Featured Articles
The VMSO Framework brings clarity, alignment, and purpose to teams
VMSO stands for vision, mission, strategy, and objectives. It’s a framework for a project, organization, or team. In this article, I’ll explain team-level VMSO. Once your organization crosses a certain number of employees and teams, dysfunctions appear. These include misalignment [...]
Announcing “The PRFAQ Framework” book ✨
I wrote a book about the PRFAQ Framework. It launches on January/2025. Add your email to the list to be notified when it’s available. The book is for those who define, drive, or evaluate innovation—founders, product managers, executives, researchers, inventors, [...]
Accessibility Thinking
Accessibility in tech has, for as long as I can remember, been associated with disability inclusion. For most people, the word accessible is associated with blind or hard-of-hearing people. But there’s so much more to it! Accessibility has a broad [...]
Collaboration vs. Coordination: Why aren’t you achieving as much as you could?
The word collaboration gives the warm and fuzzies to people. If you see it in a job description, you are more likely to apply. When you hear an exec talking about it, you go, “Yes! Let’s collaborate more!” Collaboration makes [...]
The 5 stages of CTO & the CTO Career Chasm
Unsurprisingly, there are different types of CTOs for the various stages of a startup. What makes a CTO strong in one stage might turn into a weakness two stages later, and vice versa. I’ve been a CTO for the last [...]
Budget your software initiatives, don’t estimate them
For more than a decade, I stopped using estimations for features and projects. I *budget* them. The more I do it this way, the more I realize this is the right way to build agile software. When Estimating Software projects [...]
17 reasons why becoming an engineering manager is not what you thought it will be
I often find myself giving career advice to software engineers who want to become a manager. I also mentor and coach many managers who’ve made the transition, some more successfully than others. These activities happen inside and outside of my [...]
The 10-step skill ladder for you to achieve awesomeness
What does it mean to be the best software engineer possible? What does it mean to be the best designer? Or the best dentist, CEO, carpenter, recruiter, product manager? A decade ago I heard Jeff Atwood, the founder of Stack [...]
The unintended consequences of trying to do it all
On my first job as a manager at Microsoft, the software developers on my team were spending too much time documenting code. They were writing architectural documents, design docs (design docs for devs are not about graphic design but code [...]
The three-thirds executive
Over the last decade, as a startup executive, I’ve made countless mistakes. As a computer scientist, my brain tries to abstract the problem to a class of problems. Fixing the symptoms, although it might be the right thing to do [...]
About Me
I've been obsessed with technology, product, and innovation for as long as I remember. I wrote my first software when I was 12; I sold my first software at 16 (a CRM tool for MS-DOS), and that journey continues until today.
I was born in Brazil, and moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft in the late 90s, mostly leading engineering at Bing. After seven years, the entrepreneurial call was too strong, and I left. Over 18 years, I've founded and built startups and startup studios in Seattle and in London. I've raised more than $40M for my startups in social networks, events, media, fitness, health, telecommunications, and more. I spent close to two years at Amazon, leading a product and engineering team in HR.
My LinkedIn Profile has up-to-date information about my career.
I've built startup communities in Seattle, including what became the Geekwire Awards and the Geekwire 200. I currently organize the Acquired Seattle meetup, the Seattle Flow (for founders & Investors), and other get-togethers and groups.
I ran eight marathons around the world, and countless half-marathons.
I wrote The PRFAQ Framework (publishing in Jan/2025). I'm building a startup to solve a problem for innovators (founders, product leaders, researchers, etc.), and I'm launching two communities in the coming months.
