Living, Learning, and Connecting in Lisbon with Fernando Jardim
Fernando is one of the CMX Connect Lisbon co-hosts, which can be seen here at Volkswagen SDC.
Fernando Jardim is a community manager, startup founder, and avid traveler. Most importantly, he is passionate about connecting with incredible people and making big dreams a reality. Since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, he has been focused on building Stay Home, Keep Growing, a venture which offers webinars and workshops to keep good content flowing. We had the opportunity to chat with Fernando and learn about his work as a community manager, how he landed his current role, and his best tips to become a freelancer in Portugal.
Hi Fernando! Tell us a little about yourself.
I love travelling, volunteering and community management. I travelled for five years in a row, through Australia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore and New Zealand, settled down in Brazil for three years where I’ve done a lot of cool community projects, moved to France, and now I am in Lisbon doing amazing community projects, such as Stay Home, Keep Growing.
What do you do in Lisbon? How did you get started?
I am one of the CMX Connect Lisbon co-hosts, also in charge of partnerships at Creative Mornings Lisbon, the Admissions & Partnerships manager at Le Wagon Lisbon, one of the community leaders at 351 (the Portuguese startups community) and I also run my own startup (Tripr).
The very beginning of my career as community manager was in São Paulo. I joined the 011 Startup Community (local community), where I had the opportunity of organizing Startup Weekends, Silicon Drinkabouts, and many other tech events. This lead me to have an amazing network of really interesting people, who were also crazy about community, so was easy to get big projects done fast.
I moved to Lisbon as I got a job as community manager at Beta-i. Since I love community management, I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time, as being CM there granted me access to such a great network and also to a beautiful auditorium, so for me, working at Beta-i was the perfect place to support the local community here!
What do you love most about your work?
Dealing with partners (who are also good friends), to create amazing things such as Stay Home, Keep Growing. In 2 days we put up this project to support the tech community to be alive during the COVID-19 crises. We manage to get everyone to help. Currently, we are reaching 200k followers on Facebook.
What is the most challenging part of your work?
Aligning everyone to be on the same page and implementing the right processes for each project. Sometimes the partners also need to approve the projects internally and we may lose the right timing.
Tell us about the process of becoming a freelancer/startup in Portugal for anyone looking to relocate.
I would definitely recommend looking for events on Eventbrite & Meetup, joining communities such as Lisbon Digital Nomads and Nomadx, finding coworking spaces to work & network (Croissant is a good place to go!), looking for information on Startup Portugal and joining the newsletters from Startup Digest, Beta-i, Made of Lisboa, Moviinn, Landing.Jobs (and their slack) and also the one from Startup Portugal. Having information and networking possibilities will be everything you may need to succeed!
Lisbon has grown to be a huge startup hub recently. What has been your personal experience with community and events geared towards freelancers, entrepreneurs, and startups?
Due to government incentives, like startup visa, startup voucher, the creation of one of the biggest innovation hubs in the world (Hub Creativo Beato), and many other incentives, the city has been attracting a lot of tech companies and startups to settle in Portugal (AWS, Revolut, Google are examples). This makes the whole ecosystem grow, also bringing more events to support startups, freelancers, developers, companies, and so on.
What is the best part about living in Portugal? What are some of your favorite coworking spaces there?
The climate, the people, the food and the tech scene. Lisbon is just the right size of town for me! You can approach all the companies and they will be very open to run amazing projects together. My favorite coworkings (and their communities) are:
Selina Secret Garden & Now Beato (hard to choooose!)
Héden
Second Home
And last but not least, tell us where we can find you!
Linkedin; at any CMX Connect Lisbon that I run with incredible people, one of the best teams I worked with; At any Creative Mornings Lisbon, they are a group of people that I love a lot; setting up a call with me at Le Wagon Lisbon, or coming to any of our events; at 351 slack channel, the best place to connect with the local startup ecosystem One of the Tripr’s trips, which are only available in Brazil at the moment!
