Thanksgiving 2025: Growing Beyond Comfort Zones, With Less Harm to People and Planet

With gratitude from the GoGlobal team, wherever you are in the world.

Dear friends of GoGlobal,

As we step into the holiday season, I’m thinking about how unusual this year has been. 2025 was not a “typical” year for anyone building or backing companies: wars, conflicts, climate shocks, and shifting regulations challenged everything we thought we knew about risk, resilience, and expansion.

And yet, from Latin America to the Middle East, our founders did something extraordinary: they chose not to shrink back into their comfort zones. With GoGlobal by their side, they stepped out of them.

This Thanksgiving, I want to express my gratitude – to our founders, investors, partners, and friends – for entrusting us to guide growth in a world that doesn’t always feel stable or fair.

Beyond Comfort Zones: Our 2025 Journey Across Ecosystems

In 2025, GoGlobal worked across multiple time zones and very different realities:

• Founders in Latin America using their regional edge to build globally relevant products.

• Teams from Türkiye and wider Europe rethinking where to incorporate, raise capital, and hire talent.

• Startups in the Middle East navigating rapid transformation, new regulations, and a wave of capital looking for real value, not just hype.

What we saw again and again is this:

Geography is not destiny – but it is context. Our job at GoGlobal is to respect that context, and then help founders grow beyond it.

We spent this year:

• Helping teams test new markets without burning runway.

• Pairing founders with operators who have actually built and scaled before, not just advisors with slide decks.

• Guiding companies to upgrade governance, impact, and resilience, not just valuation.

  
  

The result? Portfolio companies that are clearer, calmer, and more intentional about their next step – whether that’s entering the U.S., deepening their presence in Europe, or building stronger regional hubs in the Gulf and beyond.

Building Through Conflict: What 2025 Felt Like for Our Founders

It would be dishonest to pretend this year was only about opportunity.

Many of our founders built and executed while:

• worrying about regional conflict and safety

• facing volatile currencies and uneven capital flows

• handling team fatigue, mental health, and uncertainty

  
  

We heard the same questions in different languages:

• “Is it responsible to scale now?”

• “How do we protect our team and still grow?”

• “What if the world becomes even more unstable?”

  
  

At GoGlobal, we answered not with slogans, but with design:

• Designing go-to-market plans that assume volatility, not stability.

• Designing cap tables and funding strategies that prioritize resilience over vanity valuations.

• Designing people and culture practices that protect teams, not just productivity.

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Our message to founders was simple:

You can grow and still do less harm. You can be ambitious and still be deeply responsible.

What This Means for Our Investors

For our investors – angels, funds, family offices, and strategic partners – 2025 was a year of recalibration.

On one hand:

• deal flow remained strong across healthtech, fintech, edtech, climate, and mobility

• valuations in many emerging ecosystems became more rational

• there was a growing appetite for real businesses, not just narratives

  
  

On the other hand:

• geopolitical risk became impossible to ignore

• regulatory and capital flows shifted, sometimes suddenly

• the pressure to show both financial return and real-world responsibility only increased

  
  

Our role at GoGlobal was to sit in the middle of all this and say:

You don’t have to choose between returns and responsibility. You do, however, have to choose your partners, your geographies, and your timing carefully.

In 2025, we focused on:

• Curating fewer, stronger opportunities for our investors.

• Prioritizing companies that plan for downside scenarios and still have a clear path to upside.

• Highlighting founders who see impact and ESG not as a slide in the deck, but as design constraints in their business.

  
  

For our investors, the signal is clear: the next decade of outperformance will belong to those who understand both risk and responsibility – and act accordingly.

Positive Impact, Less Damage: Our Commitments Going Forward

What scaling means to us: courage, responsibility, and a lighter footprint.

In a world this fragile, “growth” is not enough. Growth has to come with less damage to Earth and people.

Going forward, GoGlobal is doubling down on:

• Climate-conscious choices

  Supporting companies whose solutions reduce emissions, waste, or resource intensity – and challenging all portfolio companies to measure their footprint and improve it.

• Human-centered scaling

  Encouraging founders to design around worker safety, mental health, diversity, and inclusion, not as a PR exercise but as a condition for long-term success.

• Ethical AI & technology use

  Guiding teams to think carefully about how they collect data, build models, and deploy technology in ways that protect rights and avoid harm.

  
  

We don’t claim perfection. But we do commit to continuous improvement and to using GoGlobal’s platform to make better choices possible for our founders and investors.

Lessons Learned (and Won’t Be Repeated in 2026)

Every year leaves us with a set of “never again” lessons. Here are a few we’re carrying forward:

• We won’t underestimate geopolitical risk.

  Expansion strategies must now include real contingency plans, not just optimistic roadmaps.

• We won’t confuse momentum with resilience.

  Fast fundraising and rapid hiring mean little without strong fundamentals, governance, and impact discipline.

• We won’t work with misaligned partners.

  If a stakeholder doesn’t care about the long-term health of teams, communities, and the planet, it’s not a fit – regardless of check size.

• We won’t see impact as “extra.”

  Social and environmental impact are not “add-ons”; they are core to how we select, support, and celebrate companies.

A Thank You, and a Next Step

To every founder who trusted GoGlobal in 2025: thank you for letting us walk with you beyond your comfort zone.

To every investor and partner: thank you for believing that capital can be courageous, careful, and constructive at the same time.

As we move into 2026, our invitation is simple:

Let’s keep building companies that can survive volatility,shape fairer systems, and do less harm to the world we all share.

With gratitude,

Esra Talu

Founder & CEO, GoGlobal