I can't be put in a box. For good — and for bad.

People keep trying. It never holds. Something always wriggles out the side. Took me years to realize that's not a flaw to fix. It's the best thing about me — and maybe the reason I notice what other people carry around without seeing it.

What I do, underneath everything, is simple — and I love it. I see what's already there — in a person, in an idea — usually a little before they do. And then I help make it real.

I've been doing that one person at a time for most of my life, long before any of it had a name. Put me across from someone standing at their own edge and I'm exactly where I want to be. That's not generosity I'm performing. It's the work I'm best at.

CTLZ grew straight out of that. Years of conversations, settling into a method the way a trail appears after you've walked it enough. I built it because so many people I met were quietly asking the same question — is what I'm good at still seen? — and I'd already become very good at helping them answer it. I hold it loosely. The day someone shows me a better one is a good day. Every so often, for one person, I still do it the old way: no method, three hours, and a portrait at the end.

And some people don't need to be seen. They need their idea to stop living only in their head. With them I sit down and we make the thing — the name, the shape, the first real version — in a few intense hours. I call those Creative Sessions.

I'd rather have one real conversation than a hundred small ones — so I keep my circle close, and I don't apologize for it. But close isn't the same as few. I collect people. Some of my favorite ideas arrived because someone looked me in the eye and told me I was wrong.

I've always been drawn to the moment before something exists. Entrepreneurship, once — two books, in Brazil, when the word still sounded like a dare. Leadership, after that — a book about holding a room instead of gripping it. I live a half-step ahead of the present, and I catch the next thing while it's still a rumor.

My day job is reshaping a global public tech brand — proof that the slow, careful kind of change and the restless kind can live in the same week.

And now AI. Obviously now AI. Not the loud part — the race, the demos, the noise. That takes care of itself. I'm after the better question underneath: what this means for a person. How someone actually changes. How a company finds its footing instead of its fear. What it takes to stand fully human next to something this powerful — and lean all the way in.

So I build. With Bia, through a studio we call Happy Capybara. And lately I build with the thing itself — Claude, mostly. A thought that used to take a year now takes an afternoon. I build at the speed I think. Finally.

Some of that building is for the youngest among us. Lemonade helps educators teach kids to stay creative next to AI — because the fear of this belongs to adults, and so does the work of meeting it well.

People ask why. Why move, why not settle. Because I have to know what's next. Not predict it — meet it. Better yet, help co-create it. Curiosity isn't a hobby for me. It's the engine, and it runs hot.

We moved to LA for exactly that — Brazil to California, running straight at the edge where the future gets built. Bia chose it with me. Nico grew up inside the choosing. The restlessness is mine. The adventure is ours.