Hello World

June 18th, 1988. That was my hello world. I was born in São Vicente, São Paulo, Brazil.

You can probably guess from the picture that the city was not rich, and the hospital shows it. São Vicente has a real place in Brazilian history, it was the first official city in the country. But being historically important does not make a place economically easy.

That contrast matters to me. I did not start in anything that looked like a startup story. No garage myth, no family office, no obvious path toward technology companies, investing, or building products. There was a normal Brazilian family, work, effort, limitations, and a lot of life happening without any special label on it.

My father, Walter, was a factory worker for almost his entire life. Funny enough, his job title was programmer, but not the code kind. He was a production programmer, more like a steel production scheduler. He worked with reality: production, timing, constraints, the thing either ships or it does not. My mother, Leila, is a teacher, from basic education all the way to music, and a pianist too. She gave me a different environment: learning, discipline, sensitivity, repetition, and the idea that education changes what a person can even see.

Looking back, I can see both of them in me clearly. From my father I picked up a respect for work that is not abstract. Real work happens out in the world, it has constraints and schedules and friction, and a plan is only worth something if it survives contact with production. From my mother I picked up that learning and expression matter. Teaching is not only handing over information, and music is not only playing notes, both of them need attention, practice, patience, and the belief that a person gets better by doing the thing again and again.

This mix explains a lot of me. I like ideas but I do not want to live only in ideas. I like models, but I want them attached to action. I like thinking, and I get uncomfortable the moment thinking turns into an excuse to dodge execution. I like building, and I still care about the human side of whatever is being built.

Maybe that is why this book is not only a memoir and not only a book of ideas. If I write only stories, I lose the system. If I write only models, I lose the human reason the system exists in the first place.

So the first lesson of my life is probably this: context matters, but it does not fully decide the future. Where you start hands you the material. It gives you constraints, fears, habits, examples, sometimes wounds. It is not the whole story.

I was born in São Vicente. I grew up around family, work, education, music, and eventually a ball. That was the first environment. The first installation. The first version of the operating system.

Later I would build companies. I would learn to code. I would lead people. I would become a father. I would feel pain in my body. I would think hard about risk, money, health, reputation, and long games. But before any of that there was a simple beginning. A city by the beach, a father who worked with production, a mother who taught, and a kid who would take a very long time to figure out how much of his thinking started right there.