I'm Rafael. I grew up in Brazil. Then I met a French woman, and I followed her home. Two boys and a house in the south of France later, here we are. I practice Sahaja Yoga. Not the exercise kind of yoga, the meditation kind. Fourteen years of it, with retreats in India along the way. I started for spiritual reasons and I'm still doing it for the same reasons. It's the practice that introduced me to my own self.

I've always made things. The first one I cared about was a company called Carbono Zero that I co-founded in Brazil. It's still running today. That company is where I learned that data is a real part of the toolkit. It's also where I got hooked on entrepreneurship: the environment and the challenges of it. You watch a number move, you change something, you watch it move again. Growth marketing was the obvious next career step because the web compresses that loop from months down to minutes. Then AI arrived, and the part I'd always struggled with, closing the gap between an idea and the working version of it, stopped being hard. Over the last three years I've been shipping nonstop: tools, agents, automations, whatever the week needs. Nothing is ever the first shot. You put something out, you see where it breaks, you learn, you iterate. I can't make myself stop.

When I'm not working, I'm usually in the water or walking somewhere green with the boys. I watch football, the real kind, the one the rest of the world also calls football. Every company where I did my best work ran the same playbook: trust the people, empower them, stay out of their way. Autonomy, trust, and empowerment, without the hierarchy theater. Just good people building good things.

“The beauty of AI is that it can empower everyone.”