Before any uniform, any deal, any title, there was Curitiba. I grew up in a city that taught me two things that have never left me: the value of family and the power of friendship. They are the foundation everything else was built on.
Before the uniform, before any deal, sport was my first teacher. It taught me that results are built in the hours no one sees, that pressure is a privilege, and that losing is not defeat but information. Show up, compete, recover, come back sharper. Long before any boardroom, the field taught me how to lose well and how to win.
At 18, I entered officer school and graduated first in my cohort, earning the Medalha Correa Lima. Five and a half years of service followed, and with them, everything the uniform teaches. Discipline, resilience, and the kind of leadership that is earned in front of your men, not granted by rank.
By day · Army
By night · UniversityWhile serving full time, I attended university at night. No margin for error. No room for excuses. Just the discipline of showing up to both, every single day.
My father passed away, and the business he spent his life building was weeks from collapse.
I sold assets, renegotiated debt, and kept everything he had worked for from disappearing. That experience taught me something no case study can replicate: that corporate distress is not a financial problem with a financial solution. It is a human one.
After navigating my own family's crisis, I chose to make distress my profession. That decision meant leaving Curitiba for São Paulo, the financial center of South America, where the deals are bigger and nobody waits for you to catch up. In private equity, I learned to read broken capital structures, price risk others ran from, and find value where the market had given up.
I chose to make distress my profession.
While working full time in private equity, I pursued the CFA designation. I did not do it because someone asked me to. I did it because I knew the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was technical, and I was the only one who could close it.
The next chapter is written in New York. My goal is to join the Levered Finance and Restructuring group of a leading investment bank, advising companies at their most critical moments.