Before any team, at 16 I enrolled in Physics at PUC Minas to become a researcher. A nuclear physics professor, Dr. Zé Roberto, pulled me aside and told me I looked like an entrepreneur and a trailblazer, not a bench scientist, and that I'd be wasting it stuck in a lab. At 17 I switched to engineering. It was one of the best pieces of advice I ever got.
In my early 20s, I was building esports teams. I didn't have money to buy stars. So I did the opposite: I went looking for the kid who played incredibly well in a messy bedroom that nobody had discovered yet, and built a team around him.
It worked out beyond expectations. I led more than 35 people, spent six years running the club, reached the top of Dota 2 in South America, and even played myself, going as far as competing in a world championship. Teams that came out of there went on to become FURIA in Counter-Strike and won the CBLOL in League of Legends.
But the number I'm proudest of isn't in a trophy: it's the more than 40 people I helped develop, from interns to solid positions in real careers, with multiple champions formed along the way. People are the result that lasts.
I used to think it was about the game. It wasn't. It was about finding potential, building a team, and fighting for the process every single day, with very little resources. Then came production engineering, Lean Six Sigma, and the growth teams, where instinct turned into numbers: 103% of target, an average ROI of 11.6x, and more than 2,937% growth in lead generation.
Today there's a name for this path. On the technical track, the top isn't becoming a manager, it's becoming a high-impact individual contributor who takes on the whole problem and delivers it end-to-end. That's where I perform best, now with AI as leverage.
When AI showed up, a lot of people asked "how do I code this?" I asked something else: "what team do I build with this, and what problem do I solve?" I didn't become a programmer. I became someone who orchestrates AI to deliver products that work in the real world.
