Keeping the monthly cadence. A lot has moved since we last spoke — here is the honest picture on where Pausa stands, what is coming, and where your network could make a real difference.
Running the first pilot Sprint with an internal team at UFL — pro-bono, by design. The goal is to stress-test the format, collect real feedback, and build the case study that makes the next conversation easier.
We have also opened early conversations with founders at Casa do Impacto about bringing a Sprint to their teams — mission-driven, credible in the ecosystem, the kind of early adopters we would want. Worth saying plainly: ecosystem partners like this move slower than we would have hoped, and we are learning to build our timeline around that reality rather than against it.
The Sprint is a full-day session for 8–12 people. We assess across four dimensions — physical health, mental health, emotional health, and purpose and values — then co-design micro-habits anchored to actual performance outcomes. It is not a workshop. It is a wellbeing map of a leadership team, built together in one day.
We have profiled 26 Portuguese VC funds. 12 are Tier 1 — portfolio size, people focus, and founder community strong enough that a Pausa Sprint partnership is a real fit. Outreach has started. The pitch: one Sprint for their portfolio founders, scoped as a pilot, priced as an entry point.
The competitive landscape is thinner than expected. European VC wellbeing programs exist — Cherry Copilot, Balderton WellFounded — but they are all individual-only, UK-centric, and none operate in Portugal. The group-level gap is ours to fill.
Revenue target for the first 6 months: €50K–150K. Three to six paid pilots would get us there. We do not need many — we need the right three.
A month of honest recalibration — and a surprising amount of new doors opening. Here is what changed, what we learned, and where things are heading.
We attended SIM Conference in May expecting it to open VC fund conversations. It did not — and understanding why matters.
The insight, sharpened with help from Emre B. at UFL, is structural: early-stage VC funds in Portugal are still in institution-building mode. Their portfolio founders are pre-product-market-fit, resource-constrained, and not yet in a position to invest in team wellbeing programs. The timing is simply wrong.
The right client is a founder who has already closed at minimum a Series A — ideally B or beyond. Someone building at scale, where leadership health is genuinely a risk factor. That is a different conversation, and it is one we can now have with more precision.
One correction to last month's update, in the spirit of keeping this honest: Pausa Open, planned for July 2–3 at DOMA Portugal, is not going ahead. Eight sign-ups told us what we needed to know. We were over-enthusiastic about how quickly Unicorn Factory Lisbon, the 351 association, and Casa do Impacto could move as cooperation partners — all three turned out to be far slower to respond than the timeline needed. We are keeping the lesson and letting go of the event.
We are looking at the B Lab community in Europe as a potential ICP channel. B Corp-certified companies operate with a built-in values orientation toward people and wellbeing — and their leadership teams are exactly the profile Pausa is designed for.
B Lab's European network spans the UK, Benelux, Germany, and the Nordics, which maps closely to the geographic focus we are developing for the corporate channel. This is early-stage exploration, but the values alignment is unusually strong.
Separately, we have begun a tentative partnership with a biomarker testing provider — building toward an integrated pre-assessment offering for Pausa Reset participants that pairs subjective wellbeing data with objective physiological markers. The goal is rigour: when a participant arrives at a Reset, we already have a full picture of where they are.
June is where the B Corp wedge started paying off. The first two pro-bono assessment calls are confirmed, Happiness Camp is evolving into something larger and possibly moving to Porto, and the autumn performance offsite with Jan Frodeno is taking real shape. Here is the honest picture — and the two places your network could genuinely move things this month.
Talks with Happiness Camp — the biggest wellbeing conference in the world — are continuing, and the shape of the opportunity keeps getting larger. The most interesting development this month: a potential move to Porto, hosted at the Lionesa Business Hub, where roughly 170 wellbeing-focused companies are already based. That concentration of aligned organisations in one location is exactly the environment where the Workplace Wellbeing Assessment can prove itself at scale — a captive audience of exactly the companies we are built for.
The first traction on Pausa for Companies has arrived. The go-to-market motion is deliberately narrow: offer the pro-bono Workplace Wellbeing Assessment — our proprietary scoring system built on validated frameworks — exclusively to B Corps in Portugal. Two calls are already confirmed.
And it may not stop at one company at a time. We are in talks with B Lab HQ about running the assessment across their wider ecosystem. If that lands, the channel stops being a company-by-company effort and becomes the network itself — the fastest possible route to credibility with exactly the profile Pausa is designed for.
What was once an internal methodology is now a deployable product: the Workplace Wellbeing Score (WWS). Forty-three questions across eight short sections, built on five validated frameworks covering demands, control, support, relations, role, change, and energy. Anonymous individual assessment at the employee level. An aggregate company score on a 0–100 scale, with named bands from critical to thriving.
Two outputs matter most: a Fair Work evidence pack for B Lab auditors, showing measurement trajectory rather than a single snapshot; and an ESRS S1 workforce data set for companies inside CSRD scope. One methodology answers both regulatory requirements — not two products, not two frameworks, but one rigorous measurement system that satisfies the B Corp auditor and the CSRD reporter simultaneously.
The full SaaS version, Pausa for Companies, is production-ready: a dashboard where HR managers invite employees to complete the anonymous assessment, track scores across measurement rounds, and generate reports. Anonymity is enforced at the database level — no employer can access individual responses, only aggregate data from teams of five or more. Available to pilot now.
We are creating a series of YouTube videos on the new EU directive ESRS S1-4 — the standards that set workforce reporting requirements for EU-based companies. The aim is to build authority and inbound interest with exactly the audience the Workplace Wellbeing Assessment serves: HR and People leaders, COOs, and CEOs who now have a dated, concrete reporting obligation and no obvious way to meet it. Educating that audience openly is both good positioning and, frankly, a genuinely useful thing to put into the world.
It is worth returning to Marco Moutinho at Jeronimo Martins, because his impact keeps compounding. He co-designed the Happiness Camp proposal, made the introduction that put Pausa in front of Lionesa, surfaced new corporate client leads, and gave us a clear ICP read from inside corporate Portugal: post-burnout leaders are more receptive than those trying to prevent burnout. The sweet spot is someone who has already experienced depletion, not someone optimising proactively.
Said plainly: Marco has been more useful to Pausa in a few months than most commercial conversations we have had in a year. Not because he was the most senior person we spoke to, but because he understood the problem from the inside and was willing to think alongside us — not just open doors, but help us decide which doors were worth walking through. It is the clearest illustration of what one right relationship is worth, and the reason the asks below matter as much as they do.