Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

Since 2020, all of us have gotten used to video calls, to the point that we started to overuse them. Of course, they are a great tool, they save time, keep us focused, and let us do more, faster. Personally, I love them.

But there is a “but” when we work primarily, or sometimes only via video calls. After a while, calls become impersonal. A human relationship is hard to keep alive only behind a screen.

This week, Angelica and I felt it clearly, and we realized, once more, how important it is to continue cultivating in-person meetings. So we decided it was time to visit two business partners we are in touch with almost every day, yet hadn’t seen in person for over a year. Daily contact, and still a year apart.

What struck us was how different the conversation was. We weren’t running through a 30-minute check and a to-do list. We took the time to ask about them: who they are, what challenges they face, how their organization really works. And once we sat around the table with a piece of paper, looking at things together, the conversation changed again. Solutions appeared that the screen had never produced.

Wrapping up our day on the way back to Lugano, we realized that efficiency keeps a relationship running, but presence makes it grow and keeps it human.

We live in a world where fast is our daily mantra, but I thoroughly believe that human contact is even more important today than it used to be. When I talk to people I realize they are missing this personal touch and are eager to connect, but sometimes they don’t feel comfortable asking. We tend to think that we disturb others, that they are busy and that a quick e-mail or a short video call is much better to preserve each other’s space.

Well, Angelica and I believe that in-person contacts are not only important, they are the lifeblood that keeps us alive, in our profession as much as in our personal lives.

Our weekly Powerful Pills:

💊 1. Take the time to nurture in-person relationships.
Pick the people who matter most to your work and your life, and go to them. Not for a reason, not for an agenda. Just to be there.

💊 2. Be curious about the person, not only the project.
Ask about their challenges, their team, what keeps them up at night. People remember how much you cared long after they forget the deliverables.

💊 3. Bring a piece of paper.
Sit side by side and look at the problem together. Drawing, scribbling and thinking out loud build trust and ideas in a way a shared screen rarely does.

What you can do this week

• Look at the partners, clients or colleagues you speak to most often. When did you last see them in person?

• Pick one and book the visit, even if it’s only a coffee.

• Leave the agenda a little open and see where the conversation goes.

Video calls are not the enemy. They are a wonderful tool. They just shouldn’t be the only one we use to build relationships that last.

And now we would love to hear from you: when did an in-person meeting last change a relationship, or a decision, for you? Tell us in the comments. We read every one.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

Happiness has become quite an industry. There are books to read, retreats to attend, routines to follow and people telling us to get up at five in the morning. Personally, we feel that still being asleep at five in the morning can make a considerable contribution to happiness.

Both Jacqueline and I listen to many podcasts and Blinks, we read a lot and we love to discuss the topic, especially when we are following an uphill path for some reason. Recently, we put our heads together one more time on this topic, and we realized that amid all this advice, we strongly believe that happiness boils down to to three simple things:

Something to do. Someone to love. Something to hope for.

We quite love this formula. It is short enough to remember without reading glasses and leaves room for the occasional bad mood. Both excellent qualities.

Something to do.

A reason to get out of bed, get dressed and engage with the world. Preferably something beyond locating the phone charger.

For some, it is building a business or learning a profession. For others, tending a garden, caring for a relative, studying, volunteering or making sure a child understands that pasta does not come from an app.

We all need to feel that our presence makes a difference somewhere, that there is something worthy of our attention, our effort, our particular contribution.

Of course, there is a distinction between having something meaningful to do and having an overflowing calendar. We have both occasionally confused the two and our inboxes remain enthusiastic accomplices.

Someone to love.

Here, happily, the definition is generous.

A partner, a child, a friend, a sibling, a chosen family. A person whose voice makes the day better. Someone to call with good news, bad news or the deeply important news that the neighbour has finally cut that hedge.

Romantic love gets most of the publicity, but friendship has carried many of us through chapters that romance would have struggled to organize transport for.

Loving someone draws us beyond ourselves, it gives us another person’s happiness to care about, another perspective to consider, and occasionally a very good reason to apologize.

And love needs attention. Even the strongest relationships appreciate something more substantial than “we really must have lunch” repeated regularly.

Something to hope for.

A trip, or a visit, a recovery or a new opportunity, a project taking shape, the chance that someone we care about will find their way.

Sometimes hope is a grand ambition. Sometimes it is simply having something in the diary that we are actually looking forward to attending.

We need a sense that the future still holds possibilities. Particularly when the present is being difficult, expensive or exceptionally fond of testing our patience. When people stop being hopeful, is when they start dying.

Hope allows us to make plans without demanding guarantees. Which is fortunate, because life’s customer service department remains remarkably unresponsive.

Different lives, familiar needs.

These three essentials travel remarkably well. Across geographies, ages and social strata, their expression changes, but the underlying human needs remain familiar: purpose, connection and possibility.

A teenager finding their place, a parent working two jobs, an entrepreneur in Lugano, a farmer tending the next season’s crop, a retiree discovering a new interest: very different circumstances, yet each has a need to contribute, to care and to look ahead.

Of course, circumstances matter enormously. Financial security, health, safety and opportunity shape how easily these needs can be met. We would never suggest that three cheerful sentences can remove hardship.

But neither wealth nor status exempts anyone from loneliness, a lack of purpose or the feeling that there is little to look forward to. A prestigious address can still house a very unhappy person.

Perhaps that is what we appreciate most about this formula: its humanity. It reminds us to look at our own lives with a little more honesty, and at other people’s lives with a little more understanding.

This week, we are asking ourselves: What deserves our energy? Who deserves more of our attention? What are we looking forward to?

The answers need not be impressive, they only need to mean something to us.

Three Powerful Pills for this week

💊 Do something that feels useful. Help someone, finish a small task, learn something new. Give yourself a reason to say, “That was worth doing.”

💊 Turn affection into action. Make the call, arrange the lunch, tell someone you appreciate them while they are there to hear it. Telepathy remains an unreliable relationship strategy.

💊 Put something hopeful in the diary. A walk with a friend, a visit, the first step towards an ambition. Give your future self something to smile about.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

Autumn is here. The leaves are changing, the days are getting shorter, and our inboxes are filling with invitations to conferences, panels, summits and the occasional “unmissable conversation.”

Apparently, there is a great deal we cannot afford to miss.

Jacqueline and I find ourselves navigating the familiar seasonal dilemma: should we attend? Will we learn something? Who will be there? And, inevitably, what if the one event we skip turns out to be the one we should have attended?

FOMO is quite an effective event organiser.

Then we arrive and find the usual suspects. The people we saw at last week’s panel, yesterday’s networking drinks and, quite possibly, this morning’s breakfast.

But somewhere between the third welcome speech and the fourth slide nobody can read, a question emerges: what actually makes an event good?

Between organising events, speaking at them and attending our fair share, we have a few thoughts.

The venue, the technical setup and the communication beforehand are the foundations. People should know where they are going, why they are coming and when they can reasonably expect to leave. The venue should be appropriate, the microphone should work, the presentation should open, the podium should be available, the temperature should be suitable.

Once those basics are covered, however, the event rests largely on the people holding the microphones.

Speakers are often chosen for their expertise, experience or impressive titles. All sensible criteria. Yet we sometimes forget to ask whether they can make their subject interesting to anyone who has not spent the past twenty years studying it.

Knowing a great deal and giving a great talk are different skills.

We have all listened to someone who knows their subject inside out but has somehow left the audience outside, looking in. Acronyms multiply. Slides become denser. “Just one more point” begins to sound less like a promise and more like a threat.

This is a missed opportunity for everyone. The speaker’s knowledge deserves to be understood. The audience deserves to learn something and the organiser deserves a better return on six months of planning than “Well, the venue was lovely.”

Then there is the moderator.

A good moderator is worth their weight in conference badges, a mediocre one can break the event.

They prepare, listen, connect ideas and draw out the interesting parts. They notice when someone has barely spoken and when someone else has apparently booked the microphone for the afternoon.

They can say, “Let me stop you there,” with enough warmth that everyone remains friends.

Crucially, they remember that their role is to help the conversation along. We have occasionally encountered moderators whose questions were so long that we forgot there was supposed to be an answer.

But organisers have a part to play too. We cannot assemble impressive people on a stage and assume an engaging discussion will spontaneously occur. A panel needs a purpose, a clear brief and some preparation. Speakers should know who is in the room and what might be useful to them. Moderators should feel empowered to steer, clarify and, when necessary, rescue.

None of this requires everyone to become a professional performer. A thoughtful example, a clear explanation and a little enthusiasm can go a long way. So can finishing on time, a quality we appreciate more with every passing conference season.

Ultimately, people have rearranged their diaries, travelled, left work or organised childcare to be in that room. Their attention deserves care.

We would love to leave an event with an idea to explore, a useful connection or a question we had never thought to ask. Something beyond a tote bag and a few business contacts.

Personal growth takes time.

Three Powerful Pills for this week:

💊 Look beyond the biography. Before handing someone a microphone, find out how they use it. A brilliant CV cannot deliver the talk for them.

💊 Keep your sense of humour and know when to leave. Some events give you fresh ideas; others give you a good story for dinner. Once you know which one you’re attending, a gracious exit is perfectly acceptable.

💊 Give FOMO the occasional evening off. Choose events with a clear reason to attend. “Everyone will be there” is tempting, but so is dinner at home.

What makes an event worth your time, and what sends you searching for a discreet exit?

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

A confession first. This week we almost didn’t write to you.

Not because we had nothing to say, quite the opposite, because we were busy, very busy. Closing deals, updating files, preparing several events coming up in the next few weeks. We were so deep in the jungle of doing that we forgot to stop and plan. And then, suddenly, I looked at Angelica, in front of one of our readers and I said: “Our A&J… we haven’t written it.”

A small moment of panic. Then a big laugh, because the irony was impossible to miss.

Just a few hours earlier I had shared with Angelica a book I had just finished, “Do What Matters Most” by Steve and Rob Shallenberger. A book about time, focus and priorities. Knowing is one thing. Doing is another. And this week we were very good at knowing.

Those of you who follow us regularly know that we are a little obsessed with improving whatever we do. Sometimes so much that we start believing we are Wonder Women. We can do it all, at the same time, perfectly. Until reality kindly reminds us that we can’t, and we come back down to earth. This is why we are grateful every time a book, a guide or an article crosses our path and reminds us how to do better with the time we have.

What the book taught me

The authors are a father-and-son team of leadership consultants, and their starting point is a study that made me smile, because I recognised us in it. After researching more than 1,260 managers and executives from over 108 organisations, they found that 68 percent consider time management their number one challenge, while 80 percent have no clear process for prioritising their time.

Two out of three struggle. Four out of five have no method. We were, that week, perfectly in the statistics.

Their answer is surprisingly simple. Three habits: a written personal vision, clear roles and goals, and consistent pre-week planning. Each habit sharpens a different level of focus: strategic, operational and tactical. And the promise is bold: people who live these habits can raise their productivity by at least 30 to 50 percent while reducing stress.

What touched me most is that the book doesn’t ask us to do more. It asks us to decide first. Know where you want to go. Translate it into concrete goals for each role you play in life, as a professional, a partner, a mother, a friend. Then protect that time in your calendar before the week fills it for you.

We recently wrote about the value of time. This book gave us the how. Living with a clear vision and planned priorities means working in calm, low-stress mode instead of running constantly in “everything is urgent” mode. And honestly, we know which of the two makes us better at what we do.

So here are this week’s three Powerful Pills.

💊 Pill 1: Choice

Whatever we do, wherever we invest our time, it is our choice. Even when it doesn’t feel like it. Every “yes” to something is a “no” to something else, often to what matters most. Living with less stress starts here: deciding what is truly important, and having the courage to leave aside what is not. Not everything deserves our energy. And that’s fine.

💊 Pill 2: Plan

Planning in advance is not about controlling every minute. It is about being free to live each moment fully, instead of running last minute from one thing to the next. One small habit we both apply: we prepare the coming week on Friday or over the weekend. A quiet half hour, a look at the calendar, the three or four things that really have to happen. On Monday morning the week doesn’t jump on us. We are already one step ahead. (This week, we’ll admit, we skipped it. You can see how that went.)

💊 Pill 3: Boundaries

Set them on time, set them with clarity, and say them out loud to the people around you. Colleagues, clients, family. You may be surprised: most people understand and respect boundaries when they are communicated early and honestly. What they struggle with is the silent “yes” that turns into frustration later. Clear boundaries free you from guilt and from the need to say yes at all costs. And they give others permission to do the same.

And you?

This edition arrives a little later than usual, and we decided that this is okay. Imperfect, but written with love and with a lesson learned on our own skin.

Now we are curious. When was the last time you planned your week before the week started planning you? Hit reply and tell us. We read every message, and many of our best ideas come from you.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

Quick reminder to register for our Coffee & Conversation edition 1 on October 9, 8:30-9:30, register here it’s free!

Our lives are bountiful in many ways. Jacqueline and I are fortunate to have work we care about, people we love, and opportunities to contribute beyond our professional lives. We both do quite a lot of volunteering.

Giving our time to a cause we believe in can be enormously rewarding. You meet generous people, share ideas, and occasionally help make something happen that would otherwise have remained a very good intention.

Then there are the days when you discover that your voluntary role comes with an unexpected second job: managing the emotions, expectations, and disagreements of everyone else.

Recently, I found myself in a difficult situation with someone I will call Jane.

Jane contributes to an organization I chair. She brings energy and strong opinions. Unfortunately, our collaboration has also involved abrupt changes of mood, recurring conflict, and a conviction that her way of doing things should generally prevail.

We all have difficult days. Jacqueline and I certainly do. Having recently advocated for permission to be human, we can hardly insist that everyone arrive at every meeting cheerful, composed, and carrying a perfectly formatted agenda.

But there is a difference between having a difficult day and repeatedly making collaboration difficult for everyone.

Several times, I have suggested to Jane that, if she feels so little alignment with the group, perhaps stepping down would be the right choice for her. She does not wish to leave. Yet the difficulties continue.

Which leaves us with a question we suspect many of you have encountered: what do you do when someone wants to remain part of a voluntary endeavor but struggles to work constructively with the people in it?

In a paid role, there are usually clearer expectations and processes. In volunteering, we can become strangely hesitant to set either. Someone is giving their time freely, so asking for accountability feels almost ungrateful.

And yet everyone else is giving their time freely, too.

The person quietly doing the work. The person rearranging their afternoon to attend a meeting. The person chairing it, who had perhaps imagined discussing the organisation's mission rather than refereeing another disagreement.

Their goodwill deserves consideration as well.

Jacqueline and I often talk about how to motivate people: give them purpose, recognise their contribution, listen to their ideas, and allow them room to take ownership. Those things matter, and so does being willing to hear a dissenting voice. A group where everyone agrees all the time may simply be a group where someone has stopped speaking.

But how do we distinguish a challenging voice that helps us grow from a pattern that exhausts the group?

And when encouragement, conversations, and invitations to reconsider the role have not changed things, what comes next?

Perhaps we sometimes mistake kindness for avoiding a difficult conversation. Perhaps we hope that one more explanation will achieve what the previous five did not. Or perhaps we simply find it uncomfortable to say: “We value what you have contributed, but continuing in this role requires a different way of working together.”

We do not have a neat answer this week. We would genuinely welcome yours.

Have you faced this in an association, a committee, a board, or a community project? What helped? And, if parting ways became necessary, how did you handle it with clarity and dignity?

Volunteering asks us to give something of ourselves. How do we make sure people still have something left to give?

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

A few days ago I celebrated my birthday, don’t ask age as we all know, you never ask a woman her age, especially once she’s past 25. Anyway, back to my story. On the evening of my birthday, I was sitting at the table with my husband when a thought suddenly struck me: how life starts, develops, and eventually ends.

When you are a little baby, your parents celebrate every month, then every year with a proper birthday party. Then you become a teenager and you no longer want to celebrate with your parents, you’d rather have birthday parties with your friends. Then the magic 18 arrives, and it feels like you have finally reached everything life has to offer, that one truly deserves a celebration.

21 can be another major milestone, depending on where you live, shortly followed, of course, by a quarter century which cannot pass quietly. From 30 onward, you tend to celebrate every ten years, at least until you hit 50, which it’s quite an achievement. At that point your mind starts running through everything you have accomplished, or haven not, and everything you still want to do. Suddenly you realize how precious every single year is, and so at 55 you start celebrating every five years again. Once you cross into your 80s, you probably start celebrating every year once more.

We live longer now, and if we are lucky, we live healthier too, but we still come to realize that time is the most precious resource we have.

Sharing my thoughs with Angelica over our usual morning coffee, I realized how much this translates into professional life too. Deep into your career, you might think you still have years to build something meaningful. Ready to start something new, you suddenly realize how much time you have left behind and how much better you could have used it.

The same holds true for founders and entrepreneurs. In our work with them, we very often see situations where they waited too long to act. It can happen with cash flow: not managing it properly, until suddenly they find themselves trapped in a liquidity crunch, one that’s not just difficult, but painful to work through. It can happen with the tough decision to part ways with a partner, or to let go of the employee quietly poisoning the whole team. And in many small and medium family enterprises, we see it around succession: they wait too long, and that makes success much harder, sometimes simply impossible, and always with unnecessary stress.

So yes, time is the most precious resource we have in life, and we should spend it wisely. Time compounds the same way capital does, the earlier you invest it well, the greater the return.

So here are our three weekly Powerful Pills:

1. Live every single day as if it were the only one you had left.

2. Take action on whatever feels right for you, there’s never a perfect moment, only now.

3. Learn from the past, hope for the future, and be kind to your daily self.

And you, what’s the one thing time has taught you that you wish you’d learned sooner?

P.S. - Speaking of not waiting: we are launching our first morning series “Coffee & Conversation”. First session will be on "The Cost of Waiting". Free, over coffee, Friday October 9, at 8:30. 10 spots only. Register here.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

As women in finance at a time when there were not very many of us, as athletes, as daughters, wives, mothers, aunts, mentors and entrepreneurs, Jacqueline and I somehow learned a lesson that neither of us remembers actually being taught:

Never display weakness.

Do not show that you are tired.
Do not admit that you are disappointed.
Do not let people see that something has hurt you.
Do not say that you are overwhelmed.

Instead: smile, regroup, solve the problem, get on with it.

Preferably while looking perfectly put together, and, to be fair, this attitude has served us rather well.

As I always like to remind myself, and anyone willing to listen, there are very few advantages to having lived several decades. One of them, however, is certainly the opportunity to learn. Another is the luxury of looking backwards and realizing that some of the things we once considered absolute truths were perhaps not quite so absolute after all.

This week, amid numerous conversations about Artificial Intelligence, what it will do for us, what it may do to us, which jobs it will replace, which problems it will solve and whether humanity should be excited or terrified, we found ourselves thinking about something much simpler:

the permission, or better yet, the right to be human.

AI is extraordinarily good at giving us answers. It doesn’t need to sleep after a difficult day, it doesn’t wake up wondering whether it made the right decision yesterday, it doesn’t get its feelings hurt by an unnecessarily sharp email, it doesn’t have an argument with its daughter, worry about an ageing parent, lose confidence before an important presentation or need twenty minutes and a strong coffee before being ready to face the world.

We do, and perhaps that is not a design flaw.

We meet many young people who seem more fragile than we remember ourselves being at their age. But then again, perhaps we should be careful with that comparison, we have written in the past about the danger of living comparatively. They are growing up in uncertain times, constantly exposed to other people’s successes, expected to make the right choices earlier and faster, and increasingly surrounded by technology that appears to know everything instantly.

That is quite a standard against which to measure yourself.

So perhaps, rather than teaching the next generation simply to toughen up, we should teach them, and remind ourselves, that strength and humanity are not opposites.

You can be resilient and tired.

You can be ambitious and frightened.

You can be competent and occasionally have absolutely no idea what to do next.

You can be grateful for your life and still have a terrible day.

You can make the wrong decision, be disappointed, cry, lose your temper, need help, change your mind, feel insecure, fail spectacularly and wake up the following morning not quite ready to turn the whole thing into an inspirational LinkedIn post.

Permission granted.

The important distinction, perhaps, is between experiencing an emotion and allowing that emotion to define us.

Resilience is not the absence of vulnerability. It is what happens afterwards.

We feel the disappointment and eventually try again.

We acknowledge the fear and decide whether to move forward anyway.

We make mistakes and take responsibility for them.

We ask for help and later, when we can, offer it to somebody else.

There is something wonderfully imperfect about all of this.

And as machines become increasingly capable of producing flawless answers, perhaps we should become a little less obsessed with producing flawless humans.

Because our doubts, contradictions, emotions, intuition, humour, empathy, affection, irrational attachments, spectacular mistakes and occasional bad moods are not unfortunate remnants waiting for technology to correct them.

They are part of the package, so this week’s Powerful Pill is a very simple one.

Permission to be human: granted.

To the young people around us, our daughters, nieces, nephews, mentees, students and founders, and perhaps even more importantly, to ourselves.

• Be strong when you can.

• Be vulnerable when you need to.

• Learn, recover, apologies, laugh, try again.

• And every once in a while, admit that you are simply tired.

Even in finance, even on a Monday morning, even while looking wonderfully put together.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

Last week Angelica took you back to Ithaca, to Odysseus entrusting his son to a friend named Mentor, and to the idea that mentoring was never really about handing over answers, it was about fostering someone else's judgement, confidence and curiosity.

Yesterday, in Bellinzona, I had the great honor to to do exactly that. A group of young girls gathered thanks to Inspiring Girls International, a global charity dedicated to expanding girls’ career ambitions and breaking gender stereotypes by connecting them with diverse female role models. I was there to share something simple: my journey, the simple and real version of it.

Last week Angelica shared how much we care about giving young people the tools, and most importantly the confidence, to build a career on their own terms. This week, we want to stay right there, because yesterday reminded us why.

Here’s the truth: school teaches us a lot of things but it rarely teaches us how to figure out what we actually want to do, what we’re good at, and how those two things might meet in the real world. That gap is where so many young people, and especially young girls, get stuck. Not because they lack ability, rather because too often they lack confidence, or a map, or simply someone who has walked a strange, non-linear path before them and can say: this is normal.

So I told them the parts of my story that don’t usually make it into a bio. The setbacks, the plans that fell apart, the moments I felt completely lost, and I told them something I deeply believe: every one of those moments was not a failure, rather it was a signal. A door closing so I could notice the one that was actually meant to open. With time I learned that a journey is never a straight line, and it shouldn’t be. If it were, we wouldn’t be learning anything along the way.

Too many girls still believe certain rooms aren’t built for them, that ambition needs a permission slip, or that some careers simply belong to men. Together with other three outstanding women I stood in that room in Bellinzona to say, plainly: that’s not true, and we are living proof, and so are the women who came before us.

This is exactly why supporting organizations like Inspiring Girls International is important because sharing where we fell, and how we got back up, again and again, is not a nice extra. As we said last week about the mentors we try to be, the most meaningful moment in that room wasn't the talking. It was a girl raising her hand, hesitating, and asking her question anyway. That's the whole point: it's interesting, and we want her to tell us more.

This week’s Powerful Pills:

💊 Dream big and think bold. Nothing is too ambitious if it’s what you truly want.

💊 Ask for help. It is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of wisdom.

💊 Every door that closes is telling you something. Listen to what it’s showing you.

I’ll leave you with the same question I asked that room of curious girls yesterday: if nothing was stopping you, not fear, not “what will people think,” not the idea that some doors are closed to you, what would you actually go after?

Your comments, inputs and insights are always welcome.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

As the newly released movie reminded us, a few thousand years ago, Odysseus was preparing to leave Ithaca and head off to Troy.

He had a kingdom to leave behind, a war to fight and, perhaps more importantly, a young son named Telemachus.

Before departing, he entrusted Telemachus to his friend Mentor, asking him to watch over the boy, guide him and care for him during his absence, and so through Homer’s Odyssey, a name eventually became a concept: mentoring.

We rather like that origin, and it worth reflecting upon it: Odysseus did not ask Mentor simply to teach Telemachus. He entrusted him with something much broader: to keep an eye on him, encourage him, guide him and help him grow.

Thousands of years later, we have courses, coaches, consultants, tutorials, podcasts and, of course, an internet willing to explain absolutely everything to us, whether it knows the answer or not. Yet, we firmly believe that a good mentor remains extraordinarily valuable.

Perhaps because mentoring is not really about transferring information, rather it is about transferring experience with interest and care.

There is an enormous difference between saying, “This is how it is done,” and saying, “This is what I learned when I tried it. Here is where I went wrong. Here is what surprised me. Now, what do you think?”

The first approach teaches, the second fosters, and we have learned through the years that fostering may be the more powerful of the two.

It means creating the conditions in which someone else can develop their own judgement, confidence and curiosity. It means resisting the temptation to provide all the answers, particularly when, with a few more years under our belts, we are rather fond of believing we have them.

At Fondazione Privilège, this is very much what we try to do. We share our passion for entrepreneurship and finance with younger generations. We introduce them to investors, entrepreneurs and professionals. We talk about business models, markets, venture capital and the decidedly unglamorous reality behind building companies.

But hopefully we give them something else too, that something else is permission to ask questions, permission to challenge us and common assumptions, permission to get things wrong, and perhaps the confidence to try.

As compared to what is glamorized in the movies, the most meaningful mentoring moments are often not the grand ones, rather they are a conversation after a session, or an introduction to someone who might help, maybe even a question that makes a young person look at an idea differently. Sometimes it is simply someone experienced saying, “That is interesting. Tell me more.”

We often do not realize that those four words can be surprisingly powerful. They say: I am listening, your idea deserves my attention, you might actually be onto something.

We cannot know what difference any of these moments will make. Telemachus had the advantage of a rather famous author documenting his journey; the rest of us rarely get such convenient feedback. Jacqueline and I on a regular basis share what we know without expecting to control what happens next, we encourage without imposing and we foster without taking ownership.

Our three Powerful Pills for this week:

💊 Share the scars, not only the trophies
Experience is useful precisely because it includes mistakes, wrong turns and lessons painfully acquired. Saving someone from even one unnecessary bump has value.

💊 Ask before you advise
The best mentors are not necessarily those with the most answers. They are often those who know which question to ask.

💊 Open a door, and let them walk through it
An introduction, an opportunity or a little encouragement at the right moment can alter a trajectory. After that, the journey must remain theirs.

Odysseus fully entrusted Mentor with Telemachus.

Most of us will thankfully not need to sail off to a ten-year war followed by an equally troublesome journey home, however we can still be Mentors.

We can notice talent, encourage curiosity, share what took us decades to learn, make an introduction, ask a good question just give someone younger a little of our time and our attention.

Knowledge kept to ourselves is experience.

Knowledge shared with interest and care might just become someone else’s opportunity.

And we think that is worth fostering.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

Monday morning comes, and with it, as always, the first coffee of the week together at the office.

The question is often: Did you have a good weekend?

The answers, being the generally positive bunch that we are, tend to fall somewhere between “Yes, it was lovely,” “pleasant and uneventful,” “productive,” or, occasionally, “It was a blast.”

We are not used to hearing what we heard this Monday: “It was awful.”

Naturally, coffees were put down. Attention was secured.

Why?

“Because we had a guest from hell.”

And just like that, the Monday morning conversation was decided.

What makes a good guest?

There is plenty written about being a good host. Make people feel welcome. Offer them something to drink. Make sure they are comfortable. Include them in the conversation. Don’t serve the experimental soufflé unless you have a backup pizza.

But what about the other side of the equation?

Being invited into someone else’s home, office, team, company, meeting, or even country, comes with a subtle responsibility: you are entering an environment that existed before you arrived and will continue after you leave.

The good guest understands this, the guest from hell, apparently, does not.

At home, this can manifest itself in small things. A good guest observes the rhythm of the household. If everyone goes to bed at 10:30, perhaps midnight is not the ideal moment to suggest opening another bottle of wine. If breakfast is a quick coffee and toast, requesting eggs Benedict may be ambitious. If your host starts loading the dishwasher while yawning conspicuously, this may be an ancient and sophisticated social signal.

A good guest doesn’t need to disappear into the wallpaper. Quite the opposite, they contribute to the atmosphere, bring their personality, tell stories, laugh, engage.

But they must read the room.

And this is where our Monday coffee conversation moved, inevitably, from the weekend to work.

Because aren’t we guests in other people’s professional environments all the time?

When we join a meeting, visit another company, start working with a new client, sit on a board, enter a partnership or join a new team, we walk into an ecosystem with its own habits, language, hierarchy and unwritten rules.

The temptation is to immediately demonstrate our value.

At my previous company, we did it differently.

I think you should…

Why don’t you…

Perhaps that is ok, however, before rearranging the furniture in someone else’s space, it might be useful to understand why the furniture is where it is.

A good professional guest observes before judging.

They ask questions, they notice who speaks, who doesn’t, how decisions are made, what matters to the people around the table and, importantly, what history they may not yet know.

Fitting in doesn’t mean conforming.

It means understanding the environment well enough to know when to adapt, when to contribute and when to challenge it.

There is a wonderful balance between being so accommodating that you bring nothing to the table and being so determined to “be yourself” that everyone secretly counts the hours till you leave.

Perhaps this is the real etiquette of being a guest: leave the environment slightly better than you found it.

At someone’s home, maybe that means bringing good conversation, helping clear the table and not using every towel in the house.

At work, it might mean bringing curiosity before opinions, value before ego and respect for what was built before you arrived.

And in both cases, there is one remarkably reliable test:

Would you be invited back?

Our three Powerful Pills for this week:

💊 Observe before you occupy.
Every environment has a rhythm. Take a moment to understand it before imposing your own.

💊 Contribute, don’t consume.
Good guests bring something: energy, curiosity, ideas, help, humor. The principle works equally well around a dinner table and a boardroom table.

💊 Know when you’ve overstayed.
Sometimes literally, sometimes professionally. Reading the room includes recognizing when your contribution has been made and it is time to graciously step away.

Being a good guest is ultimately an exercise in awareness, you don’t have to become someone else to fit into someone else’s world. You simply have to remember that, for a little while, it isn’t entirely your world.

And perhaps that is good advice not only for guests, but for colleagues, leaders, partners and humans in general.

As for our colleague? Without even asking we are pretty sure that the infamous guest would not be invited back!

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

As summer slowly winds down, and not everyone has returned to the office yet, I still have a bit of extra time for reflection, that I’d love to share with you.

Two episodes happened recently that made me think about the importance of network.

When I was young, I always had many friends and connections, something that came pretty natural to me and where I didn’t have to invest energy or effort. While it was somehow harder to keep in touch with everyone, since socials didn’t exist yet and all connections were in-person, I felt those relationships were stronger, somehow more real.

Growing up, traveling, and starting a career, most of your earlier connections get lost. Not for any specific reason, simply because people move, embrace different ventures, and mature into a new version of themselves.

But let me go back to why I was reflecting about network in the first place.

The first episode that made me pause and think about it was while I was reading a newsletter piece by our dear friend and advisor Sarah Clatterbuck, who wrote a lovely piece on exactly this topic, have a look.

The second one was a conversation with a serial entrepreneur who has already co-founded several companies and is now leading an emerging biotech scale-up. We were discussing how much money it takes to get a product to market, and how hard fundraising really is.

There are so many opportunities out there. Many of them are strong candidates, addressing real problems. So how do you move forward in a jungle of investors of every kind? VCs who tell you they’re genuinely interested, before ghosting you. Family offices who introduce themselves as true investors, until they tell you, for whatever reason, that they don’t actually want to back you, and so on.

And that’s where the network topic came up, strongly. When you’ve built it over years, nurtured it, and given something back, that’s when it really compounds.

Does that mean fundraising becomes easy? Absolutely not. But having a network you can turn to, for introductions, feedback, honest support, certainly helps.

Earlier in my career, I didn’t understand the importance of taking care of my own network. Some of the best connections I had were lost along the way, while others I was able to reconnect with over the years.

This week’s Powerful Pills

💊Nurture your network. It’s about giving as much as receiving, never a one-way street.

💊Align with people who share your values, and grow the relationship intentionally.

💊Avoid investing time in people who don’t fit your agenda. They’ll drain your time and energy, and neither of you will get much out of it.

It’s true what they say: your network is your net worth. Cultivate it, it will be your biggest asset.

In the end, human relationships are probably the most important asset we have.

What are your thoughts?

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

This year no one will disagree about the fact that it is a hot summer everywhere in Europe right now, and for once nobody’s arguing about whether that’s a coincidence. It’s just true, the way a lot of things become true only once you are the one standing in them.

Lugano is quiet too. Half empty, actually, most of the offices are on vacation, and this week it’s my turn to hold down the fort. Which means my days, usually punctuated by a coffee grabbed here, an idea floated there, some fire that lands on my desk uninvited, have gone strangely still.

I won’t pretend the first day didn’t feel a little lonely. No one popping in with “got a sec?” No hallway debrief after a call, by the way, very few calls these days. Just me, my computer, a to-do list that suddenly had nowhere to hide and my best companion, the A/C.

Somewhere around day two, I noticed the loneliness wasn’t quite what I thought it was. It was just quiet, which, it turns out, is not the same thing as empty, rather the opposite.

Let me share with you what I’ve been doing with it:

Mornings, usually pretty busy and hectic for me, unwind slowly now. No 9am scramble, which actually gave me more time than I normally have to move my body before I move my inbox, and this changed how the whole day starts. I finally experienced the beauty of jogging along the lake, something I usually don't do since I live a bit further up. It was a true highlight, early in the morning, while the temperature still allows it. I feel so lucky to live in Lugano, a place others travel to for vacation, and I get to call home. I call this "morning gratitude."

Then lunch comes and I used the time for a walk, no matter the heat, it just feels right. A meal eaten slowly, alone, without conversation, without noise. Just mindful eating. A moment that is just mine. I call this “luxury”.

And then comes the to-do-list. You know the one I’m referring to, the tasks that are important but never urgent enough to win against the noise. This week they finally had nowhere to hide either, and one by one, I’ve been getting to them. Not because I found new discipline. I think I just finally had the room, the energy and the space to take care of them. I call this “creating space and peace for the fall”.

That’s the part I want to sit with, because I don’t think focus is really about willpower, I think it’s about environment. Give most of us enough quiet and the “hard” things get a lot less hard. This is what I experience every time I can find enough quiet.

I know these quiet moments won’t last much longer, in a week or so the city will repopulate, people will be back in bars and restaurants talking about their vacation and how far they already feel, offices will fill back up, the coffee runs come back, the ideas start flying across desks again. Honestly, I can’t wait. I like the noise. I missed my people by day three.

But I’m trying not to rush past this either. It’s rare to get days this unclaimed.

This week’s Powerful Pills

💊Find your version of “morning gratitude.” Before the inbox opens, give your body ten quiet minutes, a walk, a stretch, a run somewhere you never usually go.

💊Treat one meal as luxury, not fuel. No calls, no scrolling, just you and the food, even if it’s fifteen minutes.

💊Let quiet do what willpower can’t. Pick the one task you’ve been avoiding for months and give it the first empty hour you find this week.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and if you have experienced something similar and how you handled it. When’s the last time you had a stretch of real, uninterrupted quiet? What did you do with it? Or what did you avoid doing with it?

Hit comment below, I’d love to know.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

Some of the best conversations seem to happen when nobody is trying too hard. As Jacqueline and I were enjoying one of those warm afternoons in summer with Lucian, our senior advisor, our conversation wandered, as good conversations do, towards resilience in entrepreneurship, business and life.

Resilience has become one of those qualities everyone admires. Investors look for resilient founders, leaders praise resilient teams, and motivational speakers remind us to never give up. Wonderful advice… until it isn’t.

As we talked, we realized that resilience has three close cousins: determination, stubbornness and, eventually, stupidity. The tricky part is that, when you’re in the middle of the journey, they all feel remarkably similar.

Imagine finding a wall blocking your path. Determination tells you to keep moving towards your destination. Resilience invites you to look for a ladder, build a door, grab a hammer, or simply walk around it. Stubbornness insists on repeatedly banging your head against the wall, convinced that the next hit will surely bring it down. Stupidity is continuing to do exactly that long after you’ve given yourself a concussion.

The objective was never to break the wall. The objective was to get to the other side.

Yet entrepreneurs, and people in general, often confuse commitment to a goal with commitment to a particular method. We keep pursuing markets that have moved on, defending ideas that reality has disproved, or staying in situations that no longer serve us simply because we’ve already invested so much.

True resilience is not about refusing to change course. It is about refusing to abandon the destination while remaining completely willing to change the route.

Perhaps the most valuable question we can ask ourselves every now and then is not, “Should I keep going?” but rather, “Am I still solving the problem, or have I become emotionally attached to the way I wanted to solve it?”

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is stop hitting the wall and start looking for the door.

This week’s Powerful Pills

💊 Stay committed to the destination, not to a single path.

💊 Persistence without adaptation is simply expensive stubbornness.

💊 The smartest entrepreneurs don’t avoid obstacles; they find better ways around them.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

There’s a moment I want to tell you about.

We were in the Scottish Highlands, a road trip through landscapes so vast they make you feel pleasantly small. After a long drive, I had a couple of quiet hours at the hotel before dinner, so I opened my laptop to check a few things, the way I always do. A little work in the morning, a little in the evening, a quick glance at the phone between stops. As an entrepreneur, you know this rhythm, you’re never fully off, but you’re never fully anxious about it either. You just ... stay on top of things.

Then, almost done, I turned to my husband and asked: “What day is it today?”

Neither of us knew. We just laughed.

That’s the moment I want to talk about, not the castles, not the whisky, not the single-track roads. What actually happens to your mind when you truly switch off.

Disconnecting isn’t about zero contact

Here’s the thing I think we get wrong about vacation: we treat it as all-or-nothing. Either you’re reachable and therefore “still working,” or you’re a ghost for a week and everything back home falls apart. Neither is true, and chasing the second one is often what stops people from ever really resting.

Real disconnection isn’t measured in how many emails you didn’t open. It’s measured in whether your mind stopped keeping score. You can answer a call, text someone back, glance at your phone from one stop to the next, and still be completely on vacation, as long as your mind isn’t running the business in the background the whole time. The test isn’t your inbox. It’s whether you know what day it is.

Why this matters more for founders

We’re wired to stay on top of things. It feels responsible, even virtuous. But there’s a difference between staying informed and never landing anywhere long enough to rest. The mind needs unstructured time to actually recharge, not just fewer hours worked, but fewer hours tracking. That’s the part that heals. It’s also, not coincidentally, where your best ideas tend to show up, the ones you never get to in back-to-back weeks.

A small practice, if it helps

Once a year, I do a hard reset, 3 to 5 days, completely off, no matter what I can manage that year. It’s non-negotiable, and it’s different from the longer trips where I stay loosely connected. Both matter. But the road trip reminded me that even the “loosely connected” version can go much deeper than I usually let it, if I stop treating every check-in as a checkpoint to defend.

So here’s a question for you this week: when was the last time you didn’t know what day it was, and it felt wonderful, not disorienting?

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

There is something almost magical about this time of year, when calendars suddenly become lighter, inboxes slow to a gentle trickle, meetings disappear one by one, and for a few precious weeks the endless list of obligations imposed by everyone else quietly gives way to something far rarer: the opportunity to decide how our own day should unfold.

This morning was one of those mornings. I woke up, opened the windows and was greeted by that perfect summer temperature that seems to whisper rather than shout. Instead of rushing to my desk simply because that’s what weekdays are supposed to look like, I laced up my running shoes and went for a jog. There was no urgency, no stopwatch, no attempt to squeeze exercise into an already overflowing schedule. Just movement, fresh air, the lake slowly coming to life, and the wonderful realization that oxygen is perhaps the cheapest performance-enhancing substance ever discovered.

By the time I sat down to work, my mind had already solved problems I hadn’t consciously started thinking about, ideas had quietly connected themselves, priorities seemed more obvious, and the demands of the day, both professional and personal, no longer felt like demands at all, but simply the next logical steps.

It reminded me that slowing down is not the opposite of productivity. More often than not, it is the prerequisite for meaningful productivity.

I often think about how fortunate I am to live in Lugano, a place that thousands of people spend months planning to visit, save money to experience, and proudly post about during two fleeting weeks of summer. For me, it is simply home. Yet it is astonishing how easily we stop seeing the extraordinary once it becomes familiar. We walk past lakes without looking at them, mountains without noticing them, sunsets while staring at our phones.

Perhaps that is why I secretly enjoy July and August so much.

While much of Europe crowds airports, highways and hotel lobbies in search of relaxation, those of us fortunate enough to stay put are gifted something even rarer: space. Space in our diaries. Space in our streets. Space in our minds.

There is a fascinating idea often attributed to physicists and philosophers alike, namely that the reality we experience is, at least in part, shaped by the state of our own minds. Whether or not one subscribes to every interpretation of quantum theory, the practical lesson is beautifully simple: our internal state changes the world we perceive.

A frantic mind finds urgency everywhere, whereas a calm mind discovers opportunity.

As we were considering the need to take time off to recharge, we reflected on the fact that during the rest of the year we celebrate speed as though it were a virtue in itself. Faster replies. Faster growth. Faster decisions. Faster meetings. Until, almost without noticing, life itself becomes another task to optimise.

Summer quietly questions that assumption: What if the extra hour wasn’t meant to be filled? What if the empty afternoon wasn’t a scheduling mistake?

What if the absence of constant interruptions wasn’t an invitation to do more, but permission to think more deeply?

Some of our best decisions have never been made while rushing between meetings. They emerged during walks, over long coffees, after exercise, while watching the water, or during conversations that had no agenda beyond curiosity. Reflection is rarely efficient, yet it is incredibly effective.

Maybe, just maybe, the person who returns in September having cultivated clarity instead of merely accumulating activity will have gained a far greater advantage than the one who never stopped moving.

Here are some reflections we wish to share with all of you this week:

💊 A full calendar is not proof of a meaningful life. White space is often where your best thinking happens.

💊 Your environment influences your mindset only if you take the time to notice it. Sometimes paradise becomes invisible simply because it is familiar.

💊 Strategic leaders don’t protect only their time. They protect their energy, their attention and the pace at which they make their most important decisions.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

There was a time when waiting was simply waiting. We stood in line at the supermarket looking absent-mindedly at chewing gum and magazines, sat at the doctor’s office staring at the ceiling or exchanging a few words with others, watched trains arrive, airplanes depart, rain fall against the window, and somehow, without ever scheduling it, our minds wandered. Ideas appeared from nowhere, old conversations replayed themselves with new meaning, problems quietly untangled, gratitude surfaced unexpectedly, and every now and then a genuinely original thought would sneak into our consciousness.

Today, every spare minute has become occupied territory.

The lift takes twenty seconds? Scroll. Waiting for a friend? Scroll. The coffee machine takes a minute? Scroll. Standing in traffic? Hopefully not... but probably a quick glance at the notifications. We have become remarkably efficient at ensuring our minds never experience silence long enough to produce anything interesting.

The irony is that leaders desperately seek innovation, vision and creativity, yet systematically eliminate the very conditions that allow those qualities to emerge. Great ideas rarely announce themselves while we are consuming somebody else’s content. They usually arrive during the quiet moments we now consider wasted time.

This week’s conversation between Jacqueline and me wandered exactly there. We realized that perhaps the greatest luxury today is not time itself, but uninterrupted thinking. The ability to be alone with one’s own thoughts has become surprisingly rare, and with it we are slowly losing our capacity for reflection, perspective and gratitude.

And then there is comparison.

Scrolling is not just stealing our silence; it is quietly rewriting our standards.

Every few seconds we are presented with another successful founder closing a funding round, another investor celebrating an exit, another entrepreneur speaking on a glamorous stage, another family enjoying the perfect holiday, another athlete breaking another personal record, another smiling couple apparently living without disagreement, stress or uncertainty.

Our brain knows, intellectually, that social media is curated, our emotions forget that.

The problem with comparison is not that others are doing well. Quite the opposite, we really believe that we should celebrate success wherever we find it. The problem is that comparison invites us to evaluate our own journey using somebody else’s measuring stick.

Imagine running a marathon while every kilometer somebody changes where your finish line is supposed to be. You would never feel like you were making progress because the destination would constantly move.

That is exactly what comparison does. You stop asking whether you are becoming a better version of yourself and start wondering why you are not becoming someone else.

Leadership suffers enormously from this mindset. Companies abandon perfectly sensible strategies because competitors seem to be growing faster. Investors chase fashionable sectors they barely understand because everyone else appears to be making money there. Founders pivot not because customers ask them to, but because LinkedIn has convinced them that everyone else has discovered a magical shortcut.

Comparison replaces conviction with imitation, and there is another trap that is even more unfair: you are comparing your backstage with somebody else’s opening night.

You know your doubts, your financial worries, your difficult conversations, your mistakes, your sleepless nights, your rejected proposals, your family tensions and your insecurities. They know theirs.

What you see online is rarely any of that.

Instead, you compare your unedited documentary with somebody else’s carefully produced trailer, complete with lighting, filters, selective editing and a soundtrack.

The remarkable thing is that almost everyone is playing exactly the same game, convinced they are the only ones falling behind.

Perhaps leadership begins the moment we step away from that race.

The strongest leaders we have met are not obsessed with outperforming everyone else every single day. They are remarkably focused on becoming incrementally better than they were yesterday. Their benchmark is internal before it is external. They study competitors without becoming prisoners of them. They admire excellence without questioning their own worth because someone else has achieved something different.

So perhaps next time you find yourself with three spare minutes, resist the instinct to reach for your phone and let your mind wander: you may solve a problem that has been quietly waiting for your attention, or you may simply notice something beautiful, you may even realize that your life, imperfect and unfinished as it is, deserves to be measured by your own values, your own aspirations and your own definition of success, not by an algorithm that profits every time you feel inadequate.

Here are our suggestions for this week:

💊 Protect empty moments.
Silence is not wasted time; it is where clarity, gratitude and original thinking are born.

💊 Measure progress against yourself.
The only comparison that consistently creates growth is between who you were yesterday and who you are becoming today.

💊 Never compare your reality to someone else’s highlight reel.
You know every chapter of your own story. Social media only shows the cover of everyone else’s.

As the Roman poet Horace stated over 2,000 years ago: Carpe Diem, stay in the present, enjoy the moment, savor this instant, it is all we really have.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

There is a story our culture loves to tell about entrepreneurship: the founder as protagonist, the pitch that lands, the exit that changes everything. It is a compelling story, and we understand exactly why it is so seductive, because Angelica and I find the entrepreneurial journey fascinating too. It is, quite literally, why we became entrepreneurs ourselves years ago. But somewhere between admiring that story and actually living it, we learned something the story leaves out: this is a far more demanding journey than most people watching from the outside ever understand.

We spend our days with founders and startups, and the pattern repeats itself with striking consistency. Two or three founders sit across from us, genuinely passionate, convinced they can conquer the world. They swear they are all in, that they will never give up, and in that moment, we believe them, because they believe it too.

Some time ago, and it happens from time to time, during one of our regular catch-up meetings with one of our portfolio companies, we learned that one of the co-founders was beginning to waver. It sparked a broader reflection on the entrepreneurial journey, one shaped by ambition and uncertainty, resilience and doubt, responsibility and freedom. Building a company is rarely a straight path; it is a constant balancing act between the weight of expectations, the responsibility towards employees, investors and customers, and the deeply personal rewards that come from creating something meaningful. These emotions are not separate chapters of the journey, they are intertwined, often appearing all at once, and learning to navigate them is as important as building the business itself.

During this seemingly glamorous and long journey things get hard.

Not hard in the abstract, motivational-poster sense, but hard in very specific, very unglamorous ways. Long hours that don’t end when the laptop closes. Flexibility that isn’t about working from home, but about taking the one call that matters while you’re on holiday, or quietly rearranging your personal plans because an investor is finally, finally ready to commit. Uncertainty that doesn’t last a week or a quarter but sometimes years, sitting alongside pushbacks, plans that don’t survive contact with reality, and the slow accumulation of things that simply don’t work the way you expected them to.

And then, at some point, reality shows up and asks for a seat at the table.

That is usually when the shift happens. Founders realize it is not always fun. That building something means doing plenty of things you don’t particularly like, over and over, because they need doing. That there is no shortcut around pushing forward and finding the next solution, and the one after that, in order to keep building toward scale, an exit, or simply a company that survives and thrives, whatever form that takes for them.

We see this regularly, and we recognize how disorienting it can be. Living with uncertainty is not easy. It is frustrating, some days more than others, and there is nothing wrong with admitting that.

This is really why we wanted to write this week’s letter. Not to talk anyone out of anything, but because we think it’s worth saying out loud: the success stories are real, and so is everything that happens before and beneath them. The part rarely mentioned is not a footnote, it is most of the journey. And what carries people through it, from what we’ve observed again and again, has less to do with talent or timing than with three quieter things: responsibility, patience, and attitude.

For this week, here are 3 things we keep noticing when we watch founders navigate this:

💊 The romance and the reality are not opposites, they coexist. Loving the journey and finding it exhausting can both be true in the same week.

💊 “Flexibility” as a founder rarely means freedom. More often it means your calendar bends around whatever the business needs, including the moments you’d rather protect.

💊 What gets people through isn’t relentless excitement, it’s steadiness. Responsibility, patience, and the willingness to keep adjusting your attitude are what we consistently see separate those who make it through the hard middle from those who don’t.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

There are conversations that stay with you for years, not because of what was said, but because of how they made everyone feel. Jacqueline and I have been reflecting on this a great deal lately, especially as we find ourselves spending more and more time in boardrooms, negotiations, mentoring sessions and difficult conversations where the quality of the relationship often determines the quality of the outcome far more than the quality of the argument itself. It reminded me of a very personal story that happened many years ago, one that I only truly understood after recently sharing it with Jacqueline over coffee.

My father, a physician and scientist with a brilliant analytical mind, was having a conversation with my then husband. The topic was orthodontics, and someone observed that nowadays so many people wear braces. My husband, much younger and perhaps with the charming confidence that only youth can afford, casually concluded that this probably meant future generations would naturally have straighter teeth from a genetic point of view.

Scientifically, the statement was completely wrong and my father knew it and picked up on it immediately.

Instead of gently explaining why acquired characteristics are not inherited, he dismissed the idea almost with disbelief, correcting him in a way that felt less like sharing knowledge and more like exposing ignorance. The discussion escalated, pride entered the room, voices rose, and two intelligent men who actually respected each other stopped speaking for months.

Many years later, recounting this episode to Jacqueline, something struck me that had escaped me all this time: that day, nobody won.

The older man possessed the correct answer but failed to transfer knowledge because he delivered it in a package no one wanted to receive. The younger man reacted to the tone rather than the content and lost the opportunity to learn something genuinely fascinating. Both left the conversation poorer than when they had entered it.

One had knowledge but lacked empathy.

The other had curiosity but lost openness.

Both were right, and both were wrong.

It is remarkable how often this happens in business, in families, in leadership and, perhaps most dangerously, on social media. We become so attached to being correct that we forget the actual objective of communication. The purpose is rarely to prove that we know more. It is to create understanding, move ideas forward and strengthen relationships.

The older I become, the more convinced I am that communication is not measured by what leaves our mouth but by what arrives in the other person’s mind. If our perfectly accurate message produces embarrassment, defensiveness or resentment, then we should not be surprised if the facts never make it through.

Knowledge without kindness is often perceived as arrogance.

Kindness without honesty is often perceived as weakness.

Real wisdom lives somewhere in between.

Ironically, the most persuasive people we know are not necessarily those with the highest IQ, the strongest arguments or the most impressive credentials. They are the ones who make others feel respected while changing their minds. They understand that people rarely remember the exact words, but they never forget how those words made them feel.

Perhaps the greatest competitive advantage in life is not being the smartest person in the room, it is being the person everyone is still willing to listen to after you’ve told them they are wrong.

For this week, here are 3 points that we definitely try to apply to our daily lives:

💊 Knowledge is only valuable if it can be received.
Being correct is an achievement, helping someone else understand is a skill.

💊 Every conversation has two outcomes.
One is about the topic itself, the other is about the relationship. Never sacrifice the second unnecessarily for the first.

💊 Deliver truth with generosity.
People become more open to changing their minds when they don’t first have to defend their dignity.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

We have all been sold the same story. Work hard, stay focused, keep moving forward, and success will arrive in a neat, predictable sequence, with every day being slightly better than the one before, every decision bringing you closer to your goal, and every effort producing a proportional reward. It is a wonderfully comforting narrative, almost mathematical in its elegance, and perhaps that is precisely why it is so seductive.

Reality, however, has an odd sense of humour. As Jacqueline and I were reflecting on the past 2 years, both in personal and professional realms, we arrived at a different conclusion.

If you look closely at the lives of entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, scientists, or simply anyone who has built something meaningful, you quickly notice that progress rarely resembles a straight line climbing gently upwards. Instead, it looks suspiciously like the scribbles of a toddler armed with a crayon after two espressos. There are periods where everything seems to click, followed by weeks where nothing works, moments when opportunities appear from nowhere, and others where it feels as though the universe has accidentally misplaced your file.

The problem is not that progress is messy, the problem is that we keep expecting it not to be.

One disappointing meeting convinces us that we are going backwards, a rejected proposal suddenly feels like proof that the strategy is wrong, and a quiet month makes us question years of preparation, when in reality we may simply be experiencing what every worthwhile journey inevitably includes: plateaus, detours, unexpected lessons disguised as setbacks, and invisible growth that only becomes obvious much later.

Nature, after all, has never been particularly interested in linearity. Bamboo spends years developing an underground root system before shooting up several metres in a matter of weeks, seasons alternate between abundance and apparent inactivity, and even the stock market, despite all its dramatic daily headlines, has rewarded patient investors not because it moved smoothly, but because it kept recovering from countless moments when everyone believed it never would.

Business works in much the same way. The fundraising process that feels painfully slow often produces a single introduction that changes everything, months of refining a product suddenly unlock the right customer, and countless conversations that appear to lead nowhere quietly build the reputation that eventually opens doors no cold email ever could. Looking backwards, it all appears perfectly logical; living through it, it usually feels somewhere between mildly frustrating and completely absurd.

Perhaps this is why experience is such a valuable asset. It teaches us that not every day needs to produce visible results, because some days are quietly laying foundations that will only reveal their value months or even years later.

The irony is that the biggest breakthroughs often happen just after the point where most people would have concluded that nothing was happening at all. Had they been expecting a straight line, they would have stopped too early, mistaking temporary silence for permanent failure.

The next time your progress feels slower than expected, remember that the absence of visible movement does not necessarily mean the absence of growth. Sometimes you are climbing, sometimes you are preparing to climb, and sometimes you are simply catching your breath before the next ascent. The mountain, fortunately, does not care how straight your path looks from below.

So every time we feel that things are not going as fast as we wish, it may be worth remembering 3 things:

• Progress compounds in bursts, not in straight lines. Trust consistency more than daily results.

• A plateau is often preparation, not stagnation. Roots grow before branches.

• Looking backwards always makes the journey appear logical. The courage lies in continuing before the pattern becomes visible.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J

Hi Powerful Pills Seekers,

Welcome back to A&J Powerful Pills, your weekly prescription without any unpleasant side effects.

Let’s talk about something Angelica and I continue to notice. Something small, slightly absurd, and, if you work in any professional capacity, almost certainly familiar.

You send an email, a clear one: a question, a proposal, a request for a yes or a no. Something that could be answered in thirty seconds with a functional keyboard and a modicum of goodwill. You wait, a week passes. You follow up, politely, another week goes by…. silence.

Then, while scrolling through your phone in the evening after a long day, suddently at some point, there they are. Three Instagram stories posted before 9am. A lunch photo. A boomerang of someone’s aperitivo. A reel about morning routines. Posted today. In fact, posted while you were still waiting for that reply.

We rest our case.

The “I’ve been so busy” myth

Here is the thing: we are all busy. Truly. Angelica and I are certainly busy, we sit on boards, we mentor founders, we speak at conferences, we co-write this newsletter, we do pro-bono work because we believe it matters, and we still find time, even on the worst weeks, to answer our emails. Not beautifully. Not with long, perfectly constructed paragraphs. Sometimes just three words. But we answer.

Because “busy” is not a personality. It is a condition we all share in varying degrees, and it does not exempt anyone from basic professional courtesy.

We have noticed over the years that the people who are genuinely the most occupied, the founders building something important while simultaneously running the company and trying to close a funding round, the executives managing teams across time zones, the operators holding everything together with institutional tape, are usually the first to respond. Because they understand that a quick reply saves everyone time, including themselves. The people who disappear? They are often the ones with the most curated presence elsewhere.

What a reply actually does

We want to be practical for a moment, because there is a genuine logic here that gets lost in the performance of business.

When someone writes to you, a founder asking for an introduction, an investor requesting a call, a partner waiting on a decision, they are not just waiting for content. They are waiting to know whether to keep waiting. And the longer the silence stretches, the more time both sides waste: you accumulate follow-up emails you will eventually have to deal with, and they continue to invest energy in a direction that may already be a dead end.

A simple no is an act of generosity. “Not the right fit.” “Out of scope for us right now.” “Not something I can take on.” Four words, five words. It costs nothing and it frees everyone. The person on the other end gets to stop wondering, recalibrate, and move forward. You get a cleaner inbox and something arguably more valuable: a reputation for being someone who treats other people’s time as if it matters.

To the founders in particular, and we mean this with enormous respect for what you are building, we know that fundraising is already its own special kind of exhausting. You are putting your idea, your team, your vision in front of strangers and asking them to believe. The least the rest of us can do is tell you clearly if we are or not interested. Quick and short is good enough to allow people to move forward. The same applies for everyone, not only founders.

We all find time for what we care about

This is perhaps the part that stings a little, so we will say it gently but clearly: we find time for what matters to us. Holidays get booked. Restaurants get reserved. Gym slots get protected with the rigour of international summits. This is not a criticism, it is human nature, and it is fine.

But it does mean that “I didn’t have time to reply” is rarely the complete picture. More often, it is “I didn’t prioritise replying,” which is a legitimate choice, but it is worth owning it honestly rather than hiding behind a myth of universal overwhelm.

Because the other person knows. They can see the stories too.

A small ask for the week ahead

Look at your inbox. Find the email that has been sitting there the longest, the one you have been meaning to get to, the one that feels awkward or complicated or just inconvenient. And reply to it today. Even briefly. Even if the answer is no. Especially if the answer is no.

You will feel better. They will feel better. And your inbox will be, in some small but meaningful way, a more honest place.

As always, thank you for reading, and for sharing us with people who might need a small, friendly nudge.

Until next time, stay authentic, keep growing, and remember that we’re all in this together!

With love and gratitude 💚
A&J