On finding the next challenge
Moving on after being in your dream job is hard, but good things end. Possibly for better things to come! In this article I want to share my rationale on deciding my next challenge :)
I consider myself a passionate tech guy and in the beginning of my career, my mind was mostly focused in growing and gathering enriching experiences and not in financial earnings. Going back to year 2014, fortunately, I had the chance to join Uniplaces at a very early stage, now one of the most successful and known startups in Portugal in an era where Lisbon and Portugal itself breathe startups. If you want to know a little bit about my journey I’ve actually written an article about it a few years ago.
I saw Uniplaces going from ~20 people to 300+ people after 2 big investment rounds totaling around 30 million euros and got the privilege to experience in first hand the company growing pains, not only from an individual contributor perspective but also from middle management and leadership team perspective.
I had four super exciting and fulfilling years. Four years of hard work and of building an amazing team and culture, coming from a diverse range of companies. We had all kind of profiles, local and international, junior people who had just graduated to senior people from different backgrounds, people coming from small business’s in small cities in Portugal, to people coming from companies like Google and Facebook from the Valley and other hot tech hubs.
Finally, I reached a point where I felt it was time to leave. Why? A lot of people ask me, this is the reason I’m posting this article as I always like to share my thoughts through writing (in fact, I also don’t like to repeat myself :D).
If you’re happy, why leave the company you got so personally attached to ? Why leave it if it makes you happy ?
This is the question people ask, the same question I was asking myself every day when, somehow, something was missing. It took me a while to figure out what it was, but finally, I understood what I was really missing was the excitement of working in a yet, non working machine, let it be in a big or small company. After careful thinking I decided to leave Uniplaces.
Finding where and what I was going to do next was quite challenging. I wanted to work in a non working machine and improve it but I had conflicting interests since I didn’t want it to:
- seem a step back in my career
- create financial instability in my life
Fortunately, in the last years I was able to create a good network and thanks to that I add the opportunity to validate what I really wanted to do at an early stage company called UTRUST. These guys aim to make cryptocurrency payments simple and had just successfully raised around 20 million euros through an successful ICO to grow their team and develop their product. As all start ups in their early stage, having lot’s of money can be even worse than having no money at all, and I had the chance to work with them for a while as a pretty active advisor to their leadership team but also quite hands on in technical aspects, mostly on architecture, infrastructure and scaling their delivery and team process, as they were growing their product and tech team a lot. I really enjoyed seeing them growing quite fast, skipping a lot of hurdles we faced previously at Uniplaces. I had the validation that this was what I really enjoyed doing at that moment…
I knew it was almost impossible to safely keep having these chances from time to time and this is where I think I got really, really lucky!
Danial Taherzadeh introduced me to KI labs, a team who’s mission is to help companies around the world scale and work, but even more challenging, a team that is bringing the start up and lean enterprise thinking to huge corporations. At KI labs, I have the challenge (read opportunity) to have major impact in some of the biggest corporations in Europe, with brands we all know. Impact at a level capable of changing the way this corporations think and approach problems! Solutions come in all kind of formats. From steering teams we create and integrate in existing companies, aiming to improve their processes and solve technical issues the company is struggling with, to spin offs we create together with these corporations to instigate innovation. Ultimately, having the best of both worlds and everything I was looking for:
- Making a non working machine to work, from team, to process, to technical challenges at scale or in smaller startups
- Having the stability a corporate world can provide you without leaving the start up ecosystem, mindset and culture
- No step back in my career
Most importantly it opened the door to get to know better the corporate world and work in different domains which I didn’t have too much contact with previously, broadening my knowledge and also bringing me new perspectives!
My main challenge right now, is to create a strong team to join the ride and help unlock innovation, by finding the best way to bring a tech start up mindset to the big companies we are already co-operating with. If real impact is something you’re looking for, working with a team of experienced people who’ve grown some of the biggest start ups in Europe, improve your tech skills exponentially by really working at scale on interesting tech stacks, do reach me in any social network @mlimaloureiro as we’re looking for Software Engineers and Product Managers or any brilliant mind out there :)

