About

I grew up in Madeira, a small island in the Atlantic that most people know for the wine or for Ronaldo. I was the kind of kid who ran TeamSpeak and mIRC servers for the Portuguese Runescape community long before Discord was a thing. Always building something, always online.

Moved to Lisbon to study engineering. But before I got anywhere near a product team, I flipped burgers at McDonald's, knocked on doors for Portugal Telecom, and translated toy labels on Upwork. Each one taught me something I still use, mostly patience, persistence, and how to talk to people who'd rather you went away. I used the freelance money to fund my education, and somewhere in the middle of all that I joined a four-person software company, figuring I'd learn faster inside a product team than inside a classroom. I was right about that part. What I didn't expect was that the company needed someone on the business side more than it needed another developer. So that's where I went, and I never moved back.

I stayed for 13 years. Started by figuring out how to make money from free software, ended up running the company. Product, pricing, hiring, acquisitions, keeping the lights on. I learned most of it by doing it wrong first, then fixing it, while running a team that could out-engineer me on any given day. But I wasn't there to write code. I was there to make sure what they built turned into a business.

I'm a father. My kid wrecked my sleep schedule and rewired how I prioritize everything. I built BundleOfJoy during those first few months because every baby tracker I tried required two hands at 3am when I only had one free. Parenting and product have a lot in common: you're always behind, nothing works as designed, and you love it anyway.

I'm a certified drone pilot. I've been to 30+ countries and tend to see most of them from above. I was a junior national table tennis champion, played at a competitive level for about ten years, right up until the day ran out of hours. I cook at home most nights and can make a Francesinha that would hold up in Porto. I volunteered for four years at an animal shelter back in Madeira. That one stayed with me more than most things on this page.

I used to be Top 50 worldwide in OldSchool Runescape. I don't put that on my CV, but I'm not sure anything else taught me that kind of patience and persistence.