pilot
my name is felipe, i'm on an exchange program at uc berkeley, and i'm a software engineer at a startup called tako (on leave til the program finishes). i was born in a not-so-big brazilian beach city called joão pessoa, which probably explains my love for music and beach volleyball.
more than that, i love learning, tech, and especially the idea of becoming a founder, which led to joining tako and moving to sf for a while.
this posts exists to gather thoughts, hear other people's ideas, and share every piece of content that feels worth it. at the end of the day, the goal is to read this ten years from now and see how much things have changed.
and yeah, things do change a lot, and that's today's topic, but first, let's go back in time a little bit
jorge paulo lemann
the name was just to grab attention, but let's go back a year to explain why i want so much to be a founder.
one year ago, i was interviewing for tech fellow, a fellowship program created by jorge paulo lemann (the second richest man of brazil) to find young people with great potential and help them thrive. one cool thing about the interviewing process is that, even though it has some technical parts, it goes to the root of your motivations and dreams.
long story short, i failed the process, and one of the reasons is that i didn't really know what i wanted for my future, i was doing some cool projects in university, but at the end of the day, my motivations weren't clear to me. and that made me think.
around the same time, i discovered ycombinator, and specifically a company called brex, founded by two brazilians who dropped out of stanford in their first year. one of the founders (henrique dubugras), has participated in a bunch of podcasts (and actually later created his own called hd in hd), that i watched repeatedly and that completely shaped how i saw the future. that (and a lot of other stuff i was studying around the same time) made it clear to me: i liked coding, i liked talking to people, but more than that, i loved solving people's daily problems. in a glimpse, software became all about changing how society did things in their daily lives.
that's when it hit me, i wanted to be a founder. so i took a few action items:
- joined a startup call mobile.dev as a software engineer (my first full-time job while still in uni)
- founded trilha, a mentorship program focused on helping first-year tech students (will get into details of this on a different day)
- decided to go to a conference in boston called brazil conference
this last one is what i want to get in detail here
april
in april of this year (2025) i took the money i saved working as a software engineer, and i spent a month in the us, going to tech events and meeting cool people. during this trip, i went to ny, boston, and sf.
every conversation and day spent there made me believe more that what i had to do was build, and after that, i decided that every step i took would get me closer to this goal
that's why i applied to uc berkeley for a semester, knowing that the more time i spent in the bay area, the more i would learn (there is something special about being in a city where every billboard is about tech)
i also decided to move from my home city (and temporarily drop out of uni) to join tako, a brazilian startup founded by fernando gadotti (founder of doghero) and sebastian mejia (founder of rappi), so i could be in a fast-growing place and learn from great entrepreneurs about what it takes to build a successful company that will exist in the next ten years.
don't want to make this too long
don't want to spend all the stories in a single post, just wanted to introduce this blog with some context about what i'm doing right now. the best boss i've ever had (herval freire) once told me that i shouldn't wait too long to create my company, because life happens, and it gets exponentially harder to build something when you have more stuff to lose. that stuck with me, so hopefully in the not so distant future, i'll be writing about my first million arr :)