This week I was inspired by a post from Udemy’s co‑founder; one of the most successful startups to emerge from the Founder Institute, and by a sharp comment from Fernando Fraga: politeness in mentorship is rarely about protecting the founder; it’s about protecting the mentor’s network.
And he’s right.
Telling a founder their idea is broken means risking the relationship, the introductions, the future deal flow. Vague encouragement is reputationally safer than honest critique. In Portugal, this instinct is even stronger, because we have a cultural reflex to avoid the harsh truth in the name of being “polite”. We soften the edges, we dilute the feedback until it becomes harmless and useless, and in doing so, we often fail the people we’re trying to help.
I’ve spent some time with acceleration and mentorship programs, here and abroad, and the most useful conversations I ever had with founders were the uncomfortable ones: telling one his go‑to‑market was built on untested assumptions; telling another his cap table would collapse before seed; telling a third that the co‑founder dynamic wouldn’t survive future rounds ...
Some adapted, some didn’t. The ones who could hear it built the companies. Most of the ones who couldn’t… didn’t.
The rarest mentors aren’t the smartest, they’re the ones willing to spend relational capital to tell a founder what they actually need to hear. The ones who choose truth over convenience. At the end of the day, polite feedback is just abandonment disguised as respect.
What This Means for the Maturity of Our Ecosystem
The way we give, or avoid giving, feedback says a lot about the maturity of an ecosystem. Young ecosystems protect themselves through politeness: everyone is supportive, everyone is friendly, everyone avoids friction. It looks healthy, but it isn’t. It’s simply the behaviour of a system still too fragile to handle truth.
As an ecosystem matures, honesty stops being seen as aggression and starts being seen as service. The quality of conversations rises. Decisions accelerate. Founders stop looking for validation and start looking for clarity. And mentors stop measuring their words to protect their “network capital” and start using it to create real impact.
Portugal is exactly at that inflection point. Density has increased, talent is stronger, cycles are faster and that demands a culture of truth. Not brutal truth, but useful truth. The kind of truth that prevents a founder from losing two years chasing a hypothesis that never had legs. The kind of truth that saves capital, time, and emotional energy. The kind of truth that builds companies, not presentations.
If we want a stronger, more international, more competitive ecosystem, we need to abandon the idea that being polite means saying what the other person wants to hear. Maturity begins when we understand that the greatest act of respect is telling someone something that might change the trajectory of their company, even if it’s uncomfortable.
In the end, it’s simple: an ecosystem grows when its conversations grow.
And conversations only grow when we stop confusing politeness with respect.
This week also marks the beginning of my collaboration with SAPO.pt, where I’ll be writing, every two weeks, a column on the Portuguese entrepreneurial ecosystem. The goal is simple: help the country understand what is actually happening beneath the surface, the talent we have, the companies being built, the value being created, and the cultural shift already underway. I’ve always believed that if Portugal truly grasps the scale and potential of this ecosystem, everyone benefits: founders, investors, institutions, and the country itself. It’s a new challenge, one I’m taking on with enthusiasm, and I hope to count on your support as we open this space to a wider audience.
And I just realised we’re now just one week away from SIM Conference in Porto, one of the high moments of the ecosystem calendar. Two days where the energy, the density, and the ambition of the Portuguese tech scene are all in the same room. If you’re building, investing, mentoring, or simply paying attention to what’s emerging here, you should be there. I’ll be there, fully immersed as always, and I hope to cross paths with many of you. These encounters matter, they remind us that this ecosystem moves forward when we show up.