Episode 73: Part-1: View adversity as an opportunity, How to slow down and intensify focus, Learnings from living in 35+ countries, How love for food has influenced his career w/Nuno Goncalves Pedro
About Nuno Goncalves Pedro:
In the realm of innovation and strategy, few individuals embody the true spirit of transformation, possessing a unique blend of strategic prowess, unwavering determination, and a passion for creating lasting impact. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, the co-founder of Chamaeleon and Strive Capital, epitomises this rare breed of visionary leaders.
Welcome to The One Percent Project, where we delve into the minds of extraordinary individuals who have achieved remarkable success and made a significant impact in their fields. In this episode, we have the privilege of hosting a true thought leader, Nuno Goncalves Pedro.
With a background that spans the realms of technology, strategy, and entrepreneurship for over two decades, Nuno has carved a unique path in the corporate world. As a former senior leader at McKinsey, specialising in Technology, Digital, Media, and Telecom, he has a wealth of experience guiding organisations through complex digital transformations.
As a co-host of Tech Deciphered, a top 3% podcast globally, Nuno dives deep into the intricacies of the tech industry, shedding light on emerging trends and deciphering the complexities that shape our digital landscape. As a sought-after speaker, advisor, and board member, Nuno shares his strategic insights and invaluable expertise with audiences around the globe through his podcast.
Join us in part one of this two-part series, to listen to Nuno’s reflections on his career, his unique perception of adversity and how to deal with it, his experiences of staying in more than 35+ countries, his views on food as an art form, and much more. Get ready for an enlightening conversation that will leave you inspired, motivated, and armed with invaluable insights to unlock your own potential.
Subscribe to the show wherever you listen to it and sign up for The One Percent Project's "Think" newsletter at onepercent.live for curated content that adds value to your professional and personal development.
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Key takeaways:
Embracing and catalysing rejection and adversity can lead to personal growth and resilience. Instead of solely focusing on enduring and overcoming difficult situations, one should perceive rejection and adversity as positive catalysts. By actively processing and practising how to navigate these challenges, individuals can develop the ability to extract valuable lessons, bounce back stronger, and view adversity as an opportunity for personal and professional transformation.
Adversity can prompt individuals to slow down and cultivate a focused state of mind. In the face of challenging situations, living in the present rather than being consumed by anxieties about the future or lingering on past experiences is important. By intentionally slowing down and embracing a state of slowness, individuals can find inner peace and regain a sense of calm, which enables clearer thinking, heightened awareness, and improved decision-making.
Embracing cultural diversity and approaching the world with genuine curiosity and empathy leads to a deeper understanding of others, breaks down barriers, and paves the way for meaningful connections and collaborations across different cultures and backgrounds.
In this conversation, he talks about:
Transcript:
Pritish: Welcome Nuno to The One Percent Project.
Nuno: Thank you for having me, Pritish.
Pritish: So, let's start with how you reflect on your career.
Nuno: I have a really strange career. I've been working now for almost twenty-seven years. Many people would say different careers. I try to compartmentalise it into four stages. I'm an engineer by background, I started as a computer engineer and developed production software that's, shockingly enough, in production today. Probably just a testament to the side affair of IT development. And I became a product manager, so that was the beginning of my career. To be honest, the product management piece never really left me. We might come back to that later. Secondly, I was what we used to call a Line Manager, what we in Silicon Valley now call a Growth Operator, someone who does strategy, product, corporate development, business development, organic and inorganic sources of growth plus the strategy side. I did a lot of really cool stuff around then, a couple of really big scale-ups; very proud of some of the things we did, learned how you take an organisation from ten to a thousand, which is pretty incredible. And then, I had an intermediary, which I'm not sure if it qualifies as a career, but it was definitely six years of my life that were really vital in many ways, in which I was with McKinsey and Company in Asia Pacific. I was a senior expert and member of the Asia Pacific Technology, Media, and Telecom leadership team. And I was based in Beijing, worked extensively across Asia, and missed Asia nearly, honestly. And then the last step of my career really has been as an entrepreneur in venture capital. I'm now working on my second VC firm and my third fund called, Chameleon. I did another VC firm called Strive Capital, which I still am one of the managing partners of. And then I do a variety of other things on the side. I always make the joke that I don't suffer from ADHD, I enjoy every minute of it. I have a podcast called Tech Deciphered with Bertram Schmidt, who was the founder and former CEO of Annie. We do a variety of other things together. I'm also still independent of a couple of companies and an advisor—so really, four stages to my life and career. I can maybe tell you why I had such a strange career in these four careers in one, in quasi twenty-seven years, but that's basically it. That's the sort of four epics of my life.
Pritish: Brilliant, and I highly recommend the podcast. Definitely, the links will be in the show notes. It's an amazing breakdown of how technology is evolving, especially in Silicon Valley, and what kind of impact it's bringing to the global audience. And we will dive into a number of things that you just talked about, but let's get into first and talk about adversity. You gave a popular and famous talk about adversity, how it has impacted you, how you've grown out of it, and what you've learned. So, tell us what happened in 2017 or what you realised in 2017 and how it has helped you evolve.
Nuno: Yeah, it was a particularly difficult year of my life. It was the year of my divorce. Funnily enough, I'm still very good friends with my ex-wife, but I'm Catholic. And so, the divorce was a very traumatic experience. It was very lengthy, and the process itself was very short, but the process by which we got to divorce was relatively lengthy, and we were separate. And again, for a Catholic person, that's a significant trauma and obviously not the objective of us getting married in the first place. And that's maybe the biggest thing that happened that year, but it was a variety of other things, I was having difficulties professionally finding my next thing. I'd worked on two funds with Strive, and I was figuring out what was the next thing and joined a partnership that didn't quite work out nicely or as nicely as I thought it would in helping them create their venture capital arm. They were really good people, but they weren't my people, and that realisation was very complex to me. So, it was a year of really complex things. I wouldn't say I had an alcohol issue, but I was certainly drinking way too much. I was realising the effects of alcohol, and how it becomes a depressant if you start consuming it very regularly, even if it's not in very high quantities. So, many things amplified it. And the funny thing is this sun that you see in the image today, which people are like, well, why isn't this guy taking the sun away? The sun is my life. I live next to the ocean and one day I looked outside like it is today, sunset is probably going to be in an hour or so, and I couldn't feel happiness. And that may have never happened to me. This is a beautiful place. I'm next to the ocean. I'm five minutes walking from the ocean. I have a very blessed life in more ways than one. And I couldn't really compute it. It was like there was something wrong with me. Am I depressed? What's going on? All these different layers of adversity are small and very large. I was pushed to leave my job with this partnership because, in some ways, they were pushing me to do something that I didn't want to do with a construct that didn't work for me. So, all of this stuff happened at the same time. And at that moment in time, I decided that rejection and adversity in general happen all the time in our lives. They probably happen several times a day. We probably don't notice it. It's like you go and park your car, and someone tells you can't park here. Or you go somewhere and people say you can't do that. Or you go to the bank, and you ask for something, and they say no. So even in small mundane things, rejection and adversity happen all the time. And then sometimes we have bigger adversities. All of us have bigger adversities, some more than others, probably. And those adversities may be more traumatic. And the thing that I kept coming back to, I've done much coaching with entrepreneurs over the years, a little bit by accident. I'm an investor, and then I took a few independent board seats over the years, hustling, and doing all these things. And then some entrepreneurs really wanted to work with me individually, not for me to work with their companies and their startups, they wanted me to work with them. And when that happened, basically, I started developing this methodology around how you catalyse rejection and adversity, not just to withstand it, the whole notion of grit and resilience, which everyone talks about these days. That's cool. Grit and resilience are cool, and it's amazing that people can come out of difficult situations and really push themselves, but could we actually process rejection and adversity as positive catalysts? So, it's one step further. It's not just, I need to get out of this, and I need to get a ladder to get myself out of this hole that I'm in, etc. No, it's like, this is a trampoline. Can I hit it just right so I come back faster and higher? So, it's the other way around. It's not. How can I make this positive for me? And in some cases, it's very difficult. It could be like the death of a significant other, quasi-bankruptcy, or even bankruptcy. It could be many things, but can you catalyse it positively? And the notion of it that I started also evolving in my coaching practice, I don't do much coaching anymore, unfortunately, and sadly. I love coaching, but because I don't have the time and I'm so focused on Chameleon and what we're doing at Chameleon as a VC, there's this important step of the methodology, which is it takes practice to deal with it. It's like athletes. Athletes are really good and go to the Olympics because they practise a lot. They're not just good because they have natural talent, all of this stuff. Some of them do, and some of them might not. They practise a lot at it. And so, the notion is let's be athletes at rejection and adversity. Let's practise really a lot at it to process it. So, once it happens, how do I process it? How do I process it positively? How do I come out of it in a stronger way?
Pritish: Brilliant. This scenario of yours or this adversity also helped you look into how to slow down and probably intensify and focus. So how did that work out and what have you learned out of that?
Nuno: There are a number of hacks that I talked a little bit about in the methodology in the keynote that you mentioned, the rejection and adversity keynote. The core notion and everyone has heard about this in some way or another, is the notion of power of now, the book, the famous book, The Power of Now, the notion of living in the present rather than the future or the past. And unfortunately, people like us who work in the business world, sometimes that might work in startups, the investment world, or in corporations, always have to anticipate the future. In some ways, we must be a bit obsessed about the future. And as the famous Andy Grove book talked about, only the paranoid survives. In some ways you have to anticipate plan B and plan C, you have to figure out what are the scenarios that might happen to your market, to your industry, and all that. So, living in the present is actually a very difficult thing. You also have to take information from the past, what happened to you before, so that you don't repeat the same mistakes. So, the notion of living in the present is not new. I'm not inventing it; I’m not coming to it. It's a notion that I am present and aware of. And it matters because of a couple of reasons: One; it takes away the anxiety of the future. The future, in many cases, creates anxiety. You don't want to have anxiety in your life. You want a plan and to be prepared, but you don't want to be anxious because anxiety takes you from, again, the present, but it's also putting you in a negative realm. A negative realm of something that didn't happen might not even happen. And so, you're just winding yourself up for something that doesn't really matter. And then, obviously, the past brings a couple of other negative things. It brings in traumas, your perception of how other people behave with you, and a bunch of psychological issues like fundamental attribution error and a variety of other things that manifest themselves. So, the ideal stage is for you to be in the present, okay? And that's at a very micro level; it’s internal. This is the complex part. It's not about you stop to think about the future, you're not having budget planning discussions, it's not that. It's about whether you can be fully present in all your interactions, can you be fully present and aware once you tell yourself that you need the space to regain calm? So, slowing down is about that. Slowing down is about finding that peace, finding that moment. And that is a very powerful state because once you're in that moment, in that zone of peace and slowness, you think clearer. You see everything clearer. Actually, you even see the future clearly in some ways. I practised two sports, and since I was a kid, I've been told by my family and parents, and it's probably true, I always had difficulty with my hands and doing stuff with my hands. And they always treated me as a smart guy, an intelligent guy. So, he does stuff, and that's great. And so, we will allow him not actually to work with his hands. We'll do stuff for him, which is not a great thing. If you have kids and they're not very good with their hands, emphasise the work rather than the outcome. Maybe the outcomes won't be great, but if they put in the effort, that's great. And so, I decided to go with two sports that are the opposite of my skills. I clearly have difficulties with hand-eye coordination, so I race cars and I play table tennis. Other sports might require a lot of hand-eye coordination, but these two require a lot. And one is semi-life or death, and the other is a little bit less life or death, but it's much more micro. And in both sports, I notice the moment where I am the fastest in the race car driving, the moments where I'm doing my movements in table tennis, my top spins, my undercuts, or my under-spins in the best possible way, are the moments where I am fully in flow, where I'm fully present. In some ways, I'm fully there, and there isn't anything else. And everyone thought, oh, but race car driving must be so exciting. It's the opposite. There's an amazing documentary on Senna, obviously after his passing, which talks about this race in Monaco where he was leading, and he had this stupid accident. The guy's leading by, I don't know, 30-something seconds from second place, which is silly. And he had an accident, and he described it by saying, there were lapses, a bunch of lapses I don't remember, and then there was a moment that I had a thought, and I hit a wall. So, what effectively happened is that he got out of the flow. He was in flow for a bunch of lapses. He doesn't remember them. He was going faster and faster and faster. And at a certain point in time, something happened in his head that popped up a movement, and it took him out of the flow, and he just hit a wall. And that's what happens in our lives. We have too many distractions. We have too many things thrown at us. We have messaging apps everywhere; we have email. It's very difficult to be in a state where you say, okay, I'm going to be here and have this conversation with Pritish, or I'm going to be here and have this conversation with my colleague, or I'm going to be here and listen to this startup, which is the 10th startup I'm listening to this week. So, all of that's very complex, but that act of presence and slowness is very important. It's also true that in the race car driving and table tennis, the ball is coming slower in some ways when you start seeing things slower. By the way, the ball is not, but if your brain is processing it slowly for some reason, you're playing better, racing better, and seeing things more clearly, and that's exactly what that slowness means. It’s not about dolce tarantante and we don't have active lives, and we don't work 67-hour weeks. That's not it. It's about having these states as much as possible of slowness, awareness, and presence.
Pritish: Brilliant. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, that's the book you were referring to, is brilliant. I've read it so many times and recommend it to everybody. It's a very thin, simple book, but it conceptually gives you an idea of how important the power of now is, and I don't think we can explain it as much as we may want, but reading the book helps, and obviously, he has a great YouTube channel as well. You have lived and worked in 35 countries, which would have been an experience. Double-click on that. How has that shaped you? What have you learned, and what have you taken away from the different countries?
Nuno: Two aspects. One is, and I don't know why this happened to me, but there was a moment where my parents got a bit confused, and they were like, maybe someone got the wrong baby at the maternity. This guy was born, which is, I made my first trip to the Benelux, so this is like Germany, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. That's the Benelux. And you know, my parents were quite liberal, so I went into places that I shouldn't have. I was five. I went into places that shall not be named, certain streets in Amsterdam, certain places, and certain shows in Paris. I was five again, which I probably shouldn't have gone into, but this is Europe. Our tour guide was more than shocked that my parents were like whatever. In particular, my mother is very liberal like that. And at the end of the trip, we returned to Portugal, and they were like, " What was your favourite thing? And they were expecting some of these things like the streets in Amsterdam or whatever, the show in Paris or whatever. And I was like, “I really like Cologne and Germany.” And they're like, okay, and why? Not very obviously, Cologne has beautiful cathedrals, but it's not a very obvious place to mention after this trip. And I was like because things work. And at that moment, there was this notion that this kid is different. He's a bit Portuguese, but he's in Latin, and he is a bit Germanic, but Anglo-Saxon captures it better. A bit in the middle in some ways. That was the first instructional piece of my life. As I grew up, I was subject to a lot of different cultures. My parents would travel with me in the summer. Funnily enough, my sister lives abroad in Germany. As you mentioned, I live in the US and have lived all over. My parents have never lived abroad. My father passed away a couple of years back, but they never lived abroad, which is really interesting. It was an openness to the world that my parents gave me, particularly my mother. Because of this notion, she never treated me like a kid. She always talked to me like I was an adult. The language she would use, the way she would talk to me, she never treated me like I was a kid. And that, in some ways, edified my curiosity about the world, which probably led me to become a venture capitalist. I'm curious about the world. I'm generally curious, and if you generally go curious into the world with relatively low prejudices, which doesn't mean you don't have your moral standards, ethics, and all that stuff. As I said, I'm Catholic. There is certain doctrine and moral that I abide by. But if you go into a situation of curiosity, without having the prejudices, without having the biases, or as little as possible, we all have biases and everything, but if we can diminish the biases, it's incredible. Because you see things that are not obvious. And you mentioned the 35 countries that I either lived in or worked in, every country had something to tell me. I remember working in Dhaka in Bangladesh, which is not a very obvious place for you to have a great eureka moment if you are in tech, for example. But there were great eureka moments for me. I remember working with a particular client there, and the quality of the guys, particularly the junior guys on the team, was like silly high. They were just so smart. And I was like, here we are, a country where we have at least eight brownouts a day. Stuff goes up and down, and then comes back up. A country that has suffered, that suffered a civil war that you drive on the streets, or you walk on the streets, and you see the effects. People that are mutilated, systematically begging, or having difficulties. You see that, then you see talent, and you're like, wow, it's irrelevant. And that realisation is very profound. Because it means that, for example, in emerging markets, it's very clear, it was very clear to me for many years. Many people say about me that I see things five to ten years before they happen. It was very clear to me that there was going to be huge leapfrogging in many emerging markets, that many emerging markets were going to be really just going over many other Western markets or developed markets if we want to call them like that, just because they didn't have the infrastructure. Still, they also didn't have a legacy. And because of that, there was no other way to go. You don't talk about countries like this, like mobiles first. They are mobile-first. Like India. They must be because the Internet's infrastructure didn't percolate through fixed, so it had to be mobile. And that is what I find amazing. This multiculturality, how people deal with you, how they interact, why you have a card in your hand, and you give it with two hands when you're meeting a Japanese business partner, you know, why you should bring business cards to a meeting with a Japanese partner or a potential Japanese partner. All these little things matter because, at the end of the day, it's all about creating empathy and interaction. And many people would say, oh, it's hacks. Cool. You can use it as a hack. I believe in authenticity. So, creating an authenticity that sort of mirrors, or at least empathises with, the culture that you're interacting with is an incredibly powerful way. It's incredible to do business. It's incredible to create friendships. It's incredible to bridge the world. And the most interesting thing to me, I remember someone telling me it wasn't me. I didn't come up with this. I was in a taxi cab, I swear to you, in Southeast Asia. I don't recall exactly where, but I was either in Singapore or in Malaysia, and the guy in the taxi cab that was driving me, this wasn't Uber or whatever, this was just a guy in the taxi cab. His English was a bit broken. He just turned to me and said the world would be a much better place if people saw the world as you do. And, I was like, what? I have to process this. Wait a sec. Very flattering. Of course. Very flattering. But let me process this. And what he was saying is, if the world was subject to tremendous, to almost forced empathy where you need to interact in those environments, you need to live there, you need to work there, you need actually to do business there, people would understand that at the end they were sort of all very similar. We have different cultural backgrounds with different views of family, but we are all very similar. We have little differences that come from culture, language, many years of history, background, etc. And that taxi cab driver now, I'll never forget what he says. It's like the world would be a better place, the world would be a better place. And that's what we're missing sometimes, that multicultural exchange we all understand. Oh yeah, I understand. Hugo Guy on Sandhill World, which is where all VCs here are in Silicon Valley. I've done a bunch of business in Asia and whatever. Yeah. What sort of business did you do? What propels you to have these discussions? We talked about China today. China is obviously in the news, without wanting to go one way or the other. Well, my time in China was profound. It changed my life in many ways. People have so many misconceptions about the Chinese. I make this comment once in all; the average Chinese is much more similar to the average American than people think. This notion of capitalism as making its work of making money and going to the next level is relatively embedded in Chinese society. There are aspects of Chinese society that are very different. The notion of families is very different. In some ways more positive to me than, in some cases, certainly the coasts of the U.S. But people miss something about this, and then they look at the other guys. There's this analogy in cars and in racing as well, which is that it's actually good to know there's another person in that car. It's not you and a car on the other side. It's you and a person. That creates more empathy. It creates sort of an attitude of a bit more respect. It doesn't mean you're not trying to overtake them, but in some ways, that's it. We talk about China and Chinese, for example, sometimes in the U.S., like it’s something. It’s not something. It's a bunch of people, individuals, and we must look at that.
Pritish: Two observations. The realisations you had in Dhaka make us, people like you and me, understand how privileged we are and how we were born at the right place and time for the right opportunities. And the second is when you looked at all of these scenarios, and you talked about Japan and China as well, that you give a business card with two hands and people call it a hack, which is a misrepresentation of what is actually culture and appreciation of that. If it is communicated in a way that this is a culture and somebody appreciates your culture, there is much more empathy, as you mentioned, and much more collaboration. I feel that hack is a much abused word for things where we should actually use the literal understanding of the concept.
Nuno: I agree. And I'm a hacker, just to be clear. So, I do use things in my life as hacks, and then I sometimes transform. But I agree with you. It's an understanding of culture that comes from an understanding that people are different, and their culture, in many ways, also makes much sense. And you need to understand what that brings to the table and that interaction.
Pritish: Before getting into Chameleon, we must discuss your love for food and restaurant list. How did that happen, and how has that influenced you?
Nuno: I'm a nerd. It's when I get into something, I really get into something, so I go deep. That's, for me, the definition of being a nerd. You go deep into whatever you get excited about, and food is a passion. I love eating. I loved eating too much. I've lost 60 kilograms, 130 pounds over a period of years. Actually, how I look has changed dramatically, and I'm very thankful for that. But I love food, and what started happening was I remember one of the first times I recall going to a Michelin-star restaurant; it was a three-star Michelin-star restaurant. One of only two in London at that point in time was Gordon Ramsey at Royal Hospital Road, the one that made Gordon Ramsey famous. I was like, there’s something about this that's different. It's a Michelin-star experience. It doesn't necessarily have to be a Michelin-star experience. I love holes in the walls, bars, restaurants, and food in the middle of the street. I love any food. The specificity of these types of higher-end experiences is I started realising there's probably, in my opinion, they are the highest form of art because it's like, there's a mise en scene, there's like a, there's the aspect of the room, there's the aspect of the plates and everything that gets put together. People, there's the mise en scene of people reacting to the servers and the waiters bringing things to you, and the way they bring it to you, the way they explain it, the way they serve you. There's then the smell of the food, the aesthetic of the food, the form of the food. And then there's the taste of the food. And if you think about art forms, this is a pretty complete art form because sensory wise, you're touching almost all senses. Maybe hearing is the one that's a little bit lighter, but even in hearing there could be background music, there's sound, there's motions of sound, etc. And so, for me, that's what got me into it. And so, I started looking at it as art and started trying to empathise with the people that are in the kitchen that work ridiculous numbers of hours and really hard, and chefs and everyone, chefs, brigades, etc, as artists. And so, if they're artists, you have to treat them like that. You have to interact with them like that. You have to touch their lives like that. And you have to ask them about their lives. And there's something, an old friend of mine used to say about me that I'm very good at natural stupidity. I took it as a compliment. I've used that sentence all the time in the past. I ask questions, which might seem a bit idiotic, but in retrospect are really good questions for people really then, and so I started doing that with chefs. People would bring me there. There's this rule that many people follow, which is never dine alone. I don't agree with that. I sometimes dine alone, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I do. So, it depends on the circumstances. But because of that, I started getting access to kitchens. People would bring me to take a photo with the chef, but I didn't see the kitchen, and I would talk to them and they'd give me the signed copy of the menu and we'd take all these things. And so, what started happening was I had this idea to create a list because I'm so nerd, I need to have a list. So, I created a list of all the Michelin star restaurants that I've been to. So not the Central Green List, it's the Nuno List, which are the best restaurants I've been to that are Michelin Star. That's it. And as I go through the list, I reevaluate things sometimes because you know you have an effect on it at night, over the day off, and then you have to ponder on it again and talk about it. I made chefs cry because they weren’t number one on the list, they weren’t very high on the list. I've had some really incredible experiences with people, but there's always a tremendous amount of respect. For me, they're fundamentally artists. There's much sweat in what they do, but they are artists, and that's how all that was started. I have friends now that ask me for tips. I haven't really shared the list. I haven't figured out the right way to share the list yet. I'm probably going to do some experimentation with TikTok and a few other platforms to see how to do that, but people ask me for advice. People have actually asked me for advice and said they would pay me, which is very flattering for the advice, just for the advice. And for me, it's second nature. It's not like I'm doing this for a thing. It's not like I'm going to make money out of this. It's a thing. It's just my own way of processing things. As I said, I'm a bit nerdy like that.
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