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Portugal is a country of entrepreneurs of learn to be a strong loser who then trains and
which style?
You are very great Makers because you
have top engineers. Interestingly, you also
have Athletes and here I like to use the word
“desenrascar” that defines this very
Portuguese attitude of making it happen even
if it seems impossible. On the other hand,
there are some areas where you need to
improve, regarding Evangelists, to be better at
marketing, communicating the brand and the
story of your products and ideas.
Regarding that, what is the importance of
storytelling in the digital age?
Everything... Imagine you only have 10
seconds to interest someone when you meet
them, or you only have 10 slides to get
investment. In my current venture Redbridge
Lisbon, I write a lot of stories about Portugal
and California and I realize that people forget
that storytelling is an essential professional
talent today... even in social media.
You must share a lot of success stories at
Redbridge... but what about failure? Do you
talk about that too?
The Portuguese entrepreneurs are
understandably more afraid of failure
because they don't yet have this culture that
is more accepting of failure than we have
here in Silicon Valley. How do you change
that? Surround yourself with a new
community, like this one at Redbridge or
another, where there are people who will have
your back, support you and help you because
you can't succeed without failure. I don't
mean you have to go bankrupt and lose all
your money, but you will have setbacks,
hurdles, and challenges that will be essential.
I was an elite athlete when I was young,
playing European soccer at university.
Americans are very competitive in sports and
in sports, you always lose and you have to
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competes another day. This is something I try
to instill in the Portuguese: that we have to
be more battle-tested and play more games.
What trends are you currently predicting
that might be the next theme of your book?
I can't tell you (laughs), but I would say I'm
so excited about Redbridge that I feel it will
be something related to this concept of
countries and cities collaborating with each
other.
California is the state with the 5th largest
economy in the world, it's acting like a
country... and one with a lot of influence.
We're saying yes to climate change initiatives
and to women's rights, and we're saying no to
guns, and I think the more states, countries,
and cities act responsibly, the more potential
there is for the individuals and companies.
From the printing press to AI
For Jonathan Littman, the innovation with
the most impact on humanity in the past was
the printing press: “from poets to writers and
visionaries, this was the technology that
eventually led to the computer. In the future, it
will be artificial intelligence, “but we should all
be very careful because if something starts to
work too quickly, we can surprise ourselves and
even lose control by how quickly it is
implemented.”