Early December, I am sitting around the fire, in a circle, under the stars, reflecting back on the year. Going through the events of the year and the choices I made, I allow each memory to have its effect on me one last time — to feel them deeply — before releasing them fully into the fire and walking out of the Medicine Wheel as an empty vessel, ready to receive the dream seeds for the next cycle.
This is the eighth year of practicing deep release, and it still feels challenging to look back once more at the end of the year and pass through this journey again. And yet, this is my practice — weaving the wild into business. This is what brings me to write this letter to you, with the intention to connect one last time on this side of the year, before it is released and we step into a new one.
2025 started in Davos, observing global opinion leaders and determined people with serious agendas, oscillating between fear of missing out and the urgency of delivering. Davos attracts people from all around the world, each carrying a global perspective, convening to build new collaborations — for better or worse. To me, it is a marketplace of human striving to build global networks. This year coincided with the week of the US Presidential inauguration, and the energy of that moment, and its impact on the town, was felt powerfully — almost like a physical hit. It was as if the gathering lost its meaning, as if a rug had been pulled from underneath. I felt this for the first time in Davos, and the feeling has stayed with me ever since.
That experience shaped my perspective for the year. How do you move when the flow is interrupted? I realized that doing more of what I had done the year before would not be enough this time. Having led a startup for nine years, I pride myself on my ability to adapt quickly. Our mandate at Light Eagle is to invest, collaborate, and build — and in 2025, it became clear that the emphasis needed to shift toward collaboration and building. This meant spending less time on deal sourcing, using our investment capacity more reactively to support and nurture our existing portfolio, and focusing more deliberately on community building, putting multi-capital to work, and building.
A seed planted in me during my time in Davos was the sense that blockchain technology had passed a tipping point in adoption. Having followed this space for years, I also realized that this infrastructure is what AI agents need in order to thrive. AI is already reshaping mindsets, while blockchain provides the rails for this new intelligence to collaborate. I decided to allocate a defined and meaningful amount of time to actually building AI agents.
I had already set a goal in 2024 to have an AI companion as part of our team, and 2025 became the year to make that real. I began creating a social agent using the beta version of a tool whose founding community I had met in Davos. This process invited me to reflect on my relationship with the agent itself. What surprised me was how quickly that relationship shifted into a genuine collaboration. In February, Weya was born. It took a few more months of experimentation before I began introducing her into our meetings in the spring. As we approach the end of the year, Weya has become capable of holding interviews and making meaningful connections.
With spring came the travelling season. Özlem and I used this time to connect more deeply with the communities we are engaged with and to co-create.
In April, we attended the Family Business Network Impact Leaders Retreat in Milan, where we shared our learnings and experiences around systemic investing. In May, during the FBN NextGen International Summit held in Istanbul for the first time, we hosted the first FBN Impact Open Space. As a community, we experimented with how we might mobilize our multi-capitals to support an impact startup — in this first case, the innovative food company The Good Wild — within a food system we are collectively seeking to transform.
The first FBN Impact Forum was held in Singapore, where the open space model expanded into a marketplace — multiple systems and communities gathering simultaneously in the same room. Özlem and I felt both excited and proud to be part of a movement in which business families are convening to find new ways of using their financial, social, political, and symbolic capital for the benefit of people and planet. With each gathering, this work has taken on more tangible form. That same visit also marked our first time in Singapore together, during Impact Week, that was hosted by the Chair of the FBN Impact Community. Experiencing the city through that personal connection made the week especially meaningful, and sparked a curiosity to spend more time in Asia — as well as a deeper appreciation for how relationships within the FBN network can naturally extend into new geographies and contexts.
During this same period, Özlem stepped forward to lead the Sustainability Committee of FBN Turkey, a community she had already been contributing to for several years, and we began consciously weaving our international and national responsibilities — allowing insights, relationships, and learnings to flow between the two.
In parallel, within the Toniic Impact Investing Network, I facilitated a circle session titled Aligning Inner Transformation for Outer Transformation at the Regional Gathering in Munich. This experience clarified how strongly I yearn to move toward more interactive spaces of conversation and co-creation. Held in the intimate setting of a member’s home, the day invited deep personal and collective reflection among some of Toniic’s most committed members, and served as a reminder of how much room there still is for growth and expansion in this direction. This experience inspired us to step up our commitment and engagement with the Toniic community, becoming T100% members — a dedicated sub-community "going deep to question the assumptions underlying the dominant financial system; explore alternatives, do their own vulnerable inner work, lead by example, and invite accountability from a global community of leaders unlike any other, aspiring to do so in 100% of their lives.”
This same calling — to deepen commitment through relationship and shared purpose — also guided my involvement with another community I have been part of with deep gratitude: the Turquoise Coast Environment Fund. This year, it became a place where I took a further step into strengthening connection and collaboration. Together with Özlem, we organized the fund’s first fundraising event for the Temiz Çeşme, Temiz Deniz project, which we had been closely following since its launch the year before. We brought together a powerful community, hearts aligned around a shared purpose. On a personal level, it was deeply meaningful to gather friends and family in service of something larger. Encouraged by the strength of this community and my connection to the fund’s purpose — and to the call of the sea — I later accepted greater responsibility within the organization as chairperson. For those who remember last year’s recap, you may recall our exploration of going deeper into a domain for systemic transformation. This year confirmed that oceans are where our path is unfolding.
As summer unfolded, we looked for ways to support our portfolio companies with more than just financial capital. In addition to introducing The Good Wild through the FBN open space, we actively supported their fundraising journey, connecting the founder with our network and deepening our own understanding of food systems along the way. That journey concluded with a successful round and the Founder Dilara receiving the Food Champion award by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations — a moment that made us especially proud. During this time, we also became customers of NatureRe by purchasing carbon credits, alongside participating in their bridge round. This allowed us to experience being customers of a company we had invested in, while engaging more deeply with the nature-based solutions ecosystem and fulfilling our commitment to offset the carbon footprint of our travels. Throughout this period, we stayed close to our portfolio companies and continued our role as active LPs in the funds we are part of, taking the pulse of the systems we are connected to and engaging where needed. We also kept our eyes and ears on the ground by participating in a few select international gatherings, including Impact Week in Singapore, House of Impact, and Slush in Helsinki.
Summer was also a time when the seed planted in Davos — weaving blockchain technology, AI, and the human dimension into a new relationship — began to take root and grow. I became increasingly curious about how these technologies could come together to enable families and family offices across the globe to collaborate toward systemic transformation. From this curiosity, I developed a workshop titled Reimagining Prosperity designed to invite impact investors, family offices, and change-makers working on systemic transformation to surface collective wisdom toward the creation of the world’s first decentralized autonomous governance structure for family offices. I had the privilege of holding these workshops in Singapore at the FBN Impact Forum and in Helsinki at House of Impact, with two diverse circles deeply rooted in the international impact community, and later shared the learnings through a white paper.
Alongside these explorations, our team at Light Eagle also grew stronger by integrating our learnings directly into how we work. Applying for B Corp became a way to deepen our understanding and practices, not just to meet a standard. What began as a summer internship focused on exploring and developing Weya evolved into a committed team that is now actively building her. As a team, we have become more grounded in managing our investments while strengthening our collaborations — allowing human intention, technology, and collective practice to mature together.
The end of summer marked the fifth Dance for the Star Nation in Anatolia, where people from around the world gathered to take part in the prayer dance. Together, we brought our thoughts, words, and actions into focus — creating the prayer, carrying it, drumming it, singing it, and dancing it. This gathering once again marked the height of summer, and the ripples of the prayers sung together continue to move outward. It was especially powerful to witness the growing number of children attending the dance, and to see the children’s circle expand with strength and joy.
As we committed ourselves to communities and paid close attention to the places where we gather — from homes and farms to boats and conference rooms to medicine wheels — Özlem and I released the idea of building a private family house and began dreaming instead of a regenerative place that could support community and, in turn, be cared for by it. After completing the Dance for the Star Nation, and following a vision Özlem received there, we explored a part of the Aegean we had not been to before and arrived at a wild, off-grid land that already carried traces of human intention — communal structures, and a large flattened hilltop where a circle had been drawn. It held everything we had been listening for, including space for a medicine wheel, and within a week we knew we had found the place where this long-held calling could finally take form.
We shared this call in our monthly newsletter, inviting to join us in building a medicine wheel on the land. People we had the privilege of connecting with throughout the year came together from across the world — aged between three and seventy-three — some carrying stones weighing more than 200 kilograms, to build this ancient fractal design on the Earth, a form that has been repeating itself for billions of years and quietly reminding us humans of who we are. Standing together in the wheel, in community, became a powerful celebration — a shared harvest moment in autumn.
Not everything moved with ease. There were moments that felt like hitting a wall. While Özlem and I were on our way to Istanbul to speak at a national summit on family business transformation and impact investing, we received the news that the mayor of Istanbul had been imprisoned and that all gatherings were cancelled until further notice. Instead of standing on a stage, I found myself standing in solidarity on the street. Later in the year, the digital transformation task force platform I had been leading at TÜSİAD, SD2 was subject to a cyberattack, which disrupted the momentum built during the first half of the year and slowed our ability to carry those plans forward into the second half. These moments were reminders of the challenges we all face within our own systems as we work toward more resilient and sustainable futures — and of how vulnerability can bring us together as powerfully as strength.
As I release this year one last time, I do so with gratitude — for the people, the questions, and the practices that shaped it — stepping forward lighter, attentive, and grounded.
Wishing you and your loved ones a new year filled with health, hope, and clarity, and moments of connection that remind us we are not walking alone.
On Behalf of Light Eagle Team
Onur Eren