HOW IT STARTED

i was born in 2002 in novo hamburgo, in southern brazil. at 12, i made my first game, in python, on the blender game engine: you could build anything out of loose pieces. only later did i find out lego had already released a game with the same idea.

at 15, a friend and i started darkface inc., a social network in php. i ran the product, and it reached 15,000 users in its first week.

at 16, i launched liga brasileira de free fire, a marketplace for amateur tournaments that became the biggest amateur competition of its time, with teams like loud, los grandes and b4, before garena used the name for its official league. that’s where i learned, hands-on, about scale, users and incentives.

WHAT I DO NOW

i work across engineering, product and data. i started the technology department at the news, brazil’s largest newsletter, and own its architecture and infrastructure. there i built hubird, our own sending infrastructure, the login for the group’s products, and our deliverability.

before that, i was on the founding team of not journal, which started out using ai to read financial news for market professionals. guilherme benchimol, founder of xp inc., was among the users, and the company was valued at around R$6M when i left.

since 2020 i’ve also been building products that live inside whatsapp. it started with a chatbot that answered high school students’ questions and now covers payments, customer support and ai agents.

OUTSIDE THE NEWS

i chair the finance league at universidade positivo, even though i’m no longer a student there. i have one year to leave processes and people ready so the league runs on its own after me.

i lead the business research group of cje at the paraná commercial association, with lawyers and business owners, and i mentor startups on the tech side at sebrae.

i studied economics at ufpr and lived in london for a year, where i was assistant manager at a nando’s on baker street. what draws me most are problems where technology, product and business decisions overlap.