Who am I? I’m Inês Santos Silva. I'm the Operations Lead at AthenaDAO. I’m a passionate and accomplished advocate for diversity and inclusion in entrepreneurship, technology, health, and policy. Now and then, I send a newsletter about life, work, and random things.
My word for the year is intentionality. I want to be more intentional about what I do, what I work on, and who I spend time with. In 2023, the word was obsession. It’s a fun exercise to pick a word for the year.
I’ve recently read a book called Stolen Focus. There was not a lot of new stuff there, but it reinforced my decision to eliminate distractions from my life. I have no notifications. I have no social apps on my phone. I have sessions of deep work most mornings. Being mindful of my info consumption has clear productive and mental health payoffs.
In the book, they also talked about kids with ADHD, and it’s believed that one of the reasons for the increased number of diagnoses has to do with kids not spending any time playing alone. Alone time and unsupervised play are key for the kids’ development. If you have kids, look into it.
As always, at the end of the year, I did my annual review. But I also do a monthly review with highlights and lowlights of the month. Reading each one of the 11 monthly reviews I’ve done was incredible. It’s so easy to forget the highs and lows of the year and fall for recency bias.
Because of my focus on intentionally, I have been thinking about the balance between planning and spontaneity. How much should I plan? How much free space for things to happen? Right now, I’m more on the planning camp. I have a set of things planned, but I’m okay with them changing.
I’ve also been thinking about being ready to listen. No matter how much people tell you about something, you must be ready to listen. And when you are prepared to listen, change happens. My exercise habits in 2024 would sound completely unbelievable and impossible to me in 2020.
McKinsey has published an interesting report on the Opportunity of Women’s Health. It’s a $1 trillion opportunity. What are we waiting to do?
As always, you can see the books I’ve read and my favorite ones in my annual book review. It’s the 10th edition.
I’ve also been thinking about the next phase of the startup ecosystem. I wrote an article about it in the context of the Portuguese Startup Scene, but my thoughts have been about asking myself what’s coming after SaaS. And is this even a valid question?
Talking about business, I still feel we don’t know anything about building AI-first businesses. I understand infrastructure and LLMs. I see the potential benefits of adding AI to streamline your business. But what about AI-first businesses? What are the MOATS? Are sales and salespeople becoming more relevant in that new context? Is the sales organization coming back?
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Until the next one.
Inês