Inside CVC: Everybody Needs a Hero's Journey: Naiana Miranda on Near-Death Experience, Intuition, and Investing in the Amazon

Naiana Miranda is Principal and Co-Founder of MSH Partners and Chair of the Amazon Bioeconomy Chamber, the first international chamber built to connect capital with entrepreneurs across the Amazon basin. 

Naiana joins Philipp and Steve to trace her path from a childhood in the Amazon and a family of Brazilian entrepreneurs to a severe bout of mold poisoning that triggered a near-death experience in Qatar, one she says left her channeling Harriet Tubman and starting what she calls a love revolution in a hospital ward. She explains how that experience reshaped her relationship to intuition, why she thinks leaders confuse fear for strategy more often than they admit, and why her Amazon Bioeconomy Chamber treats a standing rainforest as a market to build rather than a cause to defend. 

She also pushes back on what investors and philanthropists still get wrong about the 25 million people who live in the region. A conversation about what happens when a leadership philosophy is built directly from a near-death experience, not around one.

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Introduction

Welcome to Inside CVC, the podcast that brings together leaders in innovation and capital investment to explore the trends shaping the business of corporate venture capital. I'm your host, Steve Schmith and together with co-host Philipp Willigmann we're speaking with corporate investors, entrepreneurs and ecosystem builders driving the future of innovation. Inside CVC is brought to you by u-path Advisors, helping corporations and startups unlock sustainable growth through strategic partnerships. To learn more, visit u-path.com. That's the letter u dash path dot com. And to catch up on all of our episodes, search Inside CVC on your favorite podcast platform or visit u-path.com, forward slash podcast. In this episode, we sit down with Naiana Miranda, principal and co-founder of MSH partners and chair of the Amazon Bioeconomy Chamber. In this conversation, we talk about her family's journey from the Amazon to the US, a near-death experience that reshaped how she leads the role of intuition in investment decisions, and what it actually takes to build an investable economy in the Amazon. We close on what it means to see the person, the soul, on the other side of every deal. Here's our conversation with Naiana Miranda.

Interview 

Welcome to the Inside CVC podcast. How are you doing today? I'm fantastic and super grateful and honored to be here with you both. It's going to be a great conversation. Honestly, in our pre conversations before we hit record, it's already been lively and really looking forward to today's conversation. Why don't we start with telling or providing for our audience a bit of your background professionally, you've got roles across leadership, family, businesses, impact investing, even the Amazon bio economy. Tell us a little bit about that. And really maybe what connects all of those different parts of your life. So I would say the, the, the connection would be me, right? So my, my background, I was born in the Amazon. I come from a family of serial entrepreneurs. We had eleven businesses in Brazil, all small businesses. Um, there's a lot of corruption. There's a lot of challenges in businesses in Brazil. My parents finally got tired of getting robbed, tired of, um, dealing with corruption. So we moved to the US. And um, as an immigrant, my, my passion has always been people and I was always into leadership and human human potential. I started doing leadership classes when I was sixteen with my mom. I started doing networking with her. And when I was twenty, I had a boyfriend who suffered a traumatic brain injury. He was in a coma. He was assaulted by three gang members and the doctor said he wasn't going to live. And he was in a coma for two months and I. He came to me while he was in coma and he said, hey, Nai, it's Kev. Tell everyone I'm going to be okay. And he remembered everything. He woke up the next day. He felt he could feel, feel people praying for him. And that completely changed the structure of my life. I started doing leadership training at twenty two, became one of the youngest trainers in the country. Um, and, and it really took me down a path of, of what I've been doing today in terms of investing and in terms of the impact that I make now. So you found yourself in Qatar, uh, and you've had what you've described as a near-death experience. Is that different than what you just described with, with, with Kev. Um, how did these, how do these things relate? Well, I, it's different where that was his experience versus this was my experience. So I had severe mold poisoning and it was a two week Experience. Where? In Miami? In my apartment, there was mold that was found. It was the worst case of mold in South Florida history for how fast it spread. It spread overnight in my apartment. It was in my entire apartment, and I was there for one night, and I was actually before I was going to Qatar, I was at Nasdaq for an investor meeting. This was a meeting with fifty people. So mold causes insomnia and mood disorder. And there was over fifty women from all different industries talking about how to build funds. And, and that was the point of the event at Nasdaq. And I was now it's been two weeks of me in in this mold toxicity. And I started having all of these epiphanies and I started having these awakenings. It's kind of like I did a lot of shrooms because mold is a fungi. So I'm at Nasdaq and I, we start to do a meditation and I see world peace during the meditation. And I get up and I'm like, I need to tell these women. So I get up on stage and I'm like, ladies, you don't know what? I just saw this girl. She was my sister in a past life. That girl, she was my sister. You think this is about building funds? This isn't about building funds. This is about taking down the patriarchy in the name of peace and love. That's that's pretty trippy. I they they clapped. I don't know if they were really clapping for me or if they thought I was absolutely crazy. But so the interesting thing about that is it's less about the trip and more about the, the message of what what is actually behind the message. And so during the near-death experience, I, I kept hearing, everybody needs a hero's journey. And I was then my, my mother had a company, a health care translation company. She sold the company. And we the next day after Nasdaq were going to Bali, I got her a retirement gifts to celebrate. Celebrate the the win. And during that trip, that's when the near death experience started on the plane. I had my whole life reviewed. I saw everything that went right, everything that went wrong. And I started having a lot of spirits come to me. And I had my grandmother, I had my cousin, and my mom thought that I was getting possessed by spirits. And so we land in Qatar. And, and this is a very long story. And my mom said, please couldn't make this concise because she's like, you have to figure out a way to make this more concise. And she's still traumatized, but we land in Qatar and I start channeling Harriet Tubman for three days straight. And Harriet Tubman was a slave leader during the Civil War who freed a lot of slaves. And I ended up going to a hospital because we I started hearing a lot of voices, and we get to the hospital and I'm in the Middle East and I start a love revolution in the hospital. And in my reality, I was Harriet Tubman. And and so there was multiple things that were happening at the same time. And if you hear about near death experiences, a lot of the stories are very similar. And for me, I was in two realities in one place. And so while I was on earth, I was also dead at the same time. And I'm not a scientist, so I don't know how to explain that piece of it, but, um, so I started a love revolution and I told the doctors, I took off my clothes and I told the doctors I wasn't going to put my clothes on until the doctors looked at everybody with love. Long story short, they wanted to keep me in a psychiatric ward for a month and a half. And, um, they finally did mold tests to figure out that I was not bipolar and there was mold poisoning. I had ten times the amount of gliotoxin still in my system. I heard, this is the magical kingdom. Everything is love. And this is actually an important part of the story. So and a lot of near-death experience stories say similar things. We become love, we become everything. And in this reality, I was everything and it was beautiful. And I can manifest anything at any time. And I was like, well, this is interesting, but if you can manifest anything at any time, what's the point? And in that moment, I chose to come back to my body. I chose to be Naya. And I was like, I was really liking that story. And, and then it came back to everybody needs a hero's journey. I know that's a lot. So I'll just pause there. It's, it's, it's such a fascinating story. Um, not only living with the mould, the, the, the symptoms, but the experience that come from that, you know, it's I have to I have to believe that changes your perception and your reality. And in many ways. So it's, it does change. And it's interesting because I, I, I think we're all on a hero's journey. Every single person has their own hero's journey. And Steve Jobs talk about you can only connect the dots looking backwards. And if you look at my entire life, my purpose has been a thread of every single thing that's ever happened to me. And we can all say the same thing in terms of our our own hero's journey and the work that I was doing in leadership development. Um, I was training fortune five hundred companies to lead from their heart when I was in my twenties. So this wasn't anything new. This is just also a evolution of my journey of what what I was put on this earth to do. It's, uh, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. We know each other for five, six years. Uh, and, um, really valued the work you have done around nature leadership. Prior to your experience. Um, but I thought after we had, you know, great moments over the last year, year and a half, you know, the story and what, what you experienced, you know, is worth sharing, uh, with our audience. Um, and I wanted to ask you. So was there like a specific moment, um, after the experience in Qatar where you realized, you know, the old ways of living and leading could, could no longer continue? And you said, okay, you, you want to be more vocal about your experience and use it in a way to also help leaders to be more connected to hard to love and to compassion. That's, that's a good question. I, I don't think there was a specific moment. So after mold poisoning. I had eight months. My whole life changed. I had to sell my home. I had to sell everything I owned. I lost the relationship I was in, Philip, that you knew. And so everything changed. And also my priorities also changed. But it's also who I've always been. So I've always I've never been money driven. I've always been driven by by people and love. That's just my personality. And, but it's just evolved in terms of what I care about. So during the, the near-death experience, I had this vision of what it takes to live in a world where everybody's dreams come true. And what that looks like is you taking just as much of what you need for what you need to live, and everything that you don't use. Like things that you don't use, clothes that you don't use, you give away what you don't need, whatever that looks like for each individual. And if every person does that, we completely transform the world regardless. Um, but there's, there's lots of little bits in terms of how I change day to day. You, you alluded to this a little bit already, but what did this experience teach you around identity, particularly when, you know, professional status and performance are stripped away? So this is really interesting that a lot of people in the consciousness space where I think consciousness impact and philanthropy are all in adjacent spaces, and the science now is talking about the fields. There's this field, right, where ideas are formed, where there's, there's everything in this field, like there's energy, there's intuition there. There's things in the field. So. And then when I left my body, I was no longer nyana and I could be anything I wanted. And and that's where I channeled Harriet Tubman for, for lack of better terms or. And in this field exists regardless. And so the science is now catching up to. I don't know if you guys heard of the telepathy tapes. Mhm. Um, so tell us about it. There's a documentary. It's now turning into a documentary, but Telepathy tapes, um, is a podcast that looked at non-verbal autistic teens who communicate with each other telepathically, and they're able to communicate without saying anything and they can read each other's minds. And there's, it's now being shown on Amazon, they're releasing it. And we all have these abilities. And if we're looking at ourselves beyond just who we are as in our past, and really being present to what's happening in the moment, you're able to pick up on those abilities a lot faster. Interesting. Interesting. What you're there's, there's, there's sort of a common word that I'm hearing and that I'm, that I'm sort of taking from the story that you've told so far. And that's the, the term vision. It seems you have had some, I'll call them very vivid visions, very passionate, open, right. Maybe an untethered, unring, fenced, untethered. It's not the right word. But, you know, there's these sort of, um, and I'm curious if I think of the word vision and I think of CEOs and leaders who have these bold visions, these bold goals that can be overwhelming, right? Do you have a point of view for those folks, given the experience that you've had and said, I'm driven by these very bold visions that I have. That's what it sounds like. Right? And, and, and certainly there are ways to get there. I'm just curious if, if there's a lot of big audacious goals are often maybe not achieved because of the sheer task of it. So how powerful is vision and sort of achieving those goals as a leader? And any advice for folks? Ooh, so if you if we're looking at it from the sense of there's what is time as it relates to vision, the only thing that we can control is right now. Right? And it's just, there's, especially with the way AI is going, there's so much fear around AI, but there's also so much excitement around AI and people talking about what is your five year, ten year goal? We have no idea what's going to happen in the next five, ten years, but we also know that it's going to be revolutionary. And so what I have found in this new way of being, um, is that all I can control is what's happening right now. And the thing that keeps coming to me is when you're busy changing the world, you don't see the world you're changing. And I was, I was just with, um, Chris Hogan, who for a philanthropy consciousness retreats, uh, that was hosted by Chris and Kylie Hogan and, um, Chavi from the Humanities Foundation. And they have been doing so much work in the consciousness space and wanting to change the world. And it's absolutely beautiful. And it's, so easy to get stuck on making a bigger impact, having bigger, bigger visions of like, how do we transform the world that we don't really see all the impact that we're making right now? And, and, and I think it's, it's good to have conviction and at the same time, being humble about where we are in the present. And I think that's part of what the hero's journey is. So you've said hero's journey a few times in today's conversation. I don't think we've actually paused to define that. Can you define what what that means, what that looks like for our audience? Yeah, I, I, it's a personal journey of, of whatever it is that you're, you're here, your purpose on this earth is to do and that that's your journey in terms of the challenges that you have, the things that you need to overcome. And if we were all so if we were all able to reach our full potential right now, they would be that thing of what's the point? So the hero's journey is really being able to look at your life as a movie and looking at what you were here to accomplish and how to keep moving forward with it. And it changes, I assume. Of course, the course of your life, right? Goes different directions. You can adjust. It's not it's not the same journey the entire time. Yeah, I think that's following your divine calling, whatever that is for that person definitely changes. You mentioned intuition earlier. Um, in a business setting in the, in the settings you've been in, how do you distinguish fear, ego bias, wishful thinking from intuition? Sometimes I don't, and sometimes I make the wrong, the wrong decisions because I'm not following. So there's, there's times where I've didn't want to make an investment because my intuition was saying, this is not going to be a good investment, but my heart likes the mission and I decide to go with that investment. And it turns out to be not a good investment. And then there's also times in, um, some of my philanthropic work that just heavily, like sometimes I would want to throw up for how bad I was like this, this doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like the right partnership, but because I'm so attached to the partnership, whether it's because it's a friend of mine or if it's something that we were doing together, that I still continue to go down that path. Um, my favorite story of intuition is my, uh, my, my mother's company is a health care translation business. And e was representing us and they, my, my mother is very mission driven and she wanted a diverse buyer and they spent over a year trying to find a diverse buyer and they couldn't find anyone. And I was on LinkedIn and I was like, huh, this guy looks like he could buy it. And I sent it to my mom. I was like, hey, this guy looks interesting. You should talk to him. My mom completely ignored me. And a week later, someone introduced me. It's a private equity company. Someone, um, serendipitously introduced me to the guy I, I introduced him to my mother and he said, we're actually looking to buy a translation company. And, and he ended up buying the company. And so like, sometimes it's just your intuition just knows. Diana on, on intuition. You know, we obviously have a, a big corporate audience and investors. Do you think, um, or how do you think about intuition in corporate decision making? And, um, how do you, you know, what are the pros and the cons about it? Um, to bring it into decisioning when it comes to corporate, because in my previous life, when it came to like big corporate presentations. There was nobody asking like, you know, how do you feel about it? Right? What is your intuition? It was all very fact based financial numbers, but it resonates with me, what you just shared. What are your thoughts on this or when other people ask you about it? I think they go hand in hand. I think intuition is interlaced with everything that you do in life. It's not like you have your brain and your heart and your gut, and they're all operating separately. And I think the more, the more that people are focused on scarcity. And this shows up in, in a lot of the world in terms of operating from fear and competition, the more that we're just focused on the numbers and the left side of the brain versus the more that we're looking at it from a bigger perspective, a divine perspective, and really just trusting that your intuition knows the more that you have that power to to go in that direction. Do you believe that many leaders are making rational decisions, but in reality, they are driven by unconsciousness, fear, and status and insecurity? Yeah, I think that there's a a lot of leaders that are driven by fear and insecurity. And I was with, um, some symbolism. Salim Ismail from the founder of, of Singularity University, and he just did a talk on the meaning of life. And it's fascinating the work that they're doing in really bringing consciousness and soul, which a lot of people aren't talking about, but there's, there's tons of leaders that are leading with the heart, leading with bravery, leading with passion and and love. But they're not calling it love. And then are really changing the world in beautiful ways when they're doing that. And it's just having radical optimism that the world will continue to get better. From that perspective. You said earlier that money was never a driver of why you do the things that you do. Um, I'm curious how these experiences might have changed your perspective of wealth and capital in terms of investing, doing good, etc.. I'm still exploring what that means to me, and I love the concept of transformational philanthropy and this concept of, and I know I'm very, it could sound like I'm very woo in love, but it's just the space that I'm in and I'm okay with that. And this concept of divine reciprocity, there's a research that says that eighty two percent of Americans care and give without expecting anything in return. And to me, that's just a very bold statement that people generally are good people. And, and I, we're in terms of in terms of MSH partners, my my business that I have with my mother and in terms of investments that we have, are our main focus is on women. And that's just an area that we care about and diverse because that's I'm an immigrant family. That's just the areas that we care about. Um, and it's still evolving in terms of what kind of investments that we're going to be making in the future versus what we've already made versus what kind of philanthropy. But I'm really enjoying this concept of what can transformational philanthropy look like at every stage. And even for, for folks that don't have capital to invest, they're still you're still giving something and there's always some type of exchange. So I'm really fascinated about that. I just don't have answers yet. And Diana, I would, I would actually like to add, I think, um, philanthropy is something which is very like long term capital. And I think looking at some of the challenges we are trying to solve, right? We talk about nature, energy, climate as one, but also when it comes to society. How is society going to be impacted by AI, humanoid robotics, you know, and these are all very, very long term developments. And I do think actually, that philanthropy is going to going to have a pretty important role together with corporates and strategic capital to make certain things happen or even start it, in my opinion. Um, because, um, there might be, you know, not the same return expectation, um, at the beginning, but it can actually be a starting point to bring the right people together. Um, and therefore I think it's gonna, I think they're going to be a renaissance around it. Uh, if you ask me, uh, and then bringing different capital structures together to make some really big long term investments happening. That's exactly my vision that I saw for a love revolution. That there we go. Revolution at work. And and I'm not, I'm not supposed to talk about him, but I'm going to do it anyway. And I'm sorry, Chris. So I'm fascinated by the work that Chris Hohn is doing and the Lighting Foundation with raising consciousness and raising vibration. And one work that he's doing in Africa is there. He's working both on the like with love and fear and really with lawmakers putting so specifically around child marriages and child trafficking. Um, they are he's providing girls with bicycles so that they can, I guess, essentially not be able to run away when they're in these situations while at the same time pressuring banks, um, Um, to be able to have the legislation changed and they were able to I don't quote me on this, but I think it was Malaysia. They were able to change the laws for child trafficking and marriages because of that. And, and it's all based on, on raising consciousness and raising agency of these girls, which I find incredibly inspiring. I let's spend a little time on the Amazon. Tell us about your work there and perhaps what investors and corporations still misunderstand about that part of the world. So I was born in Hordonia, which is the third largest Amazonian state in Brazil, one of the most deforested areas. And, um, my, my mother was actually the, uh, the chair of the board when I was there. And serendipitously, I had no intention to go work in the Amazon. That was that was not my focus. But when I got into impact investing, I had a lot of investors asking me, what are the opportunities in the region? And honestly, I was just embarrassed. I was like, I have no idea. And, and so I, I went and I still have a lot of family in, in the region and I, I spent a lot of time talking with a lot of stakeholders. And I spent five years really understanding the, the region and what was happening. And, um, what I found from investors and philanthropists and folks that were not in the region, they had no idea of the reality that was happening. Most people just think of trees, they think of indigenous communities, which there are. And there's also twenty five million people living in the region with a lot of different realities, a lot of different structural challenges. And every region needs different things. So there's it's not, hey, let's go fix the Amazon. And well, one, the Amazon doesn't need to be fixed. And a lot of the things that that investors and philanthropists are trying to fix is something that indigenous people already know. And it's just there's nothing. They don't need anything to be fixed. They need people to listen. I went to a conference of indigenous leaders with governments, and the whole time, all they just kept saying is stop killing us. And and literally the the meeting was for the indigenous leaders. And the governors would get up and we would leave and we would go do something else. And I was like, this is the complete opposite of what we said we were going to do. We're not even listening to them. And so there's a lot of complexities. But in terms of wisdom, there's there's tons of people going into the region for ayahuasca ceremonies and understanding, um, the world from a nature perspective and what a lot of indigenous leaders will say. And part of their teachings, it's, we already have the answers. It's already the nature talks to us. There's, we don't need to develop a technology to find the solutions, although those are also very helpful. But if we all just took the time and really just to listen to what nature is saying, listen to what the people are saying, the answers are all right in front of us. That's not expected that the Amazon does not need fixing. That is right. That's a very interesting point of view. And, and, uh, yeah, so where is go ahead. Yeah, we, we do need to stop killing people and stop extracting. No, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was going to say, I do think, I do think, uh, when you say we need to listen, right? It's also we need to listen to the, to nature, to the biodiversity there and say, you know what? We need to, you know, we need to support it or let it, let it live. Right. Exactly. Uh, we, we, we should, we should stop, um, you know, taking away more trees and so on and so forth and taking this, taking this a spin into the investment side. Um, how do you kind of like think about, you know, making it an investable opportunity, right? I mean, this is one of these. Yeah. If one of these asset classes, right. Biodiversity, which got, um, got some more press in the last couple of years, but it obviously also one area which is very, very hard to measure on hard KPIs because at the end of the day, it is supposed to make all our lives better and good, right. And ensure that nature is working. And because nature is working, we are living in a symbiosis relationship. We also are doing well. But from a typical investment perspective, you know, it's not that you get, you know, a return after after year one. So how do you think about this and why is it actually important to get more investors into that space, specifically those with a long term view? Um, because it has a very, very positive impact on the overall ecosystem we all live in and work in. My honest answer is I don't and I will explain why. So I, I, we built a Amazon bioeconomy chamber. So when I started doing this work there, the big talk was we need to get more money into the global South. We need to get more money and investments to the Amazon. So there were these coalitions that were started to help accelerate the businesses in the region. And there's hundreds of different startups. A lot of them are just mom and pop shops, artisanal. And so it just depends on what side of the game that you're talking about. There's the partnership that we created was with fifteen local governments with five countries, um, spanning from Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia. And all of their needs are very different. And what one country needs will be very different than what the other one needs. And the whole challenge was, how do we go to market holistically so that we can sell to the global north? And but you're dealing with a lot of different stakeholders with exactly what we've been talking about, a lot of different, um, desires and necessities for their region. So it's hard to bring them together. So when we're talking about, are we talking about indigenous communities, or are we talking about indigenous communities that are more, um, secluded versus the ones that are living in cities? Are we talking about the people that are living in the city? So there's, there's a lot to talk about in terms of those investments. And if you're asking local indigenous communities, a lot of them don't want to scale. A lot of them don't want that. And it's just it's not conducive to the way of life of what they want. So it really just depends on what side of the coin we're talking about. What are what two or three big, big challenges people should take a look at or should be aware of? So infrastructure, electrical, um, is huge in all of the different regions. And there's, there's companies really working to Mail that in terms of taking a lot, because it's a lot of it is project based companies and and how do you scale those. But using AI to scale, there's specifically in Ecuador, there's a company called Drex that's doing really incredible work in that space that that could revolutionize all of the Latin American markets. If it gets scaled to the right, the right people Can I say one thing that I think is super important? when we're talking about anything, investing boards, corporate, all these things, one thing that we really don't talk about is that we're all souls. And when we're working with people, this person is a soul with, with like with desires and dreams and fears. And if we're all just taking the time to really connect with the person that we're with in that moment, from that point, we get to a different understanding because we recognize that they're just human. And I think the more that we do that, the more that all of this fear and scarcity and power and control starts to lessen a little bit.

Closing 

That's this week's episode of Inside CVC. As always, thanks for listening. To hear more episodes, search Inside CVC on your favorite platform or visit u-path.com/podcast.