Hey, I'm Ricardo 👋

About

I'm an entrepreneur living at the intersection of business and technology.For the past 10 years, I started, grew and eventually sold ColorElephant — a bootstrapped, remote/distributed digital agency — to millions in revenue and a peak of 35+ in headcount.As I figure out my next steps, I've been helping a bunch of cool companies as their head of product, tech lead or product owner.👌 Some stuff I did in the past:
— I've architected (as in: technology choice, technical architecture, data models) projects that ended up being used both by millions of people or/and in mission-critical scenarios (i.e. banking);
— I've experience starting, growing and operating companies in the UK, Europe (Portugal) and the US with all the hard lessons that come from it;
— I hired, managed and grew a team of over 30+ remote engineers, designers, project managers and other "tech people" — this means I've hired (and fired) many more;
— I've experience in pragmatic (bootstrapped! ;) ) tech recruitment for technical roles and match a business sense with good technical understanding (I speak tech);
— I've experience taking multiple products (of our clients and now our own) from "an idea in a napkin" to a launched, used product;Above all I was able to hire or rally super talented people (many times more than me!) that did amazing things.I always had a thing for building things: I started many years ago creating a site (just before blogs were popular) where authors could share their books or longer texts to a community of readers, it got traction and got absorbed by a portal (Textos & Companhia was the name). I also did many things while in high school until I launched SWITCH Conference, which went to become one of the "Top 10 Europe Tech Conferences" per Wired Magazine. I did so with an extraordinary team of volunteers.
Finally, I also had the chance of working for startups (Wooga, 6Wunderkinder) in marketing roles as well as a consultant for some bigger companies, including playing key roles in an organization such wearing the hat of an EOS' Integrator. Got featured in a bunch of different news outlets along the way, from The Economist to Tokyo TV (yeah, bit random! ;) ).I consult with companies on remote/distributed work, building engineering teams and/or doing so as a non-tech person as well as building great mobile or web products... after all that's what I've been doing.

Doing

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