Before any uniform, any deal, any title, there was Curitiba, and my family and friends. That is the foundation everything else was built on.
Sport was my first discipline: a competitive swimmer, later an amateur marathon and trail runner. It set the habit everything after ran on.
At 18 I entered officer school and graduated first in my class, earning the Medalha Correa Lima, a distinction given to only one officer a year. Over five and a half years I led more than 90 soldiers, earning command in front of them before rank ever granted it.
By day · Army
By night · UniversityWhile serving full time, I earned an economics degree at night at UFPR, one of Brazil's top-ranked federal universities. Two full loads, no margin, every day for five years.
My father died, and the company he built, USD 40 million in debt, was weeks from collapse.
Over one year I sold assets and renegotiated USD 20 million of debt with more than 25 creditors. Corporate distress, I learned there, is not a financial problem. It is a human one.
After my family's crisis, I made distress my profession and moved to São Paulo to do it. I restructured more than five companies. In one facing bankruptcy, I helped save over 3,000 jobs. I had done it once already, for my father, before it was ever my job.
I chose to make distress my profession.
While working full time in private equity, I passed all three CFA levels in order. Recruiters assume a military candidate lacks the technical base for finance. The charter is my answer, earned across 900+ hours of study.
I founded a non-profit that helps veterans return to civilian life, and I give my time to children who need it most. The service did not end when I took off the uniform.
The MBA is not an ending point, but a bridge between everything I have learned and everything I want to become. At Johnson I want to take Corporate Bankruptcy and Restructuring with Robert Symington, who ran distressed investing at Avenue Capital, and to lead the Investment Management Club, bringing my network at BTG Pactual and Itaú BBA to connect Johnson with Brazil's financial community.
My goal is a Leveraged Finance and Restructuring seat at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley in New York, advising companies at the moment everyone else has left the table.
The city where the hardest problems get solved.