The Art of Seeding Ideas: Lessons from Tuscan Gravel

I'm writing this from my terrace in Tuscany, legs slightly heavy from yesterday's ride through the unforgiving gravel roads that wind through hills covered in vineyards, olive and cypress trees. The olive trees are silver in the morning light, and somewhere in the distance, a church bell reminds me that time moves differently here—something our Momentum 2.0 guests discovered over the past few days.

Twenty entrepreneurs. Three days. Zero PowerPoint presentations. The idea is to invite a few people every year, exchange ideas and discuss new ones.

Momentum wasn't supposed to be a business accelerator or networking event with forced handshakes and elevator pitches. The team at Cherry VC, my business partner Felix, and I created it as something rarer—a space where ambitious people could simply exist together without the pressure of immediate results. No deals needed to close by Friday. No metrics to hit. Just good people, good rides, and the kind of conversations that happen when you can't reach for your phone because the Tuscan gravel makes sure you hold onto your handlebars tightly.

Yesterday's ride became an unplanned masterclass in my favorite concept: embracing your pain. We'd mapped out what looked like a civilized 80km loop through the Tuscan countryside. 1600m of climbing seemed like a bit much, but as my Australian friends like to say—"she'll be right." Who she is and how she relates to anyone is yet to be discovered.

The reality? Forty kilometers of gravel, in parts steep and relentless—a reminder for everyone that there's no free lunch in life.

The parallels between endurance sport and entrepreneurship aren't just cute analogies—they're identical psychological challenges. Both require you to sit with discomfort, to continue moving forward when everything in your body is telling you to quit, to trust that the pain is temporary but the growth is permanent. Somehow it attracts the kind of person who is willing to get up and keep going where most would not.

What happens on those climbs isn't just individual triumph—after all, shared pain is half the pain. The alchemy of shared suffering is such that when you're grinding up a 15% gradient at kilometer 30, conversation quiets down and poker faces disappear. They're honest moments that tend to lead to honest conversation.

I've always thought sport connects in a way few other things can—probably more than music and food, but I'm biased.

There's a reason why your hardest rides become legendary stories when shared with friends, and why the most impossible problems suddenly seem manageable after a coffee stop debate. Robert Putnam ("Bowling Alone") spent decades studying what he called "social capital"—basically, why some communities function better than others.

Putnam discovered that communities rich in social capital aren't just nicer places to hang out; they're dramatically more productive, innovative, and resilient. People solve problems faster, take bigger risks, and achieve outcomes that would be impossible flying solo. Same principle if you're trying to hold someone's wheel on a 15% Tuscan gravel climb. It's simply harder to give up.

As you know, drafting is like having a free watts upgrade, except the upgrade is the guy in front of you. The real magic isn't just the aerodynamic lottery ticket—it's what happens inside your head when you're not the only one questioning why you're actually doing this.

When you're grinding up a climb solo, your brain becomes a very unhelpful commentator: "Remember the nice pool waiting at the hotel? That would be nice. You could be doing that right now. With a cold drink." But when you're suffering in a group, those voices get completely overwhelmed by: if he can do it, I can do it.

It's not noble—it's pure social survival. Nobody wants to be remembered as the person who turned a "steady ride" into their personal Via Dolorosa. So you keep pedaling, or get a helping hand if anyone has a few watts to spare.

One of my favorite quotes was told to me by Austrian Winter Olympic champion Felix Gottwald: "If you're having fun, it's hard to avoid success."

This is why team training camps are more effective than solo sessions, why brainstorming with trusted colleagues generates better ideas than thinking alone, why at Ryzon it often feels more like a team than a hierarchy. When the work becomes play, when challenge becomes adventure, discipline feels less like iron will and more like self-building motivation.

The most important lesson from our Tuscan gravel for me is, once again, that the things worth building can't be built alone. They require community, trust, and the kind of good relationships that only emerge when you give time the space to do its work.

I'm off to find a large bowl of pasta—Italy was not built on a keto diet, and who am I to resist?

Enjoy your weekend,

Jan.

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