Welcome to the 9th edition of my newsletter, Sentí.earth - the insider space and home base devoted to scaling the integration of Net Zero Leadership and Founder Mental Health by Isis Valliergues.

What are all these moves, you ask?

Well, it starts with all the moving parts:

Newsletters, community, content creation, fundraising, financials, growth, metrics, actions, values, tasks, optimisation, nurturing relationships, research, tech integration, systems, online marketing.

So. many. moving parts; to launching an online business.

"Analysing and synthesising large amounts of data" : this was what I blurted out to the ever-determining "what are you good at" interview question, in an unexpected and surprise interview with my would be luxury branding mentor Prada Devil 1, named by TIME as 1 of the 25 Power People in Fashion, at the time. I now call it surfacing liminal meaning - or getting the point.

I was fresh out of my neuroscience labs and data science internships, and this was what I was most familiar with, and what had set me apart. Anyways... it's research science temperament & training at work (and an INTP mbti, what's yours? Let me know!). And so, whether its a startup or a creator business I build, the process remains the same, and replicable! The Startup asks to coordinate many, the Creator depends solely on me. Considering the success statistics reviewed in the previous edition - the solo build process, even with its myriad moving parts, still unlocks speed to market for my subject, olé!

And so to summarise what we are doing here:

• Following my build on 2 companies: Favorable the Startup where happy shoppers help brands stop waste, to tackle overproduction for brands and overwhelm for shoppers in shopping - currently in stealth building mode after winning major sponsorships in acceleration.
• Creating community and enabling solutions around Sustainability Leadership and Founder Mental Health - in the format of a Creator business named GAIA Founders | Sentí.earth, as the by product of first hand experience both as a founder and a published research scientist on Neuroscience for the Climate by Unesco/HAS Magazine. This format enables me to drive and translate the research I am passionate about - Neuroscience X Net Zero Positivity - and serve the community directly.

Armthecreators.com stated it best: "The internet gave birth to 2 children: the startup and the creator. [...] For creators the great leap forward is bound to happen in the next 5 years. Why? Because everyone is realizing the opportunity of the creator economy is much broader and deeper than originally anticipated, because they are scalable."

Also interesting to note that there are 2 Female creators for every Male creator - this business models provides considerable access to new opportunities, counterbalancing disparities and biases. Which further inspires my mission to make sustainability accessible to all by leveraging these new inroads - let's go!

Freebie!

The great part of this endeavour is being able to package my insights in a way that benefits people. Obviously, for a long time, having neuroscience on one hand, meant being at odds with commercial common sense on the other hand - which is incidentally a position often shared with ecology. This space creates a new and fast way to convert life sciences into actionable wellness benefits for people, planet, and prosperity (our cherished triple bottom line).

You'll start seeing all sorts of new options and actions pop up as I get familiar with the world of workflows, automations, integrations, and zaps!

And I am very happy to share with you, my cherished starter community, our very first Freebie! All the way at the end of the post - as a community member - you can click on the button for your direct download. If you are new here - thank you for coming and bienvenue! Please sign up to download your free calendar right away!

On to the tactical stuff

Our community is named the Net Zero Set; I will be your Net Zero Sentinel. In light of integrating sustainability into actions - I created a Climate Calendar with which you can plan out your Strategic Sustainability Schedule for the remainder of 2022! I included notable Planet dates and events to make your Net Zero leadership tempo easy and fun. Get creative and inspire your teams and communities!

Sustainability Hacks

• Every job is a Climate Job with Drawdown Labs podcast: Jamie Beck Alexander argues convincingly that to mitigate climate change, every job must be a climate job.
• Future-Readiness Benchmarking Tool by the World Economic Forum: Self-assessment to find out more about your company's future readiness.

Open Competitions

• Uplink / WEF Global Plastic Action: Plastic Waste to Value Southeast Asia Challenge - apply now until July 2nd.
• Uplink / WEF Nature-based Solutions: 2022 Trillion Trees: The Sahel and the Great Green Wall challenge - apply now until June 30th.

Worthy Reads

• Remember my mention of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Motley last time? She is the first leader highlighted in TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2022.

Managing your Mental Health while running a Startup on Future.com - "Founders have been shown to have higher rates of depression than the average person. Some of this is simply the expected result of the unique blows you suffer in the entrepreneurial life. 'When you're trying to disrupt the status quo, there are a lot of forces that don't want to be disrupted. So you run into pushback, and the frustrations involved can be demoralizing.' [...] Building a startup is really a marathon. A trade-off now in favor of everyone's physical and mental health will pay dividends down the road."

Why life as a millenial is so dull by Poppie Platt / Newstatesman.com - "From beige clothes to dating based on identifying red flags, being a young person is no fun. What will the first thing the world thinks of when it looks back at the first couple of decades of the 21st Century? September 11, wars in Iraq, the Middle East, and Ukraine; Covid. [...] These calamities strip young people of the life-enriching experiences previous generations took for granted."

And some advice from seasoned entrepreneur @peteflint on nfx.com: 39 Moves to Survive & Thrive in a Downturn: 2022 Edition including his stated #1 goal for company culture: Mental Health, happiness and connectivity - "Managing Psychology : Stressful market conditions can be taxing for everyone. Your team needs you to go above and beyond. You need to think about caring for their minds as much as anything else; clear minds will get you through this. [...] The key to great leadership is to react quickly to help everyone stay engaged and feel safe.

Did I mention I found a Sustainable Merch and Product producer? Hint hint 😏😘. Their value is "Stand for something, or you'll fall for anything", I'm into it.

So there we go - context makes the difference to resolve cognitive dissonance and spark enlightened action, and having perspective always helps to sort through noise and focus.

If anything, Warren Buffet states that core skills are inflation-proof - so chins up, stick around, we got this!

Favorable Notables

From my deck last year:

And last week, on Business of Fashion this past Wednesday 08 June 2022:

And for our Oooooh Fashion! Segment, #Favorable Favorites - a very short edit of the Top selling items at your favorite retailers - with the sustainability filter ON. I'm currently building the machine to provide you with the infinite, live selection (and accepting investment & financial partnership discussions:)

Women's - Net-a-porter | Net Sustain - Deiji Studios - Washed Linen shirt & shorts set - €206

Women's - Net Sustain again - because - shoes! Chloe is making recycled sneakers! And shoes are 50% of the waste problem in fashion so this. is. exciting: Nama recycled mesh sneakers - €640

Men's - Exciting to report the first Organic choice for Men's on Ssense is by friend and Parisian Fashion Renaissance man Charaf Tajer, giving back their lettres de noblesse to Magnificence, Joy, and Levity in sustainable style with Casablanca - bravo! And on sale! Pink Organic Cotton Tennis Tshirt - $113

A heartfelt thank you for being here! Sentí.earth is a community driven space and hearing from you is my happy place - stay tuned, reach out, get in touch, hang out, connect, share - all are welcome on our mission to bring critical mass to the green transition by raising Earth.Awareness with climate psychology.

Strengthen the fabric of eco-innovation - share us along with those you know belong here!

Sentí is a part of Gaia Founders, feel free to connect and write to me at gaia@gaiafounders.com.

And if you feel that you are happily gleaning good value and want to encourage my work directly, you can now buy me a coffee here!

Come say hi on Instagram!

Thank you Friend!

Don't forget to download & enjoy this Free Climate Calendar made with a lot of love, and start spreading the Net Zero Positivity!

And if you really really love it, tag us on instagram @senti.earth when you implement and share your inspired action!

For its 8th edition, the Favorable newsletter is evolving, and changing names.

Thank you to my cherished starter community! Thank you for being here, thank you for your patience, and thank you for coming along this journey to do good things in a wild world.

TAKEAWAYS & TACTICS

Y Combinator states that a key ingredient to their formula for success is creating a sense of urgency in the process of building their portfolio companies.

The past 18 months have been booming breakout years in impact investment and the startup industry, and it's been truly exciting to be a part of it while building Favorable. The laws of thermodynamics apply to all, however, and what goes up, must come down. This same company, Y Combinator, the industry's determining and benchmark company, issued a statement this past week informing startups at large to plan for the worst and operate under the assumption that investments will be freezing for the next 12 to 24 months.

This is in line with my takeaways from Fundraising training at Founder Gym last year, which led me to go to market directly rather than embark into fundraising for a few reasons:

> To start, I have a tendency to be weary of overexcitement, considering my passion for thermodynamics.

> My favorite gem from the FG trainings by Phin Barnes which confirmed an intuition: Build your company as if you won't receive funding, and you'll probably receive funding.

> The very good reason that our MVP is in development and surely it will be more exciting to onboard financial partners once it is live! Also, our build, and not only, has been affected by the war in Ukraine.

> Accelerating last year and reconnecting with Silicon Valley tactics blew my mind and inspired me to develop a complementary and diversified venture, based on a shocking observation, through my scientifically trained observing mind. And so I've been learning a new skillset entirely and am excited to share this all with you now. Read on!

Surely you feel it too.

Our Times are an unprecedented culmination of chaotic cascades, ricochets, and colliding trends - we operate in acute and constant ambivalence - the worst of times and the best of times, all.the.time.

And then there's that cognitive dissonance which stems from the permanent alarm that it is "Now or Never" to reverse Climate Change - including the latest UN report which stated that the 6 or 7 years we thought we had are actually 3, or was that 0?

Enter Cognitive Psychology & Neuroscience - connecting awareness, decision-making, agency, intent, action, and result. Most importantly, if the Truth is engulfed by Fake Information, how are individual people supposed to become their best selves in order to enact the actions needed at large and at scale to redress course? How do we affect Systemic and Structural reorganisation to create virtuous instead of vicious cycles - locking into Regeneration and the Nature of Nature to thrive?

I could go on about this - and as some of you know I was published on it by panel review - turns out I am pioneering it by virtue of tackling it, and naming it Climate Psychology. And it is headlining the return of the Davos World Economic Forum this year as a topic:

"Addressing the drivers of Eco-Anxiety: two-thirds of young people in 10 countries report feeling sad, afraid and anxious about the climate crisis and over half believe that humanity is doomed.[...] How can we turn eco-anxiety into agency and meaningful action to address the climate crisis and biodiversity collapse?"

Therefore, and in line with a few elements I witnessed which didn't add up, I am acting where I can, in this space now named Sentí.earth.

Sentí, in French, means knowing from feeling. Synonymous with sentience, and awareness, we aim to resolve cognitive dissonance through enlightened agency - the mission here is to make Sustainability Accessible to All - namely by connecting Entrepreneurship, Nature, and Neuroscience. Instinct and Intuition will find here a sanctuary and guides to direct action, both personally and professionally. It's a natural progression, and it's a passion. Equipping individuals with robust mental fortitude and mindset practice through knowledge, understanding, tools and tactics to translate into actions for the highest possible good in the face of overwhelming adversity. The world today is both a thrill and a daunting task. The beauty and reality of a golden age contrasted with the total and complete collapse of the social contract and the environment, in urgency.

To start, I would direct your attention to the first obvious piece of this puzzle and silver lining:

What do greed, penny pinchers, a recession, and sustainability all have in common?

Paul Hawken states it most clearly in a 1999 New Dimensions discussion named Sustaining Earth through Natural Capitalism, surfacing the fact that business as usual has been looking for productivity in all the wrong places:

" When you make something very productive, you use a heck of a lot less of it. And you have a lot less impact on land, water, oceans, forests, on the atmosphere, climate, and repairing systems. To be more productive with our use of natural capital into radical resource productivity dramatically shifts relationships between human made capital. We use less resources - people become more valuable in that scenario, and we change our emphasis on producing things to creating an economy where it's the flow of services we value as opposed to the accumulation of things."

A precocious vision of a now fully fledged and booming Creator economy in 2022. Hope. So there we go - Sentí.earth draws a line in the sand, holding space to usher in this best reality and bring critical mass to the green transition. Stay tuned, reach out, get in touch, hang out, share: bienvenue.  

A quick note and insight on the How:

By combining Startup and Creator Online Business Models and playbooks, through Personal and Professional Sustainability Education, Sentí.Earth will make sustainable personal and professional growth accessible to all. You will see GAIA Founders included in this umbrella space as well, more on that next time. These are Mentorships built to help humanity beat the odds.

I promised a shocking observation:

50% of Solutions needed for Net Zero have not yet been invented (World Economic Forum call for an Ecopreneur Revolution)

95% of early stage solutions fail.

50% more depression in Entrepreneurs - they bear double the mental health burden while driving the solutions most likely to help humanity at large - they need adapted help.

As the Barbados Prime Minister Mia Motley stated at COP26, relying on solutions that have not yet been invented is, simply, reckless.

In other words: The Climate Crisis is the Mental Health Crisis

As he is still relatively unknown, let's focus and amplify - introducing the Ecopreneur:

In calling for an Ecopreneur Revolution, the World Economic Forum highlights that "when entrepreneurs finally pursue an idea, they gravitate to the places and people in their networks that can provide resources, which ultimately tie them to corporate or profit-driven goals. As a result, humanitarian entrepreneurs have historically struggled to fuel and fund their innovation even as the pandemic, climate change, and growing inequality have increased the need for their projects."

In the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior and Research, Kirkwood and Walton state that Ecopreneurs were motivated by five factors: their green values, earning a living, passion, being their own boss, and seeing a gap in the market.

However, there is a gaping No Man's land which needs to be addressed if we plan on connecting Solutions, Action, and the Net Zero Drawdown:

Many entrepreneurs live at or below the poverty line at some point in their journey, under pressure with limited resources. Awareness begins by gaining an understanding of the factors that could impact your ability to complete a successful raise. Techcrunch

Supporting Founder's Mental Health is not only a personal responsibility for founders themselves, but a collective responsibility for everyone in the startup ecosystem. Through an awareness of realistic minimums, meditation, and conversations, founders and those around them can help to support their overall mental wellbeing. Techstars

Entrepreneurship is often an isolating experience, with very few being able to relate with what you are going through. 72% of entrepreneurs are directly or indirectly affected by mental health compared to 48% of non-entrepreneurs. Mental health is essential for knowledge work in the 21st century. Creativity, ingenuity, insight, brilliance, planning, analysis, and other executive functions are the cognitive cornerstones of breakthrough value creation by entrepreneurs. CTech

Elon Musk famously quipped that "starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss."It can feel like everything is on the line, all the time, which is a heavy weight to hold. When we're turning a vision we hold into reality, it's easy to feel like we're walking a tightrope of self-doubt and self-belief. Forbes

Entrepreneurs have to tackle active discouragement from immediate family members and close relatives. I think burnout doesn't even begin to capture the state that people end up in, when they have basically exerted or leveraged every aspect of themselves, every once of social, emotional capital. Managing mental health is no easy feat. But destigmatizing these issues would require creating awareness and participation from all stakeholders, particularly investors. Jumpstart Mag

It's a lot.

I've been there.

And, I've also recently made it into a humbling ranking by Sifted, The Financial Times-backed startup media, created together with ForColoredGirlsWhoTech, who counted me as 1 of 40 Black and Mixed Race Female Founders to Watch in Europe, this February 2022. There are fewer than 10 funded black Female Founders in France. There is just short of 100 funded Black Female Founders in the US. Black women receive less than 0,2% of all investment dollars, while yielding twice the returns on average. This is beating the odds.

In masterful execution, Founder Gym was borne from the observation that underrepresented Founders received single digit percentages of overall investment dollars; and bowed out 4 years later, this past April, having shifted the needle on this point in a major way.

Over the next 3 years, more than any other time in our existence as a species, every single one of our actions count and compound.

Code Red, as Mia Motley said. Yet, ecology and nature conservation is one of the most dangerous occupations, and the world waits on Ecopreneurs while they bear a disproportionate burden, driving innovation into a chokehold. With the violent wake up call served by the pandemic, significant progress has been made fast and priorities are clear. The next step is how, and how fast can we live up to this unprecedented opportunity to build back better and achieve cultural transformation and evolution. Hence Sentí.earth is dedicated to developing and distributing the understanding and guidance needed to shift out of doom and gloom into positive agency for the triple bottom line - People, Planet, and Prosperity; raising Earth Awareness and strengthening the innovation ecosystem by combining winning playbooks.

It all starts in the mind.

Making the most of dualities is, none the less, the story of our world, and old as Night and Day. With my namesake Isis, understanding the relationship and subtleties between Divinity and Terror is part for the course. Perpetual shifts between Chaos and Order - is in fact the First Law of Thermodynamics - energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed.

Going further into lessons from Theology - an insight from Egyptologue Normandi Ellis in the book Dreams of Isis, p.68:

Human struggle, conquest, then peace, followed by renewed strife is the pattern of personal and cultural histories. These patterns mirror the dualities, oppositions and reconciliations that occur in nature, psychology, and spirit. The succession of Horus to the thrones of both Osiris (the abundant Nile) and Seth (the desert Nile) evinces a peace that comes from uniting the diverse realms of expansion and limitation, of growth and decay. The Uniter of Opposites [...] the ability of Horus not only to tolerate ambivalence, but to combine or unify oppositions in order to create a balanced third principle, is the hallmark of [progress].

Would it make sense then that the Elle US Magazine found on February 22, 2022 - which was also Sentí's soft opening date - that " Everyone Wants to Dress Like a Goddess Right Now"

And so, a Favorable Fashionista clamors back to Fashion's way of divinely uplifting our spirits in tempo.

Taking this opportunity to introduce you to the new comer shutting it down, Nensi Dojaka - who is redefining the Divine Feminine in style.

And head over to Maison de Mode for Ethically sourced Luxury Fashion styles including top seller and affordable goddess wares by Geraldine Garcia : Sena Long in Old Rose - $242

A heartfelt thank you for being here! I am eager to share what's in store with you. And of course - funding equals speed so if you are an investor and you would like to support this work, let's talk. If you are a fellow founder, I included more material and longer quotes than recommended by algorithms: a greater understanding of your experience in context can help you cut through the noise, and feel supported. And it's just a start - reach out.

To all - please do not be shy with feedback! Sentí is a community driven space and hearing from you is my happy place.

Isis Valliergues

Founder & CEO, Favorable, Gaia Founders, Sentí.earth

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