡️ Got a one-way ticket to Panama.
➡️ And learned how to kite surf.

But…

I realized it was not for me.

Because of the very reason I chose to go ⬇️
"Time is our only limited resource" (I know, poetic)

The ROI wasn't there for me.

⚠️ It's so time consuming: traveling, prepping, wind windows, dealing with the gear, etc.

But I'm still glad I gave it a solid effort.

Now that energy that was leaking, wondering what it could be like, can be reallocated somewhere else.

 👉🏻 To hobbies that I love like: weight lifting, calisthenics and boxing.

The ROI for those is both exponential and multidimensional.

🐉 Exponential = each hour spent directly compounds benefit
🐉 Multidimensional = healthier, stronger, hotter 😜

What is your kite surfing?

And are you leaking energy not going for something you want?

Founders are catching a disease that kills businesses.

Steve Jobs saw it destroy Apple after he left.
He said John Scully had it.

Most founders still do.

And many don't realize they have it until two years in when the product still does not work and the team stopped believing in it six months ago.

The disease: Thinking a great idea is 90% of the work.

 👉🏻 You crystallize the vision
 👉🏻 Align all stakeholders, align team
 👉🏻 Assume execution is delegation

Then reality hits.

⚠️ Integration requires 6 months
⚠️ Adoption costs 4x what you modeled
⚠️ Customers abandon features they requested
⚠️ Your team cannot ship at the pace you assumed

Jobs put it aptly: Between a great idea and a great product sit thousands of hours of craftsmanship you did not account for. The idea never survives unchanged.

Building a product means holding 5,000 variables in your head and fitting them together in ways that actually function.

🧠 Some founders I talk to can pitch beautifully.
⚠️ Ask them how to acquire and retain and… nothing.

They are vague.

That vagueness is where companies die.

And you can avoid it.

Don’t hire people to understand things for you.

⚡ Sit in 12 sales calls without speaking. 
⚡ Watch 8 customers use your product with no guidance.
⚡ Track why 10 prospects chose the incumbent over you.

Avoid making the expensive mistake of assuming a product sells itself.

If you don't understand customer needs and behavior, 
you have caught the disease killing businesses.

This is why you are not closing.

(or even booking meetings with investors and customers.)

There is no shortage of founders trying to close in one call.

Or a website that is a content dump expecting a stranger to convert, when in reality they will bounce off the page within 5 seconds.

(The average website bounce rate is between 26% and 70%)
 
That is how you LOSE deals.
 
❌ Your job is not to close in one go. 
➡️ Your job is to take them to the next step of the funnel.
 
Think about sales like dating. 
You are not proposing on the first date. 
You are making them to agree to a second one.
 
🧠 Your website should only have enough information to make people book a call. Not to close the deal without human interaction.
 
🧠 Your deck should only have enough information to make an investor want a meeting. Not to finalize an investment decision.
 
If you provide all the information upfront, 
why would they want to talk to you?
 
They can make that decision without you.

When that happens (and it will), you lose control.
 
⚠️If you don't have those calls scheduled, 
⚠️ you are not in control of the sales cycle.
 
Life happens. Things get pushed back. Interest dissipates.

Now, do you have any more questions as to why they ghosted you in the first place?

"Is there one thing you look for in pitch decks that gives it a 100% chance of putting them forward?"

This is the most frequent question founders ask me.

Yes, traction.

And traction can be understood in multiple ways.
It doesn't just mean revenue.

It could be: 

⚡ The progress of your technology
⚡ The number of people in your community
⚡ Alpha customers/tester validation of your product
⚡ The media exposure of your company and founding team

What I look for is evidence that you are building something people want - not what you imagine they do.

When you show me traction, 
even without revenue:

🐉 I know you are testing and responding to feedback. 
🐉 You are building outside of an echo chamber.

➡️ If you raised two million and built a complete solution without validating whether anyone wants it? 

🚩🚩🚩 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

I would rather work with someone who raised nothing, has a manual solution, but has tested their MVP with hundreds of people.

So, be creative with your traction.

2026 is here and I have a BIG question for you ⬇️


What are your top 3 goals for the year?

According to professor Gail Matthews 42% of people are more likely to achieve their goals just by writing it. 

Shall we make 2026 the best year yet? 💥😆

Oh and PS: new profile picture for those of you that were used to my previous blue background.

What paralyzes founders faster than rejection?

Freedom.
Camus (French philosopher who wrote about human freedom) believed people fear freedom more than suffering.

Because freedom removes EVERY excuse.

➡️ THAT responsibility is what most founders run from.

⚠️ 14 investors reject on the same grounds. The founder schedules 20 more with identical positioning.

⚠️ Revenue stagnates for 6 months. The founder attributes it to market timing.

⚠️ Customers abandon after onboarding. The founder blames the sales team.

Sunk cost preference overrides strategy revision.

Admitting the approach failed = admitting resource allocation was suboptimal.

So the founder:

schedules more meetings,
burns additional capital,
defends the positioning.

🧠 Camus said meaning is created through messy, imperfect, vulnerable action.

❗Founders skip the vulnerable part by blaming timing, market conditions, bad luck❗

Vulnerability requires specificity.

 👉🏻 Map the last 12 customer decisions. Identify where positioning diverged from what they purchased.

 👉🏻 Audit which assumption were misleading. Specify what resource reallocation follows.

 👉🏻 Answer: "If I started today, what would I do differently?"

Founders who lack intellectual rigor defend faulty logic in the guise of executing strategy.

And survival depends on distinguishing between the two.

Your raise will not go as planned
Your best hire will quit at the worst time
Your product launch will expose gaps you never mapped

And if your execution requires perfect conditions, congratulations, 

➡️ You set yourself up for failure.

I watch this pattern repeat:

Founders who function brilliantly when conditions are perfect. Change one metric, and execution stops for three months.

A classic case of dependence on ideal circumstances.

The founders who secure capital prepare for volatility.

⚡ They launch without the ideal co-founder
⚡ They advance regardless of market conditions
⚡ They continue when metrics disappoint

They operate from: What can I control right now?

🐉 When I pitched on Dragon's Den, my product malfunctioned.

⚠️ Prototypes failed on camera
🧠 But the thesis held

🐉 So I held the room and closed regardless.

You don't grow by waiting for ideal circumstances.

You grow by building systems that function under pressure.

What Nietzsche called "herd morality," founders love to call it "building." 

Or in other words… Delusion

Most founders are performing what venture capital expects a company to look like while deluding themselves into thinking they are building a company.
 
 👉🏻 Polite pitch decks
 👉🏻 Predictable metrics 
 👉🏻 A familiar sequence of buzzwords
 
⚠️ You orient for what registers well in fundraising conversations instead of what your market actually needs. 

⚠️ You hire the profile investors want to see instead of the person who can solve your actual problems. 

⚠️ You build features that are on “trend” on a roadmap instead of what customers are asking for.
 
You call this strategy. It’s borrowed ambition.
 
Nietzsche said that the real tragedy is wasting your potential by following the herd.

And I could not agree more.

❌ Assimilation is safe, but keeps you small.
➡️ Being an individual is hard, but forces you to grow.
 
Founders often run from discomfort. They pivot into the new trend. They raise more capital to avoid the hard conversation about whether the model actually works.
 
But...

if you are not creating your life, 
someone else is creating it for you.
 
To me, that is the tragedy of obedience.

"What signal should I listen for that tells me if my pitch is landing or if I need to pivot?"
 
I have sat through thousands of pitches. 

You learn to read the room fast.

➡️ They interrupt you.

This is the biggest tell.

❌ When someone stops you mid-pitch to say "wait, so does this solve X?" they are not being rude.

➡️ They are investing time to build a mental model of your solution.

Time is their scarcest resource. When they choose to deploy cognitive energy on you, that's a green flag. 

🧠 Stop your pitch and follow their lead.

Answer the questions most pertinent to them.

Most founders miss this moment.

They worry too much about telling their story to notice if the person actually understands.

I sit through 15-minute pitches where founders talk about things I don't care about. By the time they finish, I have no appetite left to ask what I actually want to know.

And when a founder can't read the room and pivot to what I care about?

 👉🏻 I assume they lack the interpersonal skills to make a company successful.

Because if you can't read one investor in front of you, how will you read customers, employees, or markets?

The interruption is not a disruption.

It's your investor telling you what they need to hear next.

Follow it.

Founders do this and guarantee rejection👇🏻


They gamble and call it pitching.

You forget:

➡️ The first call is about mapping their priorities, 
❌ and instead, explain what you built and hope something resonates.

Fatal.

Here is how you actually get funded 👇🏻

Ask:

🐉 What is costing them time, money, or sanity right now
🐉 What they have tried that didn't work
🐉 What happens if they don't solve this in the next six months

Then listen.

Really listen.

For the exact language they use to describe their problem.

When you pitch back to them, use their words. Tie your solution directly to the priorities they shared.

That connection does not happen in pitching, 
but in discovery.

🐉 If your rejections are about fit, your discovery was insufficient.
🐉 If your rejections are about budget, you diagnosed correctly.

And if they don't see themselves in your pitch...

You are NOT getting their money.

The idea that startups follow different rules died in March 2023.

(With Silicon Valley Bank.)

It exposed the fiction that startups operate under different rules than businesses.

For years, founders built companies on external funding as life support. $42 billion drained in one day proved what happens when traction is optional and burn is permanent.

The market corrected.

And investors stopped funding potential and started funding proof.

By 2024, the median Series A company needed $2.5M in annual revenue - 75% higher than 2021.

30% of deals closed flat or down.

The era of inflated valuations backed by hope? Over.

But, most founders still pitch like the old rules apply.

⚠️ They follow YC playbooks instead of business fundamentals.

⚠️ They project unrealistic timelines and costs because someone told them startups move faster.

⚠️ They pitch TAM without traction, roadmaps without revenue, and expect investors to bet on ambition alone.

Investors deploy capital:

🐉 Where time is already been spent
🐉 Where the model works at smaller scale
🐉 Where proof exists before capital amplifies it

Because a startup IS a business.

And in every business, proof precedes scale.

Startups were never the exception.
They were the experiment.

After listening to 1000+ pitches, here is what actually gets investors to write a check.

But before I give you the cues that work,
let me tell you what does not.

⚠️Long answers in short meetings.

When a founder takes 4 minutes to answer a 30-second question, they reveal:

❌ They cannot isolate the variable that matters
❌ They are stalling because they don't know

Either way, the meeting is over before it began.

Here is what actually piques investor interest:

🐉 Traction.

Actual numbers that prove people are buying what you are selling. Revenue, retention rates, payback periods.

(And if you don't have revenue, show me another sign of traction that is relevant for your business. Waitlist conversions. Pilot completions that led to procurement.)

🐉 Efficient pitch decks

Answering three questions:

👉🏻 Why this exists
👉🏻 Why it exists now
👉🏻 Why this is the team to build it

Your deck should fix articulation and synthesis problems (you don't have to follow arbitrary silicone valley rules, shocking? I know)

🐉 Problems the founder lived.

Founders who built solutions to their own pain know:

👉🏻 Where inertia outweighs urgency
👉🏻 Which objections prevent purchase
👉🏻 What they will pay to solve

That is your unfair advantage.

Without one of these, the check stays in their account.

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