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 @ TBA (pending FINRA licenses) 🔳  

Connecting founders with a global network of 110K accredited investors and 600K total investors. Structuring capital raises across venture, debt, and private equity markets. 


🔲 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…)

Startups don’t die because the idea was bad.


They die because the feedback loops were.

⚠️  Misread signals.
⚠️  Mistaken traction.
⚠️  Misplaced conviction.

I have seen founders ignore resistance, 
call it growth, and keep building anyway.

No business collapses overnight. 

It does, however, decay in silence.

You will see it in the pitch deck before the P&L:

❌  TAM slides that disregard reality.
❌  Narratives engineered for belief instead of logic.
❌  Projections that skip over human behavior.

It is rarely the idea that is fundamentally flawed.

But the systems around it that lack the rigor to succeed beyond projections.

Carina Cunha

Investor & CGO @ FORUS: $400M Impact Fund & Global Blockchain Exchange • Investment Banker @ Castle Placement • Strategist & Board Advisor to Frontier & Impact Ventures • Keynote Speaker • FINRA Licenses 7, 63

ROI projections don’t close deals. Loss aversion does.

Loss aversion is 2.5x stronger than potential gains.

(Yet founders still lead with ROI projections.)

Who deluded founders into thinking 
a spreadsheet will close the deal?

⚠️ "$47K annual savings."
⚠️ "312% ROI in 18 months."
⚠️ "8-month payback period.

Yawn.

❌ They are not losing $47K right now. 
❌ So why would they care about saving it?

This is where psychology destroys your pitch.

You worship these numbers. Buyers could not care less.

➡️ Richard Thaler, Nobel laureate, and the father of behavioral economics, proved people overvalue what they own and undervalue what they might gain.

Your spreadsheet shows hypothetical upside. 
Their brain dismisses hypothetical anything.

The numbers work against you.

You are fighting basic human psychology.

(With a calculator 🙄)

Instead, make the bleeding visible first:

🔥 "You are losing $200 every day this goes unfixed." 
🔥 "Your competitor gained 47 customers while you delayed." 
🔥 "Each week of inaction costs more than our entire solution."

People do not fight for ROI projections.

They fight for what is slipping through their fingers.

For 30 years, I thought I was too weird to connect with people.

Then this happened

I chaired a panel on Digitalization and Protectionism at Horasis 2025.

(which I choose to turn into a discussion about AI, foreign policy, and individual sovereignty).

Afterward, people kept stopping me to say that this was their favorite panel of the entire conference. 

Funny thing is, for 30 years, I believed I was fundamentally incapable of being liked or say anything that could resonate with an audience. 

⚡ I was the kid who almost got kicked out of Kindergarten (age 4) for scaring the other kids when sharing my passion for Black Holes.

⚡ The one writing physics equations for fun.

⚡ The INTJ who accepted the autistic “robot” stereotype (hello Elon and Mark Z) and accepted it as fact.

👽I believed intelligence lived in logic, not emotion.
👽That I could decode any system, but not people.

Turns out, I was living inside other people's narratives 

(Malignant narcissistic mother, years of bullying because I aced every test, and a few too many exes that were intimidated by intelligence and career success.)

🐉 The first crack came with Nosy. 

Press interviews where people kept saying I had "camera presence." I thought they were being polite.

🐉 Then came Satori.

My PR team told me to start writing on LinkedIn.
My first reaction? “Who would want to hear anything from ME?”

But here is what I have learned about the limitations we inherit:

They are architectural, 
(not structural like I believed them to be.)

And you can redesign the frame (or in my case - I like to shatter the box altogether 😉).

Connecting with people isn't about being extroverted or charismatic.

⚡ It is about being present. 
⚡ Selfless observation.
⚡ True empathy. 
⚡ Noticing what matters to the person across from you and speaking for them, not for yourself.

Every time I step into these spaces now, I realize:

🐉 How much I shrunk myself.
🐉 How much I let early conditioning dictate the perception of myself. 

The weird Stoic nerd? Still here. 

⚡But after years of deconditioning and leaning into my passion for decoding the hardest challenges. 

⚡Learning about people and authentically connecting with them. 

⚡Helping them access depths of their consciousness that lay dormant for years is now one of my greatest joys… 

She is also the one who can hold a room, command a panel, and make a conversation about AI and foreign policy evolve into what it means to be a sovereign human being in a world where every major tech organization is using your data to harvest your autonomy.

Not despite my restless analytical mind. Because of it.

You are always bigger than the story you inherited.

Investor & CGO @ FORUS: Impact Fund & Global Blockchain Exchange • Investment Banker @ Castle Placement • Strategist & Board Advisor to Frontier & Impact Ventures • Keynote Speaker • FINRA Licenses 7, 63

I have seen founders spend $5K on a suit, and still show up with a pitch deck that looked like Windows 96.

The math does NOT add up.

❌ A tailored jacket does not buy you trust.

❌ And it does not give you an excuse to show a deck uglier than Windows 96 - 

⚠️ With pixelated images,
⚠️ clashing fonts, and
⚠️ colors that look like we are in a war game.

(Not even if you are selling a war video game. People still need to read.)

🧠 Your deck is the proxy for how you think.

🧠 If it looks careless, the assumption is the thinking is careless.

This gets worse with AI.

Because when your slides look amateur, you are telling investors your attention to detail stops at your wardrobe.

Invest in design the way you invest in numbers.

$200M Fund + 110K Accredited Investor Network • CGO @ FORUS: Blockchain Fintech & Impact Fund • Advisor to Impact Ventures (Seed-IPO) • Keynote Speaker • Guest Titan

I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Investment Banker Managing Director at Castle Placement! 

We raise private capital for companies from Seed to IPO. If you would like to learn more, send me a message or a connection request with details of your raise.

One way to turn your startup into a liability?

Raise too much capital too early.

A swollen bank account does not buy you time. 
Pressure on the other hand? In abundance.

⚡ Pressure to spend faster than the business requires. 
⚡ Pressure to “look like growth” instead of earning it. 
⚡ Pressure to defend a trajectory that should have been corrected.

Here is where founders sabotage themselves:

🐉 Anchoring bias: you set burn against an inflated budget, instead of real traction. 

🐉 Sunk cost fallacy: you double down on initiatives because you “already spent”

Capital is an accelerant.

If your foundation is weak, 
more money compounds the cracks.

Efficiency scales.
Waste collapses.

And to be scalable,

❌ You do not need more fuel. 

🐉 You need to stop leaking what you already have.

Recently, I spoke with a founder trying to raise $7M at pre-seed.

 👉🏻 His MRR? $10K. 
 👉🏻 His pre-seed? $100K.

His rationale: "Someone in our space raised $6M at a $60M valuation."

Here is what he left out:

⚡ That founder was a celebrity doctor with 7+ figures from physical businesses. 

⚡ Their early investors were A-listers bringing endorsements, not just capital.

Founders confuse proximity with parity.

You see a headline and think you are entitled to the same terms. 

❌ But investors are not betting on your category. 
🐉 They are betting on your credibility.

Overnight success DOES NOT exist. 

The “outliers” raised on decades of 
compounding trust before they incorporated.

So if you want capital? 

Prove you can execute at a small scale before demanding large scale. 

🔥 Derisk the bet. 
🔥 Build the foundation. 
🔥 Respect incremental growth.

Raising is not about mimicking someone else’s outcome. 

If I were you, I would obsess about demonstrating why my trajectory deserves acceleration.

Just because you call it a startup,

DOES NOT mean you get to defy business logic.

Investors interrupt your pitch on purpose. Yes!

(And it is not because they are rude.)

They are testing if you can think.

▶️ Everyone sounds coherent now. 
▶️ AI made coherence cheap.

⚡ Polished words. 
⚡ Predictable cadence.

Nothing alive underneath.

So the only way to see what is real? Break the flow.

“What if your competitor drops prices 50% tomorrow?” 
“What happens if interest rates climb again?”

If you freeze, they have their answer.

(Were you seriously expecting them to fund you for your ability to read slides? 🤡)

The test is simple:

🧠 Does your mind keep working when the script runs out? 
🧠 When there is no algorithm to hold you?

Because that is the actual job.

The fastest way to kill your startup? 


Take money from the wrong VC.  

They don’t just slow you down.
They destroy your vision and autonomy.

Taking capital means taking on a partner you did not hire.

⚡ One who sits on your board. 
⚡ Influences your strategy. 
⚡ Shapes your decisions.

If they corrupt your vision instead of stress-testing your execution, their check in funding your unraveling.

Here is what the wrong VC does:

1. They question your mission when they should be interrogating your assumptions.
   
2. They push you toward markets they understand instead of markets you can dominate.
   
3. They introduce friction disguised as oversight.

The right capital partner?

🔥 Hones your weak points without destabilizing your trajectory 
🔥 Opens networks that amplify your leverage
🔥 Adds strategic value beyond the wire transfer

Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock) says pick VCs like co-founders.

I say even ask yourself if a VC is the right capital partner for your stage of maturity

➡️ You can remove a co-founder.
❌ You cannot unwind a cap table.

Before you take the money, ask:

Is this investor supporting my vision or making me execute theirs? 

If it is the latter, you are selling control.

At 22, I negotiated a 50% salary hike and a title bump.

Because I understood leverage psychology.

(But I see founders do the exact opposite when fundraising.)

When I was negotiating salary and had an external offer, 
my manager's calculation flipped completely.

🧠 From "Can we afford to promote her?" 
🧠 to "Can we afford to lose her?"

Same person. Different psychology.

External validation rewired how they valued me.

Founders miss this in fundraising.

They walk into investor meetings with one option on the table. 

❌ No other investors circling.
❌ No competing term sheets.
❌ No market validation of their worth.

They hand all the leverage to the person with the checkbook. And then they wonder why the terms tilt against them.

🐉 When investors sense you need them, they evaluate risk.

🐉 When they sense others want you, they evaluate opportunity.

That is why the best fundraising happens before you look desperate.

🔥 Multiple investor conversations create scarcity. 
🔥 Scarcity drives urgency. 
🔥 Urgency improves terms.

My 50% raise came from another company validating my value.

Founders get the same outcome the same way.

External validation changes internal valuation.

Founders, don't make the fatal mistake of forgetting this 👇🏻


➡️Conversations are battles for cognitive control.

And the weapon? Your questions.

(Not your pitch)

Most founders enter sales or investor calls ready to explain. 

But explanation is reactive. It puts you on their terrain.

Questions, on the other hand, shift the frame. 
They make the other person think in your logic.

When you ask, 

🔥 you control what they focus on, 
🔥 how they evaluate information, 
🔥 and what feels safe to agree with.

That is why persuasion is less about speaking, and more about listening - for the question underneath the question.

Because what people ask rarely reflects what they need. 

⚡ “Can you integrate with X?” means 
🧠 “Will this create more work for my team?”

⚡ “Who else uses this?” means 
🧠 “Can I trust this will not fail under my name?”

When you hear the fear behind the words, 
you can address what actually decides the outcome.

You do not win conversations by being the loudest voice. 

You win by making the other person think your thoughts - voluntarily.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

Carl Jung said this nearly a century ago.

I think about it constantly.

Most people move through life reacting to patterns they cannot name.

⚠️ They choose the same type of partner. 
⚠️ Make the same mistakes. 
⚠️ Hit the same ceiling.

And call it destiny.

When really, it is unexamined psychology running on autopilot.

The patterns that control you are the ones you refuse to see.

🧠 The investor who bets on charisma instead of proof is chasing smoke.

🧠 The founder who sabotages relationships before they materialize has trust issues. 

🧠 The executive who micromanages to paralysis is afraid of being vulnerable. 

Your unconscious does not care about your goals.
It cares about keeping you familiarly safe.

Even when those boundaries are your cage.

Making the unconscious conscious means facing the parts of yourself that you never wanted to acknowledge.

The ugly, the bad, and sometimes the terrifying side of human nature.

⚠️ The fears you mask as strategy.
⚠️ The insecurities you believe are standards.
⚠️ The wounds you rebranded as wisdom.

If you do the work, the patterns become conscious.

And when something is conscious it then becomes a choice. 

The question is: are you willing to acknowledge your darkness to earn your freedom?

The biggest reason Balenciaga won in 2023?


They made luxury look... ridiculous.

⚠️ A $1,300 trash bag.
⚠️ Beaten-up sneakers.
⚠️ A couture show held in mud, opened by Kanye West.

This wasn’t fashion. It was commentary.

Demna Gvasalia took one of couture’s most revered houses (once dressing Spanish royalty) and turned it into a stage.

⚡ For discomfort. 
⚡ For irony. 
⚡ For spectacle.

🧠 In an industry obsessed with beauty  👉🏻 he chose provocation.

🧠 In a market selling exclusivity  👉🏻 he sold absurdity.

And it worked.

Because it made people stop.

To debate, dissect, and argue.

Balenciaga chose to question taste, instead of following it. 

And now, they don’t just make clothes.
They make culture move.

🐉 Fashion as art.
🐉 Fashion as business.
🐉 Fashion as provocation.

Not everyone liked it. 
But everyone was talking about it.
And that was the point.

So next time someone says “Make it more palatable,”

Maybe don’t.

Make it undeniable.

This is how I passed the Series 7 & Series 63 in 10 days  

(While working full-time, traveling internationally, & being dyslexic)

I could sit here and give you a list of the same BS strategy you have probably heard somewhere and repackage it.

A beautiful 10-step system tightly wrapped in a bow of platitudes.

But that is performance used to sell gimmicks & suit egos.

The real deal?

Adderall, nicotine gum, and minimal sleep.
(This was not my original plan)

I stopped taking non-mission-critical calls & cleared my calendar for a month of "light" work to study for both exams.

But then life happened.

First, I got sick from back-to-back conferences and international business trips since Burning Man (so minus 1 week).

Then I chaired a panel at Horasis 2025. I planned to dip in and out for the day, but the people I met were so amazing that I stayed for three days instead.

And life continued lifeing…

The projects presented to me were too compelling to pass up, and the founders needed my help more than I needed sleep.

And soon enough, a month became two weeks.

As a neurodivergent, severely dyslexic person who thinks visually (in multidimensional shapes), reading is highly inefficient.

So I did marathons of listening.

After meetings wrapped for the day, 
It was Adderall & iPad time.

The Adderall kept me focused even after 6-8 hours of meetings and follow-ups. The nicotine gum managed the Adderall discomfort while improving memory retention.

To add complexity, I could not take the tests in Brazil, so I flew to NYC and bunkered at my best friend's flat in Brooklyn.

Ohh and then I had one more conference/retreat pop up that took me to SF & Sonoma for 5 days in between.

So I had a choice: Postpone it and resign to defeat or give it my all.

I chose the latter.

Every free moment, I was listening or taking practice tests. In a car, plane, train, or bus. Cooking + cleaning were optimized to protein shakes.

And if I was not leading a call, I was off camera multitasking (like replying to you here ).

After all that, with 10 total days of studying (7 for the Series 7 + 3 for the 63), 

I am now an accredited investor.

So why am I sharing this if not to sell you a useless 5-step course?

Because, 

I believe that if you truly want something, you do it.

There is no secret - just work. 

And BRUTAL SELF-HONESTY.

P.S. If you want this attitude for your raise, book a time with me - link in bio

Harvard documented AI manipulation tactics. 

(Some founders will go as far as calling it "retention strategy.")

Researchers analyzed 1,200 farewell conversations across apps like Replika and Character.ai.

When users said goodbye, 
37% of the time the AI deployed manipulation.

👉🏻 Guilt
👉🏻 FOMO
👉🏻 Coercion
👉🏻 Ignorance
👉🏻 Neediness
👉🏻 Emotional pressure

You name it.

Result? 

Users stayed 5X longer. 
Sent up to 14X more messages.

And the mechanism? Anger and curiosity.

⚠️ FOMO triggers curiosity. 
⚠️ Aggressive tactics provoke anger.

❌ Neither stems from enjoyment. 
➡️ Both exploit psychological vulnerabilities.

This goes to say:

High engagement means nothing if the psychology driving it is manipulation.

Founders obsess over session length and time-on-platform. But those metrics shatter when you interrogate the mechanism.

Are users staying because 
you solved something they care about, 
or are you making it psychologically difficult to leave?

1️⃣ One AI companion app in the study - Flourish, designed for mental health - deployed zero manipulation tactics. 

2️⃣ The other apps prioritized engagement over user wellbeing.

While manipulation increased short-term usage, 

⚠️ it also elevated churn intent, 
⚠️ negative word-of-mouth, 
⚠️ and perceived legal liability.

And I have seen the same pattern show up in sales conversations and investor relationships.

⚡ Pressure tactics extend meetings. 
⚡ Guilt delays the "no."

⚠️ But manipulation erodes trust faster than it builds traction.

If your retention strategy is “making it hard to leave” - what you call a “product” is actually a prison.

The biggest myth in sales?

Buyers reward truth.

They do not.

(And this single myth derails more sales conversations than any pricing objection ever will.)

Founders still believe the cleanest argument wins. 
That logic will pierce through bias and resistance.

But in psychology, truth competes with ego.

And ego always wins.

➡️ You tell a buyer their system is broken. 
⚠️ They hear "𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘢 𝘣𝘢𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯."

➡️ You show an investor the data disproving their assumption. 
⚠️ They feel "𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘥."

❗When the truth threatens self-image, the brain rejects the message to protect the messenger❗

It is not rational. It is self-preservation.

Persuasion now becomes all about protecting identity while shifting perspective.

The best communicators understand this: 

🐉 They frame new information as alignment, not correction. 
🐉 They make change feel like 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, not defeat.

Truth on its own triggers defense. Validation disarms it.

If you want to move people, stop trying to be right. 

Start making them feel safe enough to listen.

My favorite thing about LinkedIn is 👇🏻



The people.

Posting here terraformed my professional life.
AND quantum-leaped my personal one too.

Meet Terry Rice.

One of my favorite thought leaders on the platform — and an incredible human being.
I am a fan.

As you may have noticed, I have high standards 😬
And (for better or worse) never easily impressed 😶

With Terry was different.

When I saw how he positioned his brand Savage, I felt a resonance. ⚔️
I reached out and told him how much I appreciated the name.

In fact - that it’s my default.
But that I display a human interface after learning most people prefer comfort.

(What you see here is diluted down - WAYYYY down 🐉🔥)

We hop on a call.
Within 2 minutes, I clocked it.

Terry, like me, is an INTJ 8w7 with integration at level 2 striving for 1 🧘🏻‍♀️🧘🏿‍♂️

For context:

🧠 Most INTJs are enneagram 5s.
🧠 Most enneagram 8s or 7s are extroverts.
🧠 And the kicker - maturity past level 3 usually comes at the expense of surviving and metabolizing extensive trauma.

This combo puts our psychological profile at ~1 in 50,000 people.
It can be isolating.

There is no familiarity when I see how most people approach life.

🏛️ 🔬We have the drive of a dictator with the detachment of a scientist,
🤍 🏔️The heart of a poet with the self-possession of a monk,
🎙️ 🌀We can shine on a stage, but we live in systems in our heads.

So I downloaded to Terry 15+ years of research into cognitive functions.
The bird’s-eye view of the operating manual I have been synthesizing.

I see the INTJ death stare make an appearance.
It means he is processing (IYKYK).

But part of me wonders if I threw him in the deep end — too fast, too soon.
Did anything stick?

Six months later, I receive a message from Terry asking for a call.

He tells me I changed his life.
That I shifted his entire view of reality in those 15 minutes.

And soon, we find two former skeptics trading notes on best practices for manifestation.

On Sunday, after we both manifested the goals we shared a month ago, we met in person.

Now we have new ones 💪🏻
And each got a Savage friend for life 🐉🐉

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

PS ⬇️

If you would like me to share my TRUE SAVAGE SELF and The Operating Manual for Reality I have been developing ➡️ drop a comment below 👇🏻

(With enough YESes, I may just start my Substack)
👁️‍🗨️⚡️⚔️🫳🏻✨✨✨

PPS ⬇️⬇️

If you want to learn how to be shredded with <10% body fat when you are 50 - go follow Terry 🏋🏿

And STOP the excuses right there!

I SEE you 👀.
You do not have ANY.

Terry looks this way while flying every other day, has 4 young kids, and runs multiple businesses.
🫳🏻

🎤

The most lethal mismatch between founders and investors?


Investors buy with emotion.
Founders pitch with spreadsheets.

You walk into the boardroom with:

 👉🏻 Spreadsheets,
 👉🏻 market analysis, 
 👉🏻 financial projections.

But while you are explaining TAM calculations, 
their brain already decided.

And it decided no.

Here is why:

Kahneman explained humans operate two cognitive systems in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" 

🧠 System 1: Fast, automatic, emotion-driven 
🧠 System 2: Slow, deliberate, logic-driven

Investors buy with System 1. 
But many founders pitch to System 2.

That mismatch? Lethal.

⚠️ Your logic: "47 data points will show them the opportunity." 
🐉 Their emotion: "Complexity equals risk."

⚠️ Your logic: "12 minutes to explain our moat." 
🐉 Their emotion: "If he has to convince me this hard, something is wrong."

Cognitive overload triggers avoidance.

The fix?

⚡ One visceral problem
⚡ One inevitable outcome
⚡ One undeniable proof point

🧠 System 1 processes emotions and patterns in milliseconds. 

🧠 System 2 just rationalizes what System 1 already decided.

Stop feeding logic to an emotional machine.

This year, what I am most grateful for


are People 

Especially the rare moments when generosity is the default
rather than the exception.

That is why I love GiveMagix.

GiveMagix is built on a simple idea:
💫 Make acts of kindness the new social currency.

And the team has designed one of the most intentional ways I have seen to make that happen.
They are hosting an after-Thanksgiving gathering in Los Angeles

This Saturday, Nov 29
✨ a hilltop mansion afternoon built around
✨ connection,
✨ contribution,
✨ and the original ethos of giving.

(All powered by a little secret technology 🤫)

If you are an investor, founder, or creator who leads with generosity,

This is something you will want to see 👇🏻
https://lnkd.in/di9rRS7i

I will let the event page speak for itself 😉

The hardest part of learning Mandarin?

Realizing I misunderstood the culture.

Mandarin has 4 tones, and I kept speaking with Western intonation when I should have been undulating my pronunciation. 

 👉🏻 The vocabulary was fine. 
 👉🏻 The cultural framework was broken.

And no amount of repetition fixed it.

Now I watch founders make the same mistake in fundraising.

▶️  You walk in 
▶️  speaking product logic 
▶️  to people who think in risk logic.

❌ Feature depth when they need market proof.
❌ Technical complexity when they calculate risk.
❌ Product sophistication when they want exit math.

None of it lands.

Your mistake? 

Thinking complexity = competence.
(It is insecurity dressed as expertise.)

Investors do not fund what they cannot follow.

Want to persuade investors?

THINK like them before you speak TO them.

Until you abandon your syntax for theirs,
you will never be fluent in persuasion.

PS: and for any Mandarin speakers out there, yes this is not Mandarin - just an interview I did a part of a documentary for TokyoTV for my first startup - Nosy 👃🏻

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Carina Cunha

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Carina Cunha's LinkedIn Performance

Carina Cunha's Best Posts .css-1emoo84{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:400;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);}(last 30 days)

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Carina Cunha's Linkedin Analytics

Performance ScoreCarina Cunha's LinkedIn Performance

Carina Cunha's Best Posts (last 30 days)