Pausa — Mentor Update

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.

At a glance

Sprint pilot
live @ UFL

Casa do Impacto
founders confirmed

Portuguese VC
funds profiled

Pausa Sprint

First pilots live

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.

Why pro-bono first? Every strong B2B program starts with one real proof point. The UFL pilot gives us a proper case study — facilitation quality, measurement rigour, participant experience — before we price it seriously with VC funds. This is the right sequence.

VC Outreach

26 funds mapped. Outreach underway.

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.

Where you can help

Three things that would move the needle right now

A warm intro to the People or Portfolio lead at any Portuguese VC fund — especially Shilling, Armilar, Indico, Lince, or Faber. We have the deck. We just need the door.
Any founder or executive team you know that is 8–12 people and dealing with performance, energy, or team cohesion as a real issue — that is a Sprint conversation.
Anyone in your network running a coaching practice, leadership development firm, or corporate wellbeing function — these are turning out to be some of our sharpest conversations, and a warm intro is worth a great deal more than a cold one.

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.

At a glance

New ICP channels
being tested

Partnership
conversations active

Sep

First offsite
in the pipeline

Strategy

What the SIM Conference taught us — and the pivot that followed

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.

The reframe: We are not abandoning VC funds — we are moving upstream. EU funds rather than Portuguese-only, and portfolio companies at growth stage rather than early stage. The market is larger and the buyers are more ready.

Also worth your five minutes: we have redesigned pausa.pt after the SIM Conference. It now leads with corporate wellbeing and leadership-team performance — the direction we are putting our weight behind. Take a look at pausa.pt and tell us honestly what lands and what does not. Your read on whether the new framing is landing matters more than ours.

New channels

Four ICP directions we are now testing — in priority order

1 · Corporate / CSRD

EU regulation is opening a corporate door

The EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is pushing large companies to report on employee wellbeing — which means procurement budgets are forming. This is now our top priority. We have built a corporate wellbeing offering and are exploring Pausa's positioning in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, which together account for roughly 60% of the European corporate wellbeing market. Portugal is infrastructure and differentiation. Europe is the market.

2 · EU VC funds & Series A+ founders

Funds investing from Series A onward — and the founders they have backed

Our second priority: European VC funds whose strategy centres on Series A and beyond, and — just as important — the founders inside those portfolios who have themselves recently closed a Round A, B, or C+. These are leadership teams operating at scale, where energy, focus, and cohesion are genuine performance and retention risks, not nice-to-haves. We are mapping funds in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK with this profile, and reaching the founders directly through the same network.

3 · Coaching organisations

Partnerships with coaching companies

Coaching firms already have established relationships with leaders and executives. Adding a Pausa wellbeing block to their programs is a natural fit — it expands their offering without building from scratch, and gives us access to a warm, qualified client base. We are in early conversations with two coaching organisations.

4 · Insurance

Portuguese insurance companies

Insurance providers have a direct financial incentive to reduce claims through preventive health. Leader wellbeing programs that measurably reduce burnout, absenteeism, and stress-related conditions are a natural fit for their prevention portfolios. We are exploring what this channel looks like in Portugal — lowest priority for now, but worth keeping warm.

Partnerships in motion

Four conversations worth watching

September offsite

Barkyn — offsite for 20 Portuguese founders

Talks underway with André at Barkyn to host a September offsite for approximately 20 Portuguese founders, centred on the topic of founder wellbeing. André has been publicly vocal about mental and physical health in the founder context — he gets it, and that makes the conversation substantive rather than exploratory. This could be Pausa's first revenue-generating event for a direct client.

Community

Endeavour Portugal — building something with the Outliers network

In touch with Ricardo at Endeavour Portugal around the Portuguese Outliers network. The original idea was to co-host Pausa Open with them — that event is not happening now, but the relationship and the audience are real, so we are looking at other formats where Pausa and Endeavour's reach into high-growth Portuguese founders can meet. Early, but worth watching.

Autumn event

Jan Frodeno — a performance wellbeing event for top executives

Jan Frodeno is a three-time Ironman World Champion — arguably the most accomplished endurance athlete of his generation. We are in early talks to co-design and co-host a performance wellbeing event in autumn: maximum 12 participants, all top executives with Ironman experience. The concept is building a Pausa-Frodeno protocol that answers one question precisely: how do you perform at a high level across both disciplines — professional leadership and elite endurance — without burning out? This is a flagship product if we can make it happen.

Portfolio offsite

Semapa Next — annual gathering of portfolio founders

Talks with Semapa Next about organising a wellbeing offsite embedded in their annual autumn gathering, which brings portfolio founders together from across Europe. Strong alignment on mission and format. If this materialises, it gives Pausa access to a Pan-European founder cohort through a single relationship.

Ecosystem

The B Corp community as a potential ICP

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.