Articles

March 25, 2018

A 12-step program to eliminate Facebook from your life.

[UPDATE: Dec/2019 — I deactivated my Facebook account] Despite Facebook run-ins with Privacy, I believe most people don’t care (yes, those who care are loud but they are in the minority). However, people care about their needs, and more and more people [...]

February 22, 2018

An NHS glossary for Americans (consumers amp; entrepreneurs)

I’ve been living in England for over a year now and the entirety of 2017 working in HealthTech. I’ve collected a list of words, terms, abbreviations, and other bits about the NHS. I created this list for my reference. As [...]

August 07, 2017

A new way to define Product Vision: In the form of a question.

We all know the entrepreneur who’s doomed to fail. The one that has a solution, but the problem doesn’t exist. So over the last decade, there was a valuable shift in defining the problem first in the form of a [...]

July 04, 2017

Don’t quit your job to do an AR/VR Startup yet

Every few years a new building block of technology starts to take shape and with it comes a wave of enthusiasm, not only from early-adopters but early-builders. Early-builders are the entrepreneurs and developers who just can’t resist the appeal of [...]

May 24, 2017

How to be the worst CTO that you can be

You are the smartest person on the team and, likely, the founder. If not the founder, you are the one that was brought in to build the tech. You have total control of the infrastructure, the code, the engineers, and [...]

May 22, 2017

London needs to think bigger, faster.

I’ve spent the last thirteen years of my life building technology startups in the US, and I moved to London just under ten months ago. In the first few months, I was here, I’ve met with several VCs and investors, [...]

May 17, 2017

When the technology becomes morbidly obese

Last week’s massive ransomware cyber attack (WannaCry) is the consequence of technology becoming morbidly obese. Not different from its cousin, human morbid obesity, it happens because people decide to postpone things they know they should do in the short-term because [...]

May 16, 2017

What if you had unlimited capital to build a business?

The Lean Startup methodology taught us to build something small, measure, learn, re-plan, and repeat the whole process until you find product-market fit. That’s a great process, and it serves to find something that works. But what are we losing [...]

May 15, 2017

And I thought I knew what diversity in tech was

Funny things happen when you make a drastic life change. The life change on my case was relocating across the world from Seattle to London. The funny thing was this epiphany about what diversity is. I always considered myself a [...]

May 08, 2017

Why code rots?

It’s not uncommon for non-tech entrepreneurs or MBA-grads to think of software as a one-time-and-done solution to a problem. In other words, once you “solved” that problem you don’t need to do anything else, like adding a door to a [...]

May 05, 2017

Running gives me audiographic memory

I was one of those geeks. I had my recurring fitness schedule of going to the gym once a quarter. I sat all day in a chair in front of a computer and did some more of that at night [...]

May 04, 2017

quot;I need a free developer for my brilliant ideaquot;

If you’re part of an online group about startups, entrepreneurship, founders, or CxOs on Google Groups, Facebook, Slack, Meetup, or any platform, I bet you’ve seen a post like this come by: “Hi, I have a brilliant idea, and I’m [...]

April 05, 2017

You know you lack diversity when…

Here is a handy checklist to measure your team diversity by the output it produces. The more checks a company/product/event gets on this list, the worst it’s regarding diversity. Events are scheduled to start at 8 AM, exactly at school [...]

February 20, 2017

Everything is broken… 👍

If you read the news in the last few years, you might have seen headlines as such: … Our Healthcare system is broken. … Our Education system is broken. … Our Democracy is broken. … Our Financial system is broken. [...]

January 22, 2017

Sorry. You have no unfair advantage amp; no differentiator (with cheat-sheet)

Point 1: In the last decade, I started noticing how some TV ads were so generic, particularly for banks and insurance companies. It plays out like this: They feature happy people, eating, playing, studying, or working, in a cozy home, [...]

November 16, 2016

You are screwing up your Beta Email List

I see this anti-pattern so often that I just need to write about it in the hope of helping fellow entrepreneurs do it right. The story goes like this: You are building a new product but not ready to have [...]

September 07, 2016

My first Demo Day in London: Entrepreneur First (#ef6)

Yesterday I had the opportunity of attending Entrepreneur First’s Demo Day here in London. It was my first exposure to such an event here. I found it to be very different from Demo Days in the US. First and foremost, [...]

September 05, 2016

A month living in London. How it compares to Seattle.

Last week marked a month we are living in the UK. It’s the perfect time to look at the previous 30 days and point out some differences to the US. In reality, I’m just comparing Seattle to London, not USA [...]

June 22, 2016

It’s time to say goodbye to Seattle, hello to London!

After coming from Sao Paulo to Seattle 18 years ago to work for Microsoft, now I’m moving with my family to London. A whole lot of newness to our lives. We couldn’t be more excited to move to a mega-metropolis, [...]

June 08, 2016

Ideas Are Cheap: 31 for the Taking

Over the last 30-days, I tweeted a new startup idea every morning. I could keep it going for another 30 days, but it’s a good time to stop and reflect on them. I kept them vague — how much can you explain [...]