82 – What would we say to our 25-year-old selves?
With age comes wisdom. Or does it? In this episode, we discuss what we would we say and share with our 25-year-old selves. What would we keep, what would we change and what nobody told us that we wish they had Navigation: Intro Where we actually were at 25 The conversation: six themes, professional then personal What we would NOT change The 25-year-old of 2026 Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West , co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai , business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon , @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Welcome to Tech Deciphered Episode 82. This will be quite a special episode. We are going to talk about what we would say to our 25-year-old selves. With age comes wisdom, or does it? We are going to talk about what we would say to our old self when we were maybe around 25 years old, so quite some time ago, and try to share some wisdom about what we have learned over the years, maybe things to do, mistakes not to do. Maybe we start with where we were at 25. Nuno, you want to start? Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Yeah, and we have similar ages. At 25, we were around the same year, more or less. I was in, I think, the second of my third grueling years at Deloitte Consulting, about to make probably the biggest shift of my life, which was my move to London, which would happen a year later when I was 26. I think that was my platform to where I am today, having worked outside Portugal for many years now and having lived all over the world. But at 25, I was in my second year at Deloitte, working probably around that time, 90-100-hour weeks, like investment banking style. I would say Deloitte was probably the place where I learned a lot of my discipline around business, around structuring problems, where I first read Barbara Minto’s famous pyramid principle that helped me become a much more structured person in terms of my communication, et cetera, and also where I started having a little bit of a bullshit meter for what people around me were doing and how they were doing it along the way. I’m a computer engineer by background, as many of you know. I’d come out of that. I started studying when I was very young. When I was 17, I got in college, young by Portuguese standards. I’d also started a company in parallel, which many people don’t know about, which was DreamLink, of which I was a Co-Founder and the CEO. We were in the IT services business process outsourcing space. The company did become profitable, but we closed it out anyway. This was around the time that I effectively moved to Deloitte. One of my partners ended up moving to McKinsey at the same time. I was a little bit pissed off about that, that he got to go to McKinsey, and I only got to get into Deloitte. But basically, my life was going well. I didn’t have much time to enjoy the money I was making. I was making good money back then. I was very young, but I wasn’t enjoying it very much because I was working like hell. I feel at 25, that’s where I was at. Deloitte Consulting, working 90, 100 hours. I don’t think I had a girlfriend back then. Talk about personal maybe later. I was figuring out what I wanted to do next. This was the beginning of my realization that I needed to leave Portugal, that I was a bit too Germanic for Portugal, that an Anglo-Saxon environment, a place like London, would probably be more for me, and I did get that absolutely right. So this was the beginning of that part of the story, the beginning where I was getting just super frustrated with working. As I said, I learned everything I know about business or almost everything I knew about classic business and structuring at Deloitte Consulting, but at the same time, I was realizing it wasn’t for me. The environment of work in Portugal wasn’t for me. Bertrand Schmitt Interesting. Thanks for the sharing. I think we shared effectively a lot of things, very similar life experiences. Me, I’m French, obviously. My early life was in Paris. Been a fan of doing computer stuff. When I was a teenager, doing development on my own, publishing some early software, actually HP calculators, giving me an early love for mobile computing. I started my first company, my first business, Arkadia NetSystems, when I was around 21, 22, last year of engineering school in France. When I was 25 is actually when I closed my first business in 2001. That was one year after the crash of the dot-com, after the crash of the telco space. As a business, we lost suddenly a lot of customers or prospects. It happened very quickly in one or two quarters. It was pretty shocking to experience that early on after building a startup, to see your customers disappear, and not just any customers, but some big names in telco space suddenly closing down their mobile internet division, their web initiatives. I was at 25 just closing down the business, I don’t know, May, June 2001. Then September 11th happened. For me, I started to think about what’s next. Two things really came to my mind. One is I want to learn more about business, not just the technical side, but the business side, the marketing side. Two was I just cannot stay in France. I need to have a bigger international perspective from the get-go. Therefore, I started to prepare for MBA. Ultimately, in 2002, I was accepted at Wharton and started my MBA at Wharton in summer of 2002. So that’s where I was, having made the decision to have a bigger international perspective, US perspective. You have to know that in France, it’s very easy to get used to France. France is not that small, so you might wrongly assume that it’s big enough for a business when it’s not. I guess when you come from Israel, from Portugal, it might be easier to realize the world is bigger. But if you’re French, you think that France is big enough, which I think is a mistake made by a lot of French entrepreneurs. I made this decision to move to the US, do an MBA. It’s a pretty big decision around 25. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Yeah, and funnily enough, I actually did a Wharton executive program, not the MBA, around the same year, so maybe one year before you went into your MBA or something like that, which is interesting. Funnily enough, there’s a little bit of a commonality around Wharton, which we don’t normally talk about, Bertrand and I, but there was a little bit of that. Obviously, he did the real thing. I just did a 2-week executive program. He did the proper MBA. Bertrand Schmitt I did the expensive thing. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Anyway, there’s that in common as well. I don’t know if I told you this, Bertrand, but it’s one of the reasons why I got my job at GSM Association, that I moved to London, was because of Wharton, because the guy who was last minute told his assistant was the same person as the other officer that was supposed to re-interview me, the other officer didn’t show up. The guy who had become my mentor had the same assistant. His assistant was like, “Hey, can you take this call instead? Because the other guy is not around.” So he took it and he looked at the CV very quickly. He’s like, “Did you do an MBA at Wharton? Because I’m an MBA from Wharton.” I was like, “No, I did an executive program in M&A at Wharton.” That’s how the conversation started. That guy became my mentor for many years. Again, the Wharton connectivity. Wharton was definitely very important in my life. What conversation would we have with our 25-year-old self, Bertrand? Where would you start? Bertrand Schmitt Maybe we can start on the professional side. Maybe we can start with money, risk, capital, literacy, if you want. I think that on that side, I’m not sure I would change so much because at 25, I already had taken the risk to launch my own business, my own startup. Then I have taken the risk to change continent and to start a very expensive MBA. I certainly had, I don’t know if it’s an appetence for risk, but I felt that if there is enough value in the risk, it’s worth taking. I think I had that perspective early on. I think that if you don’t risk something, that also comes with its own risk in terms of your opportunities, your career, what you will end up doing and the like. Personally, I’m not sure I would change much in terms of risk, but in terms of capital literacy, understanding more how business work, I think doing an MBA, at least for me, at least at that time… I think we’ll talk more later about what changed in 2026. Because the environment has changed for a 25-year-old. But I think at that time, for me, it was very helpful. I think if you have an engineering background, I think if you are, on top of it, a student from a country like France with less strong culture about MBA, there is a lot of value to study abroad, do an MBA to learn more about business. I’m not sure there is the same value if you don’t have that part of the international experience you get with an MBA abroad. I don’t know if there is the same value if you have an undergrad in business already. It was pretty clear to me around me that people with business as undergrad were not getting as much from an MBA. They were getting the relationship, the networking. But you could see they knew a lot about what we were taught. As the engineer, the scientist like me definitely got some real value out of our MBA. In my own situation, that’s also how I met my wife. I will certainly not change anything about that. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Good to hear. I’m sure Andrea, if she’s listening to this, will appreciate that. My two cents on the capital piece and risk and money is I probably would tell my 25-year-old to actually pursue the startup, not give up on the startup, go back to being an entrepreneur. At 25, I would have done the 2 years of learning quickly around business methodology, structuring of problems, et cetera. Go back to doing a startup, try to revitalize and go back to the startup that you closed down, DreamLink, and try to make something work out of it. Take higher risks at that point in time. I was looking at doing MBAs. I was the expert on call for MBA programs. What did you need to do to apply, et cetera, at that moment in time. I never did an MBA. So that part I think I got right. I’d tell my 25-year-old, “Don’t do the MBA. Do some programs along the way, do some postgraduate programs. Find the hacker way of becoming an alum of these places.” But I would definitely say take more risk. Go create your own thing. Use that vitality and the 90-100 hours for your own benefit and for your own stuff, not for someone else’s benefit. I don’t regret it. Just mind you, this is a hypothetical exercise. Obviously, we don’t have a time machine, at least not yet. Maybe AI will help us create that. But at the end of the day, less facetiously, honestly, I would tell my 25-year-old to take that risk to go and do something and really try and do it properly full-time, 90-100-hour weeks, push yourself out there. I was too obsessed with blue-chip companies back then and brands. I got a lot of learning. I was lucky I got some pretty amazing mentors along the way. I didn’t think that I understood how important people were in terms of mentorship, but I feel I would have liked to have taken more risks back then. Bertrand Schmitt Makes sense. I think taking risks, especially when you are young, when you don’t even have a family, technically yet, makes it so much easier to take risk. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Indeed. Maybe switching gears, second thing, which in my case, I actually think I got right, is when you’re early in your career, you should surf waves. The equivalent of waves in one’s career is markets. Is that you tap into a market or a vertical or a submarket that’s just going through the roof. Mine was telecom, actually to be more specific, wireless. It was just going through the roof. It was going through the roof, not only in Europe, but it was going through the roof all over the world. Wireless was becoming the thing. Mobile was becoming the new thing. I think I absolutely got that one right. I figured that one early enough that I rode it. Through Deloitte, I was already… Most of my work was around telecom and around wireless. It allowed me to go to the GSM Association, the Global Trade Association for Mobile. So I owe it a lot, just the riding of that wave. It then allowed me to go into McKinsey. So that whole sequencing of decisions was pretty critical that I decided to tap into telecom. Wireless became really good at understanding the levers around technology and around business in telecom. Then I moved on and on, and that led me to three big, big moves along the way. That would be my advice to the 25-year-old, figure out what’s the big move and go after it. To be honest, if it wasn’t telecom, I would have said probably something that’s more the service or application layer of the internet. So the web stuff, which was still Web 1.0 back then. I would say if you didn’t go after telecom, I’d go after internet. But I do think the telecom thing still served me well. Bertrand Schmitt First, I totally agree with your advice. I think you need to be surfing on the latest wave to develop your career, develop your business opportunities, launch a new business. It’s very hard if you are not on the latest wave because people are less interested. It’s fine to do some small business, but if you are quite focused in the tech, entrepreneurship space, startup space, you want to be focusing… Or if you want a fast-moving career, being on the latest fastest-moving wave makes a big difference. I agree with you, at that time, it was definitely mobile and internet. In terms of surfing the wave, myself, looking back, one thing I learned with my first startup is that be careful not to be too early. Internet, definitely that was a wave. Wireless was a wave. But mobile internet early on in the 2000s was not. It was way too early. That’s what I learned. It started to be big with the iPhone, 2007, ’08, and more serious from maybe 2010. But 10 years earlier was not easy. That’s one thing I learned. Looking back, I should have been like you, more focused on the telco side of things, wireless telco, or on the internet side of things. But trying to bring both together early on was a tough one. Yeah, totally agree. Look at what are the current waves. If you look at the 2010s, there was mobile and there was cloud computing. There was SaaS, software as a service. If you look at now, since 2023, it’s very clearly AI. You could have been in AI before, but that dramatic wave and shift that’s going to put win in your back is AI. There is no question about it. There is also a renewal in hardware manufacturing that’s going on as well in parallel. Biotech is also probably moving. I think there is a new wave or a new combination of waves. Usually, there is not just one. Maybe another piece of the puzzle. I think it’s very important to develop a passion for this wave. If you are just surfing but having no care or interest in the wave below you, I’m not sure it will end up so well. Either the passion is already there or you develop a passion, but you need to be quite early. If you are just analyzing coldly, not really being interested, at some point it’s visible. You are not here for the wave, but you are just here for the money coming from the wave, which should be an indirect result of surfing the wave well. I believe it shouldn’t be your main reason to be there. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I agree with everything you said. Maybe the third topic for me would be where, right? Where do you go? Geography. Do you stay in your home country or not? To my 25-year-old, I would have told him to go abroad, which he did immediately after. Anglo-Saxon environment was the right environment to frame. Further down the road, ended up going to China, to Beijing, and being in Asia Pacific. We have that in common as well. But that was also the right advice, that in this case, go east, not go west. Go north and then go east. But I feel that’s replicating this advice to anyone that is out there that is 25 right now. I feel, play to your strengths. Go to the environments where you want to compete in effect, and where you’re going to grow. Don’t go to the easy. If you’re 25, stay in the easy places. Maybe that’s an option. But given the environment today in terms of career and life, my advice would be go where you can compete the hardest. If that’s like, “I want to go to AI and work in the AI, and I want to hustle my way into it,” whatever. There’s a couple of outposts in the world. If you’re Chinese, maybe Beijing is a great outpost. If you’re close to the US in some way, or if you’re based in the US, Silicon Valley is very expensive, but it’s the outpost right now. Go to the places, the cities, the countries that allow you to really play to your strengths. I realized very early, as I said in this episode, that I was a little bit too Germanic in some ways for the Portuguese environment that I kept working in. Maybe an Anglo-Saxon environment was more suitable. I did get that right. Try and figure that out. Figure out what environment are you going to thrive into, right? Where is it going to work for you? Go into that environment. Geography does matter. For all that we say around remote. It’s a different vibe if you’re there, if you’re just interacting with people, meeting people at meetups, engaging, networking your way into your next thing, et cetera. The world has become… In that sense, certainly when I was 25, I felt networking was a little bit more closed. The internet wasn’t as pervasive. It was difficult to reach out to people, et cetera. That’s not the case anymore. The world has become much more open and the surfaces of interaction have become more open, which creates more of an onus on you as an individual if you’re 25 today, to make your way through the world and figuring out where to get to, et cetera. Bertrand Schmitt When we were 25, the big theme was, if you remember, it was the world becoming flat from this famous book. I think for you, like for me, we decided to move. I decided first to move to the US because for me, that was the best place for tech. That was the best place for business. That’s where you could find the top MBAs. I had always been attracted by all the stories about building startups in the US. All of these big famous companies started there from Microsoft to Apple. I was really a big fan. That’s what brought me there. I think that was an amazing experience for me as a French person to see the big America with my own eyes and truly studying there, making friends there, understanding more how people think there. I could see, I remember feeling quite a dramatic change in how I think about things after just my first year of MBA. What I did, like you said, was also to move to China. When I was 32, I moved to China, I moved to Beijing. I spent 6 years in China. It was amazing because it was completely booming country. One reason I chose China was it felt the most entrepreneurial country I’ve ever seen. That’s the only place in the world where I remember meeting people with three business cards because they had three businesses they were running or involved with. That’s one of the reasons. Another reason was a lot of respect for the East Asian culture and thinking that if I knew about Europe, if I knew about the US, I didn’t know much about East Asia. I felt that to be more a complete human being, there was real value to try to spend time there, not as a tourist, but as someone living there and working there. That’s why I took that decision to move to China at 32. Looking back, it was a great decision. I met my wife there as well. We did the same MBA, but different years. Ultimately, we met in China. That’s also where I started, co-founded my business, App Annie, later renamed data.ai. Great experience. Amazing for personal reason, amazing for business reason. But still, ultimately, I moved to the US to really expand the business. From there, looking back, I would advise myself to try to see the world and try to discover different places. I think I’ve always been impressed how everyone I met who had an experience quite global, who have known Europe, Asia, US, are quite different from the rest. They have very different perspectives, very global perspective, much more humility in a way about the world, but also understand the world much better, also more risk-taker, also understand the chance they had starting up in one special country. That’s one reason why usually I try to have business partners, associates, employees who have some of this experience of having lived abroad, studied abroad, because I have seen that having 1, 2, 3 years of this experience, maybe even more, can really make a difference in how people are less risk-averse, more open, and more global-minded. Maybe to share one experience from that perspective of the other way, people who don’t really have this experience, I still remember one manager who told me that when he joined a business, very US-centric, he was to start Europe and business outside the US and his title was VP Rest of the World, meaning anything else beyond the US border. For me, that was very interesting because basically, his boss really didn’t have a good comprehension about the world outside the US. First, you don’t want to be seen as rest of the world. Such a title was a catastrophe for him trying to do business outside the US. VP International, yes, but the rest of the world… I think there is a lot of basic learning that sometimes if you miss that international experience, you will have trouble to really integrate and internalize. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Absolutely spot on. Moving gears maybe to the personal side of the conversation, some of it interacts and intersects still with the professional side, but more at a personal, deeper level of interaction. I think the first theme that would arise for me is the importance of mentors, your bosses: who do you report to, the person that you work for in particular. Obviously, who your colleagues are and who you work with matters a lot as well, but I would say that’s very, very vital. If you’re doing a startup, obviously who your co-founders are, who your investors are. Starting with mentors and bosses when you’re early in your career. I had a couple of people that were fundamental to me in my life that defined a lot of my career through it all. To a certain extent, Fernando Costa Freire in my first job at GSI, he was the CEO. We didn’t interact much, but I saw his way of acting and how he interacted and how he did stuff. Later on, when I was at Deloitte Consulting, a difficult, hard-ass partner, Jorge Pereira da Costa, who went on to do other great things as well along the way. A bit of an interesting profile as well that he had come from industry into consulting. He wasn’t a career consultant. Something that I used later on in my life as well, when I went that way as well with McKinsey. I went from being a client to joining the firm. Then at GSM Association, probably the most defining mentor of my life professionally, guy called Ameet Shah, who had been at Accenture before that. Incredible human being, not just incredible mentor, but incredible human being. Then Stefan Schmitgen, who became someone who served me, worked for me while I was a client and became a friend, and then took me to McKinsey along the way. There’s a couple of people that were very, very fundamental. Then along the way, co-founders: Christof, who Strive Capital with, my co-founders at Chamaeleon, who are obviously there from the beginning. People that you select along the way, sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t get it right. Normally, relationships in my mind stay throughout. Even when things don’t work out perfectly, you get in touch. I’ve been very blessed that there’s been a lot of people in my life that I looked up to that I went on to meet or even work with. Professor Burgelman at Stanford was my professor. I loved his books, and then I went to Stanford, and he was my professor. There was a lot of stuff along the way that matters. My two cents on this is if you’re choosing just, “I’m joining that company because of that company, because I’m going to get paid a lot, whatever,” it’s the wrong choice certainly when you’re that young. Who you’re going to work for, I think, matters probably the most, actually, so early in your career if you’re going to work for someone, of course, if you’re not doing your own thing. Obviously, who your co-founders are, then probably matters the most if you’re doing your own thing. I would spend a lot of time just looking at people, making sure that you guys gel, that if you’re going to have a boss, that you understand what boss that person is going to be, and that you can really learn a lot from that person. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, I might take a different perspective from the sense that I learn a lot through reading. I just love to read. I read a lot of biographies. I don’t know if you can call a biography about someone who mentored me. I read a lot of biographies about successful entrepreneurs, successful inventors. Ben Franklin, for instance, is one of my heroes. I tried to learn a lot from some of the best people, either biography, autobiography, in business and outside of business, business and science, usually. That has been definitely one way I’ve learned about what some of the best have been doing. I would say doing my MBA, I learned a lot from my peers, from my teachers, also from visiting speakers. We had so many great speakers: a vice chairman, Joint Chief of Staff to the CEO of IBM, to the CEO of HP, sometimes in quite intimate settings around dinner. It was really helpful. For me, that’s what I’ve had because ultimately, I end up being often in a situation where I was a CEO, I was running the business. It was not that easy to have mentors. If you think about VCs, for instance, as they invest in your business, it’s tough to have them as mentors. They will provide you some good perspective and things, but it’s not always easy as a CEO to share some deep personal things or business issues because you want to keep some wall. You don’t know what people will say or share on their side about you. You have to be always careful. Finding a good mentor can be difficult. You can find peers. As a CEO, you have a group of peers that I would suggest, you have the Young CEOs Associations. You have different things. That could be one way to do that. While we are talking about people, it’s important to talk as well about if you are building a startup, for instance, choosing your co-founders, choosing your investors. I think people are very important. It can be very dramatic situation. I’ve been lucky enough to have great co-founders which I got along well, first employees who worked not only as co-founders. I’ve been quite blessed with that. For me, I think it’s important to find people who you are well aligned in terms of values, but also in terms of mission about the business. You get a good sense for the capacity to work hard, not to abandon too easily, because definitely, I think the wrong co-founders is going to damage pretty significantly your business. It’s not even sure you can go through that and stay in good shape. It’s the same finding the right investors. It’s not all about the money, it’s not all about the reputation of the firm, it’s about this specific investor, how they behave, how they work. You want to be really careful about that. I’ve been mostly lucky on that side, but I’ve also learned some lessons, so be very careful on that level. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro One thing I would add is we’ve mentioned some people and done shoutouts over several episodes over the last few years, but maybe not enough, I would highlight my parents. We talked about, I think in one episode about it, but for my father, a lot of the work ethic, the morality, the ethics, the putting in the sweat. For my mother, the smart-assness, the intelligence to go and frame things in different way, the ability to systematically question stuff and ask, “Why is it done like this? Why is it not done in a different way?” Have that self-reliance that maybe there’s a better way to do it and I can figure out myself without necessarily just benchmarking it. Around that time, I think I was already showing those characteristics when I was at Deloitte, but I couldn’t point out that that came a lot from my parents. Sometimes we always have our dysfunctionalities with our parents, but pay attention, maybe there’s something that is coming out of that relationship of how you grew up that will be ultimately a superpower. It might be something that really gives you a huge edge over other people, how you live. Be nice to your parents, I guess, is the message here. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, certainly be nice to your parents. I want to say I was lucky enough that my dad was an executive, and he understood some of the business issues I was going through as a young entrepreneur. Both of my parents were supportive of my entrepreneurial spirit, if I can call it that way. They were, of course, asking me questions about why don’t I go to some bigger companies, but ultimately, they were very supportive of my choices. It’s the same when I went to MBA. It’s not true for everyone. Not everyone has supportive parents who are going to support your choices, especially when they can be very risky, especially when you’re going to go far away from them. That’s definitely a blessing, and definitely, it’s not the case for everyone. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Switching gears to the life outside work in general and other relationships: health, hobbies, gadgets, faith. Gadgets, we’ve talked a lot. We’re both nerds, and we’ve been nerds for a while. It just meant we spent a lot of money back then that we shouldn’t probably have spent. I guess that’s the lesson learned. Maybe you shouldn’t spend a lot of money on gadget, certainly in early life, certainly. Maybe. Bertrand Schmitt Yes and no, because sometimes that’s why we got inspired in terms of new business ideas. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro At least for my 25-year-old, I would say just take it a little bit slower. Maybe I’ll start faith. As you guys know, I’ve talked about the fact that I’m Catholic. When I was 25, my relationship with God was very disturbed. I was working a lot, and I didn’t feel it was a particularly important thing to go to Mass and do all these things. It was not a great time of my life. The move to London was one of the things that brought me back to that relationship. Curiously enough, you wouldn’t imagine that you go back to being Catholic in London. Back then, it wasn’t obvious, not the most Catholic city on Earth, but that was what it took. I feel around 25, I was just very disturbed. In some ways, the working 90–100 hours was obfuscating all the stuff I didn’t understand about myself. I was pretty blind about myself. I was just working like hell, and I was becoming much better professionally, but at the same time, my ability to establish relationships was really, really suffering. Even friendships that I’d built through college, etc., were being disturbed. A lot of the friendships I built around then were with colleagues, people that I worked with at Deloitte, that are still very good friends today. Fortunately, it worked out. I think my recommendation to my 25-year-old self is like, “You need to take some more time off and sometimes say no.” I did it at the end of my tenure at Deloitte. When I was about to leave, I was like, “Hey, I’m not doing that.” And nothing happened. They can’t fire you at that time, whatever, they need you. We’ve already talked about there was no such thing as work-life balance in our minds, Bertrand and mine, but there’s sequencing, defining sequencing events that you sometimes you actually need to take a break and interact to go back to your friendships, to establish social importance in your health, to eat healthier. I ate like an animal back then, and I was very overweight and all that stuff, which wasn’t great. I was diabetic. I’ve since reversed it. All of these things were really not ideal. I would try to build relationships, a faith-based approach to the world, whatever it is, and hobbies that enhance that notion of you getting to be better yourself. It took me a couple more cycles, so to speak, to get there. That would be my advice to the 25-year-old. Bertrand Schmitt For me, I would say on one side, yes, you need to be careful not to overdo it. If your health, for instance, deteriorates very strongly, that’s really an issue. If your relationship with your family, your friends deteriorate a lot, that’s something to be aware. I don’t think it’s okay with your family to go there, but with your friends, you might have less time. That’s true. As you said, ultimately, you end up making a lot of friends in the business you are in, and that might be the alternative because if you’re ambitious, if you’re young, if you’re in your 20s, at the end of the day, that’s the only time you can do it to that pace. Slowing down when it’s the right time to accelerate your career, I don’t know, I would be careful. Don’t go that far that you destroy yourself or those around you. At the same time, it’s not the time to pace, I would say. Some basics you can take care. Be careful about weight, about some basics around sports, yes, but at the same time, that’s the time where your body has capacity. I remember when I was studying my MBA, finishing at 2:00 AM, 4:00 AM. When I was running my business, same thing, finishing really late. I remember driving back home at 7:00 AM. This is hard, but at the same time, I don’t think anything big has been created if you take it too easy, especially when you are young and you can still do it. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I agree, but I think months and months on end of 90–100 hours, weeks are also detrimental to you in your capacity, not even just to have a life, but really even to think. Your brain is mush because you’re just doing stuff all the time. I did that at McKinsey. I think the lesson learned at Deloitte was propelled while I was at McKinsey leading teams, where my engagement managers, my associates, my business analysts, I was very thoughtful with them saying, “I don’t want you to be working 90–100 hours for the sake of it, just to then next week, you’re not fully here. I’m not getting the best out of you.” I think it’s more in that nuance. I think our generation sort of overworked: the zillennial, end of Gen X, into millennial. The zillennial generation, we worked like hell. I feel it’s not about pacing, it’s about keeping yourself healthy, ultimately. There are several elements to that. Working 90–100 hours weeks here and there, it’s life. If you haven’t done it yet, you should. It’s very humbling, but you get stuff done. It should be the exception rather than the rule. Bertrand Schmitt You need to try to take it easy when you can because there will be moments where you cannot, where you have to push. At some point you run a business, sure, businesses go under. At the end, you will have a lot of free time. Sometimes you have no choice but to push through. At the same time, there will be moments where you can relax a bit, and you should try to use these moments to build back up. I think you need to find a balance. To be clear, I’m absolutely not advocating the 90 hours a week just to do 90 hours a week. It’s because you have not hired yet the right person. It’s because you have temporary issues you absolutely need to go through. There are different reasons why you have to be ready for that, and you have to do it, but at the same time, it should not be hours for hours’ sake. It has to be done for good reason and with a vision of how to work differently, of how to run your business differently. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe last but not the least on the advice on this conversation we would have with our 25-year-old, failure, I think, is something that I would highly recommend. Failing, I don’t think the 25-year-old me would like that. The 25-year-old me was very judgy and liked to get stuff right and would argue with even senior people. That didn’t always go well. I created a couple of what I would call career-limiting moves at some points in my life. Actually the ability to fail, the ability to try stuff out of your comfort zone and just get it done, I did that a bunch of times at that moment in time, unbeknownst to me, certainly around the creation of DreamLink. Some of the elements of the work I did at Deloitte as well were very far out there in terms of projects and the nature of those projects. We got a lot of autonomy at times to really run stuff ourselves, although we were relatively junior. Again, ability to fail, ability to try stuff that doesn’t work, and to try more, because at 25, the cost of you trying and failing is actually lower. Definitely think that’s the case. Fail more, fail more often, and then learn how to not fail, how to become better and go from there. A lot of my rejection and adversity as a path to growth methodologies that I’ve used over the years for coaching and all that stuff is coming from that. It’s coming from, adversity moves you, adversity makes you learn, adversity takes you to the next level. Don’t be afraid to fail. Sometimes from failure will come the best moments of your life, even at a personal level, that relationship that didn’t work out with your girlfriend or whatever. It seems like it’s the end of the world, and sometimes it wasn’t meant to be, and it moves you forward to something better or maybe to someone better. Bertrand Schmitt It’s a great point. Me, probably my hardest failure was when I had to close down my first business, Arkadia, after 3 years in 2001. It was hard. It was definitely a few hard weeks, a few hard months because your whole personality is around your business because you have put so much work and effort around it, because suddenly everything is changing: your personal life, your business life. Because it’s a recent moment, you have to go somewhere else, do something else. At the same time, as you say, and I was 25, as long as you learn from it, as long as you jump in your heads from there, you’re in a good place. I don’t wish that on anyone, but shit happens. At the end of the day, there will be more opportunities, there will be more options. If you have learned, you will just build your new heads. It’s typical. In Silicon Valley, you have a lot of very famous examples of people who fail not once, not twice, three, four, five times before making it. Travis, the CEO of Uber, was very famous to have gone through many startup experiences before striking gold in a way. I’m sure he will say that all this experience were necessary to build Uber. I think it’s true for a lot of people. Just make sure you learn from it. Make sure you build something that leaves a great reputation, that had a great reputation, your team, your business, so you can really build it from there. Some people like to burn everything around when things go wrong. That’s probably not the right way to do it. I would say if you have not failed, you have probably not tried hard enough. I think that a failure will show you, yeah, you maybe tried too hard in the wrong direction, you learn from it, but sometimes that’s the only way to guess where are the limits: your own limits, the limits of your business, your market. Sometimes you need to learn from that. You need to have that forcing function. Sometimes that’s not something you can get from school, for instance. You don’t get that because typically you are there, you can make it. I think failure, I would say it’s not failure in itself. Don’t be afraid to try, don’t be afraid to try hard. If failure happens, then that’s life and be ready to go to the next thing. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro As the great Mario Andretti, the race car champion, used to say, “If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” Bertrand Schmitt Yes, a great quote. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I think that’s exactly the analogy. It’s about the trying and just keep pushing yourself out there and seeing, it’s uncomfortable, but am I making some headway or not? That’s how you get faster. That’s how you get better. Maybe moving to a couple of rapid-fire sections from our end, what would we not change as that first section? We already alluded to this a couple of times in the previous section, but if we had to distill, what would we not change? Maybe I’ll give a couple of tidbits that I haven’t talked about too much yet. The first one is I was of a technical background, I’m an engineer by background, and then I decided to go into business. I always thought going into business, I was going to be disadvantaged because I didn’t study economy or management or all that stuff. It was a huge advantage through my life. My lesson learned, and I would share that with people that are now 24, 25, is sometimes the stuff that seems unorthodox gives you an incredible edge. You’re a master’s in science, computer engineering, and you go into business, and you become a management consultant, maybe it wasn’t super mega obvious all the time back then, maybe today it would be more obvious, but it gives you an edge. You understand technology much better than anyone else. You understand the impact of technology much better than anyone else. You have an edge on some of the core levers that lead to business decisions, which in this case is technology. I didn’t understand it back then, but having had that background and then going to business, gave me this superpower of business technology interfacing and all of that, that I use through my career. Again, if you have an unorthodox background, try and figure out if there is something about that unorthodox background that creates that superpower, that creates that ability to be much better than everyone else just because you can intersect, and you can go between both ways in that bridge. I think I was also a little bit philosophical about life. A lot of people that knew me, my best friends, didn’t think I was much of a geek or a nerd, although I was a huge geek or nerd, but I was very philosophical about life as well, and girls, and neo-romantic in some ways, and all of that stuff. My relationship with God was, as I said, under trouble, but I still thought a lot about it. I think my second part that I wouldn’t change is that, that angst of living with all these different forces around you, the things that are pulling you around, the movie you want to watch, a TV show you want to watch, the game you want to play, the book you want to read, the code you want to develop, et cetera. Live with those. Be immersed in those. Out of that sometimes comes beautiful things. Don’t be afraid to have stuff that’s not necessarily very well put in its place, not very well organized, but just play around with it would be a big piece of advice that I would give. Then third, spend time with people, friends, coworkers, et cetera. Don’t just do the work and leave. Don’t just go to your friends when you need something from them. Being in the US now, being also an American citizen, I think the US has a lot of this transactionality, even at young age, between people, men and women alike, to be honest between you. I feel that’s one thing I would not change in my 25-year-old. Just shoot the breeze if you have the time. I didn’t have much around the 25 years old, but when you do have the time, shoot the breeze. Spend time just understanding how people are doing, what are they up to. You learn a lot out of these interactions. There will be a lot of things that, albeit not transactional, will give you a lot back. In worst case, you’ll build incredible relationships along the way. Bertrand Schmitt I certainly agree that being too transactional is not good. I think people who are too transactional, people see through them, and it’s not something people like. I think it’s important to always be ready to give first before taking. I totally agree with you. One thing I will share is don’t be afraid to be a polymath. Basically, don’t be afraid to be interested in different disciplines. You just talk about engineering and business. I did the same, doing engineering first and then expanding to business, then extending to finance more recently like you. It’s important to be ready to mix different things. Because at the end of the day, I think to do something truly special, you have been mixing many different things, and you come up with unique insights, unique perspective that if you don’t do that, it will be more bland, it will be less interesting, less special, less differentiated. For instance, I’ve recently seen and talked with someone coming from a big tech background, starting his own business, but for me, it was very interesting to see how it was very difficult at a certain age to make that switch because everything is so ingrained about how the world works seen from the big tech perspective versus starting your own business and how the world works at this level. It was very difficult for this person to be really at the right spot. At the same time, when you are still young, that’s the time to experience different things, the big tech, the small tech, the engineering side, the business side. I think there is real value to combine all of this. Steve Jobs is very famous for that. He was not the pure geek. He was not the pure tech guy. He went to India, he went to Japan. He spent time learning about different perspectives, stuff that initially were completely irrelevant for the tech industry. Ultimately, it proved important when it was time to create the Mac. I think that it’s important to touch different topics. It gives some fluidity to your brain. It gives you some perspective. It gives you the ability to attack problems from different angles that few people in the room will be able to do. I will not change that. I had that in touch, but at the time, it was not always easy to think it’s okay because it was really not typical to collect these different pieces of the puzzle. People were always, “Why are you doing all of this? Why aren’t you focused on just doing your engineering stuff?” I remember people at the time were like, “Are you crazy?” Nuno Gonçalves Pedro My classmates thought I was stupid. I was like, “Why are you doing all this stuff outside of studying and all this stuff? You should be an engineer. You should be amazing at being an engineer.” Lo and behold, apparently, it was good that I did what I did. Sometimes it’s exactly that. It’s the N equals one, the people that are just fundamentally different, that make big changes in the world. I’m not saying I belong to that group necessarily, but in some ways, if you are one of those people, don’t be ashamed is the feedback. If you’re young, and you’re feeling like that, don’t be ashamed. You’re probably up to something amazing. That will take you some time to craft and take to the next level, but something definitely amazing. Bertrand Schmitt In a way, mediocrity is all too easy. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Mediocrity is the norm. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s a norm. That’s what people know. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Mediocrity is the norm. It’s sad, but mediocrity is the norm. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. It’s tough when you try to go beyond that because there won’t be a lot of perspective you can get that are really beyond the typical mediocrity. No offense to anyone. If you want to do something great, you have to go beyond what’s typical. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro If we move maybe to the 25-year-old of today of 2026, what advice would we give to the 25-year-old of 2026? We already sprinkled some advice along the way in our previous sections. Again, if I had to summarize and distill my couple of cents, I think take higher risks early on, fail. I think today, failure is actually cheaper than before. Not if you’re carrying massive amounts of loans from university, I know, but still it’s cheaper in the sense that creating your own business, creating your own project, creating your own things, doing side gigs while you’re working has never been easier in mankind. I think AI has given you all this ability to fail and take risks at a very different level than we could back in the day. The second part is information dissemination and knowledge. It’s a given today. Bertrand, like myself, we read a lot when we were younger. We read articles from magazines, we read books. When I talk about Dr. Dobb’s Journal, people are like, “What was that?” It was a defining magazine for engineers. Bertrand Schmitt No podcast, no YouTube at the time. It was handpicked magazines that were not easy to find when you were living in Paris or Lisbon. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro They were expensive. Now you have it at your $20 subscription, you get access to all stuff you want from all these different things out there, from Claude, from ChatGPT, whatever. I think it’s absolutely crazy. Just consume as much knowledge as you can, distill it, triangulate it just to make sure you’re not getting stuff wrong. Evolve. I think this generation has the chance of leapfrogging many of us old hats that have been doing this for a couple of decades, and I look forward to that. I think the geography piece still is there. The world, actually, if anything, is becoming a little bit more siloed these days. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro It’s less flat. Bertrand Schmitt I’m not sure I would give the advice to go live in China, for instance, these days. As much as I enjoyed my time there, I’m not sure now is the right time anymore. It’s not the booming place it used to be. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro You could tell people to go somewhere else, right? Bertrand Schmitt Yes, obviously. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe don’t go to China. Maybe you go to Silicon Valley, go to LA, New York. Bertrand Schmitt Pick the right spot where things are happening right now. That’s really what I would share. It’s not a specific place. It’s where the things are happening right now, where you want to go. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe go to South Korea, go to other parts of the world. There’s a lot of exciting stuff all happening all over the world. The world being more siloed, taking that step and going to that geography actually matters more than ever. The people side, very similar to before, it matters the most. The people you work with and the people you work for are dramatically important at the beginning of your career. They set habits, they set how you approach culture and how you approach ethics and a variety of other things. Go and work with people that are good people, not just in how they work, that can teach you things, but also that they’re good people, generally good people. Then the machine. The machine today has a different role. We call it the machine, but it’s not the machine. It’s all these different apps and tools that you have available to you. Those interactions also matter more than ever. We’ve replaced books with the machine, and the machine now also mentors us in some ways. I know this is sad to say, but it is important to say you’re going to learn a lot from your interactions with apps, with machines. That knowledge dissemination is going to be pretty vital as well. Then last, but not the least, life. If I finished my two cents on life, I would have taken a lot more risks. If I had known back then what I know today, I was very introvert in relation to my interactions with women and girls. There were so many things I would have taken a different set of risks in talking to people, interacting with people, not being afraid of fail in that sense in that interaction. What’s the worst that can happen? People will laugh at you. You will never remember them. I would have taken a lot more risks if I was 25 back now. If you’re 25 today in 2026, take those risks. Take them in person, not just through messaging and through whatever. Just take them in person. Interact, talk to people, get to know people, and figure out what’s in it for you much later down the road. At the beginning, it’s really about just the interaction. Bertrand Schmitt That’s a great point. Going back on my side for advice for 25-year-olds in 2026, many things have changed. That’s for sure. You can learn faster, you can reach people more easily. The world is truly more flat. You can video and chat with anyone in the world so easily now. It’s a huge difference. Sometimes some things have not changed. I think, as you say, you still need to be able to take risk. Risk has probably never been cheaper, except if you have too much debt from university, from your studies. That’s for sure. It can be limiting factor. Try your best to know why you are going to university. Why is it useful? Quite frankly, it raises questions in terms of, is it still necessary in 2026? I don’t know. Or in 2030 or in 2035. Because you talk about AI and how you can get advice. I think it’s definitely a dramatic change. You can have personalized advice from very smart AI these days that maybe beat any university settings where you can talk to a teacher maybe once a day when you could interact real-time, nonstop with an AI. If you want to learn about a specific topic, it can create your own curriculum. Things are changing. I think that might be another piece to accept is that the world will be changing. When you are 25, the world you live in, 5, 10, 20 years after that will have changed. Accept change, go with the change, be an agent of change, I think is important. To have strong values, hard work, knowledge, being good to people is key and something you don’t want to change. Learning about different topics. I talk about being a polymath, I think is important. That geographic awareness, having lived or studied in different places is, I think, quite important. I would say same country doesn’t count. You want to go in a different place, ideally a different language. I’m not sure we talked about this, but when I moved to China, I speak one word of Chinese or two. That’s it. I was not in that category where you spend years learning Chinese before moving. My point is that you can do it. Failure. Don’t be afraid of failure. Being 25 is the time to take risk. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro In conclusion, this was Episode 82 of Tech Deciphered. AI was still present, but mostly we were talking about what would we tell our 25-year-old selves. Also, what would we tell the 25-year-olds in 2026? We went through, actually, our experiences. Where were we when we were 25? We framed the conversation we would have with our 25-year-olds. We framed what we would not change. Finally, some remaining advice distilled for the 25-year-old of 2026. Thank you for joining us. If you have any feedback, send us on LinkedIn or on x.com. Thank you, Bertrand. Bertrand Schmitt Thank you, Nuno.