Roots
I grew up in Rio de Janeiro, in a family of military officers and academics. My mother bought a computer for her PhD when almost no home in Brazil had one, and I taught myself by poking at it. I was eight. By my teens I was doing real tech work at my uncle's company, which built systems for the Brazilian Navy. At sixteen I was teaching master's students how to build and maintain hardware. None of it was a plan. It was just where the curiosity led.
That household left me a few rules I still run on: do it properly, stay honest about what is true, earn your place by what you deliver. My favourite example is a small one. Three months before I was of legal drinking age, my admiral uncle refused to pour me a beer — then promised me all the beer in the world the day I came of age. Discipline and warmth in the same breath.
The real turn came on an exchange term at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. It changed my life. I fell for how things worked in Canada — most of all the idea that what you do matters more than who you know. That idea did not leave me.
Getting the baggage first
Back in Brazil, I set out to get the baggage first. Through university I built ERP systems for large manufacturers, the youngest developer on the team. At twenty-two I led Brazil's Ubuntu Linux community.
At twenty-five I was handed a management role at a global manufacturer and helped build a factory — not just its software, but its production lines and the few hundred people putting it up.
After that I ran the data, architecture, and systems for a major oil-and-gas construction company, several dozen sites at once, from refineries to deep-sea drilling modules to pipelines. Then I ran the points of presence for Brazil's academic internet network, leading distributed teams full of PhDs twenty years my senior. I learned more about leading people in those rooms than any classroom could teach.
The leap, and the hard years
Leaving Brazil was not a casual move. I gave up a tenured job — the kind most people there work a lifetime for, the kind you cannot be fired from. I walked away anyway. Something made me reassess what safety, and a life, are really worth. Once I had, I planned the move for years and opened a company before I landed.
I arrived with a business ready to run. Two months later, the pandemic hit. That first venture was the Canadian arm of a Brazilian tech company, and its whole model ran on foot traffic, in one of the most locked-down cities in the Americas. The timing was as bad as timing gets.
So I drained my savings and cold-called an empty city. I did not quit. Eventually a fractional-CTO contract came through, and I built from there: contractor, then associate partner, several clients at once. Around then I became a father. It did not change what I did so much as how far ahead I was suddenly willing to think. Four months later a downturn took the role, about two weeks before a trip home I had planned for a long time.
