Relevance means presence 🌱 Hugo Pereira

Just build. For now, just build. Because you're gonna hit the wall. You're gonna fail. You're gonna have a problem. For me, AI building at the moment, I see it as a game. Okay, what is the next threshold? What is the next boss to beat? And I just go to one, to another level, another level, another level. I just don't know what is the final boss or when the map ends. The best way to get where you want is to ask more, demand less. If a founder is curious, he's gonna get a much better relationship with a CMO than if he just wants to demand. What have we learned in the last 6 months? That can give us a signal that we are either doing better or worse with our messaging, campaigns, positioning, and what do we have to do differently or start doing differently next quarter in your view for us to get closer to our goals? That will lead to a much better conversation. I know it's a bit strange, but sometimes I want relevance for the people that I have the highest impact in my life. And that means at least in the first layer is my family. Within my family, there's my wife and kids, etc. And that means presence. So for me, relevance equals presence at this moment. And sometimes there's analogy between both. Sometimes there's no analogy whatsoever.

This week's Millennial Master is Hugo Pereira. He spent the last decade moving through startups, scale-ups, leadership roles, and now a portfolio career. Hugo's thinking sits right at the intersection of AI, leadership, and relevance, because that's what modern careers are starting to look like when the old paths stop making sense. In this episode, In this episode, we talk about why relevance now comes from staying present and adaptable, what founders still get wrong about scaling into new markets, and why AI gives speed for free, but not clarity or judgment. Hugo, welcome to Millennial Masters. Where are you joining us from today?

Thanks, Daniel. I'm joining in from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. So yeah, a very nice sunny day.

Lovely place, one of my favorite places in the world. But let's leave that aside because you had the scale-up chapter, the executive chapter, and now the founder and fractional chapter. So my question is, did you always think you'd end up building this kind of portfolio career?

In hindsight, it seems that my nature and childhood have led me this direction, being that my dad was an entrepreneur, my mom is a social psychologist, so It feels that there was some kind of like background that will have guided me towards some level of entrepreneurial approach to things. But no, I will not have guessed that I'll have ended up here like 10 years ago or 20 years ago. I believe it went by phases of career. You go almost like from mountain to mountain and yeah, different conquering of different challenges. And now contextually, you know, this is the last one that I'm at, at this stage. And I cannot guarantee that it's gonna be the same in 3 years, 5 years' time, but I did, I do enjoy the ability to move and adapt to the context that we live today.

So was it planned or things happened in a certain timeline which allowed you to move from one side to the other?

I would like to see and to believe that was envisioned, but not planned. I, I move from perhaps someone that has a 10, 15-year horizon to someone that has maybe a 3-year horizon at best.

Yeah, it's very hard to look 15 years in the crystal globe.

Yeah, I think perhaps because of the technology acceleration that we've been witnessing in our lives makes it hard to predict what is a 10, 15-year career compared to the past, uh, where you could say, you know, if you join a consulting firm as a junior, you could define it in 20 years, you want to be a partner. And it's a very clear defined path for you professionally, at least. Nowadays, I'm not sure anymore what that professional clarity will look like. Uh, some people might have it, some people not. I like to believe that at this stage with so many changes, I like to have an open mind to be a fluid choice and fluid career, but I always had a very clear guidance and envisioning 5, 10 years ahead. Some choices influence a lot. So for example, you talk about being a scale-up and operator. That was my choice. And when I started my professional career, I could have embraced enterprise approach of building a career within an enterprise.

Let's go straight to the beginning to call it your first job. What was the moment you transitioned into entrepreneurship or being a founder?

My first job is, I find it always a north to explain because I joined a youth organization called AIESEC, which is the world largest youth-run organization. Majority of it is volunteer-led when you are at university. But what people don't know about the most times is that the national and global bodies are actually full-time paid professional activity. And then you are exposed to quite a high level of responsibility at a very young age. So this organization at global level, in my time, which was over 15 years ago, The global turnover was already $20-30 million annual turnover revenue. When you are 23, 24 years old, that kind of level of responsibility sets a very interesting notion and motion of like, okay, this is a business model that might be built on volunteering, on international exchange experiences where students go to companies in other countries to have an exchange experience. And for me, that was the first job. It just, it was a starting point that perhaps doesn't feel like an internship or a junior level, it feels that you are immediately added with a lot of responsibility, which means that your career path starts with high levels of responsibility and then humbling down because you know that enterprises or companies are not gonna understand that level of experience or give you that level of autonomy moving onwards, independently of what you have done. Which means that I wanted to keep some level of autonomy and ownership and impact, And that's why I chose the startup path, which seems very common today, but in 2010, the level of funding, the level of exciting startups, this whole trajectory of some companies becoming a $100 million revenue company in one year was inexistent.

And here you're talking about EVBox, which helped scale through a pretty serious growth journey. Then, then you moved into building, yeah.

Yeah, sorry, that was already the third startup. So that's when I say that making a guidance choice, I had made a conscious choice that at least for 10 years, I wanted to go the startup path independently of the amount of times it fails. And it's good to talk about EVBox because that's the success story of my flagship story, I'd say, of my professional career, the one that is most known. But before that, There were two failed startups.

Okay. Let, let's talk about those and what you learned from, from two failed startups. Well, the, the— and they were your first two and it didn't put you off.

No, no, no. I was very clear. It's, it's gonna be a 10-year journey. Despite that, in hindsight, it's easy to say it's gonna be a 10-year journey because one worked out, but when the second didn't work out, or even the first one, I almost considered going back to Google. Actually, I, I almost joined Google in, in Ireland in this process because As you mentioned, it's frustrating, it's a lonely path. You are like, okay, you are having a low-level salary. All your friends, colleagues, peers, you know, keep building their career. At the time, it was still very driven by big, large organizations.

And you were in your 20s.

And I'm in my 20s and you feel that you are being left behind or then, you know, it is either your friends are going, you know, above and up and building a career in enterprise and You just feel that, you know, what is Google doing or what are you doing with the startups? Because it was not that cool at the time. Or you see founders that raise money, you see the TechCrunch article and you're like, damn, he raised this amount of money. Of course, funding was not a metric of success. The most startups, even with the funding, tend to fail. But yeah, your emotional angle still has an impact and you still see that and say, oh, why not me? Or why can't I get that? So the first startups, yeah, the very first one.

So how, what happened with the first one and the second one? When you look back, why did they fail? Was it the product? Was it the product market fit? Was it?

The first one was product market fit, was a very niche product, a decision-making software product, which had its place, but the addressable market was incredibly small. But it failed also because one of those things that seems obvious, but I came with the assumption when I started my career in startups that every startup is cool. The culture is great. It must be a great way of working. And it was completely the opposite. Was a founder that was out of university, first time managing company, first time managing a team. A lot of like mistakes, but more than mistakes was, you know, very toxic in a way of managing. When I say toxic is the kind of person that if you arrive at 8:05 AM instead of 8 AM, 8 AM, which is a time to start the day, he'll pull you aside and call you out and be like, why are you 5 minutes late? This is not a way of operating. This is not a way of working, you know, and it's, it's very like confronting. But yeah, that, that was the first one was one year in that organization. But I learned a lot. I learned a lot about what I do not want to do, what I do not want to accept. And, and it came with two conclusions. The first one is like, independently of the founder I'll meet, I'll set my boundaries. You know, and, and be very clear about those boundaries independently of that. And the second one is really evaluate the potential product market fit, even if I'm completely wrong before accepting a startup and realizing this is not a job, this is a real choice. And you should really do your due diligence the same way that the founder does due diligence on hiring you. So that was my two lessons from that one.

And then the third one became a greatest hit, so to speak. How did How did that happen and how did you help that scale? Because it was a pretty serious growth journey.

So that, that was, it's when I believe that things come across the second startup. We were 2.5 years and we were looking for an exit or the founders were looking for an exit and the shareholders and the trajectory was not bad, was going well, was a good product market fit, just a lot of bad choices in 2 years and, you know, burning through almost a million funding without really thinking well about this process or building traction. But one of the groups that were looking to acquire it got really excited about the people that were working at the company. But then at the end, the, there was another group that was more interesting for the exit of the, of this HR tech firm. But then I was poached, uh, one of the in potential investors basically said, hey, I am becoming CEO of this electric vehicle, uh, charging scale-up. And I absolutely love the interaction we've had. I think there's a lot of potential. Let's talk. I'd like you to move to— I was living in Belgium, in Brussels. I want you to move to the Netherlands and help build this. It's going to be massive. And that's it. I basically entertained a lunch and at the end of the lunch, I had an offer and at the end of the lunch, I had an offer on my table and I didn't even know what to do with it. I was I didn't, I didn't expect it. So almost said yes on the spot, tried to negotiate and yeah, like a month later I was in the Netherlands in this company without knowing anything about hardware, EV charging, electric vehicles. Was a gut feeling, was a gut jump.

And you had to learn everything on the spot and pretty much straight away. How did you do that? How did you cope with all of that as well as the day-to-day running?

People will laugh at this. The first book I've read when I joined EVBox was Electricity for Dummies or like something along those lines. I'm not trying to remember because I was in software world. I was really into B2B and B2C software. However, it depends on the people and the mission. I also get a little bit tired of like software, software, software. Everything is behind the computer. I was ready to go to be part of a company that has something physical, something that I can see have an impact. I already had like a, you know, not an affinity for mobility and cars, but I had an affinity for like, okay, this shouldn't be the best way that we have mobility around the world, like full-on gasoline cars. This cannot be the best possible option. And I got triggered by it. I got triggered by the mission. I saw the momentum. And yeah, my first immediate step is I want to be as eloquent and knowledgeable to the start, to the level possible as an engineer working on the products. That was it. I was not about the, I was heading marketing and go-to-market, but my first priority is I want in 6 months time, you know, to be able to talk about cables, alternate current, direct current, what, how the charging station works, kilowatts at the same level as an engineer and the, and the founder, the technical founder, CTO. That was my first immediate priority. Which is something that I see a lot of people that join startups or scale-ups at early stage, they are immediately focused on the function. I was focusing on understanding one, the customer, and the second, the product. And, and of course, the software is also the same, especially if it's a technical product, but with the hardware, it was new to me.

You've done software before. Yes.

Yeah. I went on the field with electricians and installers to install charging stations, to see how they are installed. I installed myself with them to just understand things. And me as a marketeer, I was even giving product design input to say, hey, I've talked to like 5 engineers, they have a pain point on installing these charging stations. Their experience affects the referral because it was a game for referral. Because everyone, you know, with hardware, my quick understanding is when you are early, it's amazing because it's a curve of like adoption. But no matter how you go, Give it a few years and pricing gets pressured, margins get pressured, competition increases, and it stops being a fight for features and starts being a fight for trust and brand points. It's like a TV. How do you choose a TV? Some people will go on the features, but ultimately there's 3, 4 brands you have on your mind and that's it. And for me, that was the same. I knew this is going to be a game of who do we know and who do we trust? And then the rest comes along. And yeah, which was having that understanding early on helped me to make a lot of decisions, which I believe—

So what was the lever that you pulled in order to scale it? Was it the technology? Was it the branding? Was it the marketing?

Naturally, the technology makes a foundation. Yeah, it has to work. I believe that we had a very clear understanding that this is an infrastructure play. And it's not an exciting product. It's not a sexy product. You know, if you are a driver or a business, you just want to come with a car, plug your, uh, your charging cable, and it has to work. Behind the scenes, there's a lot of complexity, but ultimately the experience has to be as simple as, you know, uh, a gas tank. You know, that's the comparison. You just want to fill and leave. And people only remember the brands when they have a problem. It's like a dishwasher. You know, if I ask people, what is your dishwasher at home? You might not immediately know the brand and the model. But if it breaks, you, you pretty quickly go, gonna remember that.

Brain food I've had recently and my tumble dryer.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So I had that very clear understanding, which means that whereby all the competitors are very focused on leads generation, e-commerce, et cetera. I was like, oh no, we're gonna build a brand powerhouse and it's gonna take maybe 1, 2 years, but when the market matures, it's gonna jump. And it happened. The first year of EVBox was not that great jump, was like 20%, 10%, and then 100%, and then 70%. So the, yeah, it really saw the hockey stick. And what I have so absorbed was that we don't own the conversation. People don't come to us at that stage, was very immature. So I understood that they'll not trust us, but they'll trust the electrician, They'll trust energy companies, they'll trust the, maybe the Amazons of this world. So I thought about, we need to be the best partner, referral partner for everyone in this sector. We are not gonna be the front-facing, we're gonna be the engine behind all of them. So the marketing go-to-market model we built was all about building a distributor and a reseller channel. And by the time the other ones tried to copy us, we were already way ahead in terms of the processes, the setup, the, the brand. Yeah, it was, that was, that is essentially the, I believe the lever we've got in the first years.

And then you worked on an international expansion as well. Yeah. Which everybody who tried to work in a different country will know, and you've worked yourself in multiple countries, that just translating a website or translating the product marketing is, is not just that. I'm wondering for you at the time, which market forced the biggest rethink? In how you sold the story and how you presented the story?

I think people are gonna laugh, but Germany.

Okay. Why would that be?

Because there's not a single person I know that has said in all this, my career, I never heard someone saying, oh, we're just gonna enter the German market. They believe it's gonna, and 3 years later, if I talk to them, how is it going? I have never met someone that said we just conquered it right away. Was like, was smooth as, smooth as simple. No, it's, it's also one of the richest markets in Europe. Everyone wants that market, but for the complexity, one, language complexity is not just translating to German, it's also the way of speaking, the way of—

That was pre-AI, just to make it clear.

And pre-AI, and pre-AI. So everything has to be written, not just written down, actually written down. The demand for knowledge was way more advanced than other markets, at least for us in hardware. They actually really wanted to know the specs and in detail. And of course, Germany has a way to make things more complex. They had their own certification. So Europe has a whole certification around, you know, how to install the stations, to We, but German said, no, no, no, we're gonna have one step further. And to sell in Germany, you also need to have our certification, which also add complexity to the product. It's not just one product. People think it's just one charging station and sell. It's actually 9 charging stations for 9 European markets. And that's really hard to scale on hardware. And coming from a software world, that was a little bit painful to learn because it's like, okay, we translate to German and go to Germany.

And, uh, but it wasn't that easy.

No, no. It was like, present to Germany, go to Germany, send the first stations, and they send back because it's like, this is not up to standards, it's not up to regulations. Come back to us when you have that. And when, and coming back to us is not like, oh, let's just tweak things around. No, it's a certification process. It might be 6 months, 1 year process. And what do you do for 6 months to 1 year? It's not that the Germans like to be on a waiting list, uh, to get their, uh, charging stations. They'll find the next, next best solutions. So that was, I think, the most complex market from a learning point of view, but I, I, I'm extremely grateful for that because it, it, it allowed me to have a very different approach to expansion. And I think with AI, people still are gonna make the same mistakes just faster. And because now with AI can just translate in German, but then because of that, people might not actually do the homework of interviewing German prospects, German customers. Is their pain points the exact same ones as the other markets? And you might create a, a false sense of expansion, which, uh, which, which let's see what's going to happen. It definitely is going to increase the speed now with AI. Let's just hope doesn't outs— no one outsources the critical thinking of really studying the markets.

I think there's plenty of evidence that that's already happening in certain roles, but we'll get to the AI bit in a moment. I just wanted to go a bit deeper here with EVBox because when you were expanding across markets, you had multiple people in different countries. How were you able to maintain the culture in the business, the overall one plus the individual one in each country? And besides knowing that Germany made you rethink how you sold the story and also how you packaged it, were there any different trust signals in each of these markets?

Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Cultural-wise. I believe it comes down to the clarity on the shared mission. Why are we doing that? What we are doing? And I didn't see many differences there, um, because the communication was clear on, on what we are doing. I also believe that if you join a scale-up that is defining a category, it's different from one that is an incumbent or a challenger. It's a different kind of momentum to build an organization. It is an incredible—

Tell me more about that. Cause if you're, you're, you're saying basically if you're the market leader, you have to behave differently than if you're somebody who is is kind of like trying to catch up or compete with you. So what's the key difference there?

The key difference—

If you've been first with it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If difference is an interesting— it might be that not everyone would agree to it, but we had a motto internally where we didn't even wanna call ourselves market leader. We said we have to be an industry leader. And the difference is that we are not competing yet for a market. We want to make the market. And That means that everything changes in terms of communication. We want to advance the industry because it's in the benefit of everyone. And that makes people resonate to say, I'm doing this because I want my children or kids to grow up in a mobility world that has cleaner air. That's as simple as that. Or I want to offer multiple alternatives that you don't depend on oil, for example, which now we see the impact of that in these kind of situations.

Yes. I believe everywhere in the world is more expensive, uh, significantly. Yes.

So we want to offer an alternative there. And of course we were a little bit, maybe a little bit too bold because we wanted to make sure people understand we are working here because we want to get a chance of getting closer to a zero emission world. And this is our part in it. We are not making glamorous of saying like, we want to be the biggest, most awesome electric vehicle charging in the world. The product was just a mechanism to make the industry work. Because he said if there's more and more cars on the road, the thing that people have to trust is that they can go from point A to point B without having to think too much about it, which was one of the big pain points. Yeah. If you go with a car, you don't think about where am I gonna fuel my car, but with the electric vehicle at the time, and now still today, true, but with a less extent, you do have to prepare. You do have to think, okay, I'm going from point A to point B, where am I gonna charge? There's more preparation.

And typically it's the map. System in the car has a slightly different routing system, which will calculate the miles and take you through there. You can't really put it on your phone, say how you would typically do it with—

No. Um, but at the time there was no connection to the cars. Google Maps didn't have this information. We were all very new. So we were all talking to each other to see how we can help this happen. But it makes very, not, I'm not gonna say easy, but makes very It makes very compelling to build and refine this category. Later on, when you are a challenger and it happened in our industries, is a different take. The industry defined, the category defined, people know what they are searching for. So as a challenger, your story is not gonna be about let's build the industry, is all about how do we improve this industry and what is your role on making it a step change. But what's hard to get right is what's that step change? What's that differentiation that we bring that few are bringing alongside us? And as a challenger, it's hard to pinpoint that because what tends to happen, and I saw this multiple now on my fractional role, is that board and leadership want to try to be everything for everyone. That's one of the biggest fallacies of scale-ups. You want to be everything for everyone and you don't really funnel down to the one thing that you want to be the most known or credible for. And when you come as a challenger—

and that's part of the messaging and the marketing.

Yeah.

And how you position yourself.

Exactly. And it's part of messaging, marketing, and how you position. And marketing has a role in building that. But I was, I always made sure that that messaging is a leadership decision, not a marketing decision.

Mm-hmm.

Because if it's a marketing decision, then it's a bubble. Of research, and if it's a leadership decision, everyone really has to make their work to embrace the messaging, to embrace the mission, to embrace the choices. And if the leadership adopts, then the company is more willing to adopt, and the chances of making the better decisions are incredibly higher. Because once you have a shared mission, you have more clarity, and you can, you can be slightly better at defining, is this the kind of work that drives impact for us to get closer to what, what our, our goals and our achievement. And of course, goals have financial metrics, have like, there's also a financial element with it. Should never be discouraged. At the end of the day, that's what shareholders, what the company also wants to see, to grow. But people don't stay for the revenue numbers, so they stay for the getting closer to the mission and to be a better version of themselves. If they, if they are not that version, they just leave.

And for somebody who's scaling up at the moment, what should the founder stop asking the chief marketing officer? For if the real problem is the go-to-market system?

Hmm. Maybe, maybe let me take an angle. If you are a founder and you have a chief marketing officer or go-to-market, the best way to get what you want is to ask more, ask more, demand less.

Okay.

And the re— and what I want to mean by this is that if a founder is curious, is gonna get a much better relationship with a CMO than if it just wants to demand. The example is we are not getting a typical conversation with Martin and the sales director or CEO will be like, we need more leads. And that's a false premise conversation because what will happen is that we'll enter on a defense mechanism of we already have leads. It's a blame of sales. It enters on a blame game. If the CEO comes more to Martin to say, what have we learned in the last 6 months that can give us a signal that we are either doing better or worse with our messaging campaigns positioning and what have we, what What do we have to do differently or start doing differently next quarter in your view for us to get closer to our goals? That will lead to a much better conversation than just like the, that's why I mean by asking less demand is always good to demand high, but like, you know, less mandates, more questions and the conversation will be much better because you're gonna get insights from, from the marketing person. You're gonna oblige a marketing person to do reflection on work. And not just run, run, run, run, which will make a better executive and it will make a better team from a leadership point of view.

So what does it look like then when the company keeps blaming, say, the marketing for a wider commercial problem?

Well, if you are a good CMO, first off, you cannot take it personally because everyone is trying to do their best work. And it's hard to be a salesperson. It's hard to be a product person. It's hard to be a finance person. It is also hard to be a marketeer nowadays, but we enter sometimes in a conversation of, oh, they don't understand how hard it is to be a marketeer. You have to handle all of these things. Of course you do. So they do. Everyone is fighting a battle that nobody, that people don't know about. So I think sometimes you lack empathy to just understand, okay, this is not about me. This is not about the team. Where does the frustration actually come from? And if you put that separately and say, okay, thanks for the feedback. Where does the feedback come from? What exactly are you hoping to solve that we are not able to help you with? Immediately that conversation will lead to any kind of examples. And sometimes it can be education, sometimes can be behavior change, sometimes can be just simple shared understanding, and sometimes can be just honest, raw truth. I have a simple example where some, I have some customers where some sales people are incredibly frustrated because they say, oh, I have this vertical, I have this sector, I want to get leads, I want to build the momentum, but I don't have support from marketing. And then, you know, we can have, I understand the frustration, but sometimes the end result is also to be honest and say, hey, as a company, we define these X 3 industries or 3 verticals as the primary focus to grow. We cannot make them all. We have to make a choice. And that choice means that yes, you are in an unfortunate position where we cannot give you that support to achieve our goals. The best we can do is to have this, this, this, and this for you to try to have a proactive approach to run your results. But this is the reality. And sometimes it's acceptance. And it doesn't mean that he's gonna get happier. It doesn't mean that he's gonna have acceptance. He just understands that this is it. It's a choice. It's a prioritization. And yeah, it's hard to hear, but at least, yeah, we don't solve for happiness, but we solve for clarity.

Now, for the eagle-eyed people, they will see a yellow cover book behind you. It's your book, which you wrote called Teams in Hell. So the useful bit there, not necessarily the framework, I'm wondering for the people tuning in what you've actually seen through your journey. What does bad management look like before a team fully breaks?

Yeah, so I think there's 3 elements and a few more, but the 3 main ones that started on is a large part of the workforce have experienced a bad manager. It just happens.

Inevitably.

Inevitably, it's gonna happen, a bad manager. There is a difference of a bad manager and a toxic manager. And that's one of the distinctions I help in the book because a bad manager doesn't wake up in the morning thinking, how can I make my team miserable? Woo-hoo! Today, who am I gonna screw over?

And you mentioned your first toxic one as well in the early days.

Exactly. The thing is that a The toxic is very inward, as in like, I want to make the best choices for myself. So that's where the toxicity comes from. And it comes sometimes from not being able to handle lack of control. So he wants to control the output and control the— control, exactly, not control the outcome, control the output, which that's why people become micromanagers. The other part tends to be that toxic managers tend to have really low self-awareness. They never did self-awareness work. They never saw like, this is where I excel, this is where I might have some pitfalls. And because they don't have that work, sometimes they don't even realize the impact they have on other people. Now, the difference is that bad managers sometimes don't even know they are bad managers because they were the best at their tasks. It's the most traditional thing. They were really great at their tasks. They were excellent contributors. And then their path was like, okay, you're really good at what you do. You're now gonna be the team leader. And, uh, and then they're like, oh, okay, so I'm not the boss. So the natural progression is I'm gonna manage everyone's tasks because I was really good at managing mine. So I'll just make sure everyone manages their tasks the same way as I do. And that's one of the biggest shifts that are really important. You stop managing tasks, you start, you know, helping people and it's a different skill set. And, uh, sometimes you have to promote the one that will help the team level up to build a team of winners. And not the one that just thinks about winning himself. This tends to happen quite a lot in sales, for example, the best performer sales becomes a team leader and sometimes works well, but sometimes it doesn't work because yeah, it's, he was really good himself and, but he might not be the best coach.

Not necessarily a team player, but just a great salesman.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But that's one of the big things. The other one, which is within a framework, but is probably the most controversial one is that a lot of leadership books say, well, the most important thing for you to do is to have, to build trust in a team. Trust sets a foundation for everything. And I bring an angle, but that is driven by scale-ups perhaps too much, which is how I put the notion forward that actually the foundation for everything is clarity. If you don't have clarity, trust will never be at the level that you hope for. Because people can be very trustworthy, but if there's no clarity on You know, why they are doing what they are doing, what's the expected outcome from them, uh, you know, what's my role here and where do I go from here? And you don't have to have all the precise answers. If there's no, some level of clarity there, or even what, what kind, what are we trying to solve as a company? Um, then trust is there, but it is superficial trust. It'll be lost sooner or later. Um, it, you might, because they might trust you as a person, as a friend, they might not trust the company. And that's why afterwards, like, you are surprised that they went for another company and they might not, they might trust you, but not the team. And so it's different levels that happens. And yeah, it is important to have psychological safety, but even psychological safety comes from having clarity on how you handle conflict, how you handle feedback, on how you handle communication. A lot of those things are not clear or even talked about.. And most of the team managers impose those behaviors rather than talking about those behaviors. And I know it's an art, it's something that takes time. I got fortunate enough to have grown up as a, the first job is basically very much on leadership development. So I was fortunate to have built with this mindset. And that's why the book came to life because people were saying, they were asking me, where can I get started from if I'm starting a career, or I was just promoted. And that's it. And I was just like, oh, maybe I, maybe I write that. And that was it.

So the book, besides the first part of the title, Teams in Hell, How to End Bad Management. If there would be 3 steps or 3 things that you would want people to take away from the books, what would they be? Because we still have a few things to discuss what happened next with your story.

Yeah. Well, the first one will be this one that, you know, like, what does clarity mean in your team? What does clarity mean to you as a team leader? And so I would say, like, focus on making sure you have clarity of mission, clarity of language, clarity of work. If that's there, the chances are the team will perform better. That's definitely one that is there. The second thing is a tough one, but it's stop promoting excellence at tasks. And stop thinking.

Okay. What are those?

Those are the high performers that just because they perform high in their jobs, there is a natural assumption that they'll be the next team leader. And that's more or less— Yeah.

You mentioned those. I just want to make clear what you were saying.

Yeah. Good. Good. So that's for me the main one. And what does it mean? It means that you need to start thinking that the team leader position is not the only path for progress that a company or a team should offer. It should also have a path for a contributor. We had this situation at TV Box where my product marketer, head of product, was bright and brilliant from a strategic and contribution point of view, extremely essential. He knew the product inside out. He was really good at communication, excellent analytical thinking. The difference was that when I was to have a team leader, I, you know, he was like, I never led a team. So I was like, okay, I'll coach you through it. I'll coach the whole team through it. If things don't work out, we'll find a way for you to keep being an excellent individual contributor and we'll find someone more fit to lead the team. Fast forward a year and a half, things didn't work out. He had a lot of like conflicts with the team. Again, not because he was a bad manager. He just, he just, it was not in him. He was very honest to say, I do not get energy from the coaching, the leading people. It just doesn't give me the joy that I had hoped for. So we hired someone, we hired someone to lead the team that had a really strong people fit and he became horizontal to the team as an individual contributor with incredibly high expertise on the product, on the campaigns, on everything else. And it was it. There was no model for it. We just tried out what's the worst that can happen. So that was it. And there's no fallback. Yeah. Also one of my, which is one of my, the brand director, for example, she was not sure if she wanted to be a team leader. She's like, I don't know if I'm going to like it. And what if I go as a team leader and then it doesn't work out? Then what? I'm fired. I go back. What's happening? So you need to have also a fallback option if you have that conversation to say, yeah, if it doesn't work out, we'll hire someone that you report to that person if you're comfortable with, you can be an excellent individual contributor. There'll be multiple options, but you, you know, you will not be let alone. We're going to go and guide you through this. And if it doesn't work and if you don't like it, you don't like it. So yeah, that assumption is a big one.

It takes time.

It takes effort, but it's, it's It's one of the takeaways. Yeah, and I think maybe the last one, which is we are in an era.

The third one, yes.

The third one, just very last one. We are in an era of AI, and I believe that as a team leader, you have to start thinking how to protect deep work for your team. Before, I would say everyone's work is individual. Now, I believe, and that's what I share in the book, deep work starts to become a shared responsibility also of the team, how you protect them to be able to do their best deep work and there's methods to do it, but that's something that I believe is getting tougher and tougher. Attention span is decreasing.

Yeah.

People are, you know, sometimes overwhelmed all over the place, hard to pick the battles. So now it's becoming a team leader's choice and a good manager to actually think how I protect deep work for my team.

So you've said in a couple of posts on your LinkedIn, as well as in your book, that AI gives speed for free. You mentioned it earlier as well, and you hear different versions of that now. Some of the stuff that I've been writing about and thinking about, you get the speed, you get the polish, but then with £20, euros a month, everybody gets the same tool and everything starts looking the same very quickly. So where do you see the clearest differentiation that AI can do in work and the business?

Well, naturally, the speed is a a big one. Um, whereas— but everybody will have the same speed boost with, or to a certain extent, everyone will have the same speed boost, but the way that you use that speed matters. But that will be perhaps a too detailed conversation because it's about if you make AI help you and work for you or if you just use it freely. I think in a larger population, people still use it freely as like question and answer and trying to figure that out. Then there is a next level, which would be people that actually build projects and customize the knowledge of AI to serve you the context. And I think that's it, providing contextual decisions. So for example, I use AI, but I have different buckets of projects for different things for my newsletter.

Do you use ChatGPT or do you use Claude?

I was on ChatGPT and I have to say I'm the one that moved to Claude. I think many people are moving to Claude. I think sometimes it's affinity, sometimes it's the way it works. Sometimes it can also be hype and you test it out and you find that it works matter, but ultimately is where you feel that you are most organized and getting the most value. And at the time that I moved to Claude, there was this whole concept of projects and projects with custom knowledge. And for me, that was extremely important. ChatGPT copied that later on, but sometimes is where you start is where you start.

And it was a short time difference, I believe. But yes, when you want to be able to move at that speed, you just start and create the projects. I'm working on the projects now as well, and I've started implementing them in ChatGPT. I kind of like stayed there. There was too much history between the two of us since 2023 that I didn't want to—

I completely understand. Yeah. So I think that's the second level. And then, okay, on speed afterwards, of course, you can have someone that gets to know really well what you want to accomplish, and then you can look into these agents research on your behalf autonomously to a certain extent. And the fourth level, you actually build, do things for you. The differentiation, I think, is, is talking about differentiation. There are two things that for me are top of mind. Three things, actually. The first one is curiosity. I think it still comes down to how curious you are to explore and how you make time for that curiosity to express. I don't work on Fridays, for example, actively. So it's just as a fractional, one of the choices I make is that I'm gonna have less income monthly and I'm just gonna have a Friday free. Friday is a day I have for sometimes, to be honest, sometimes also to do nothing, to enjoy, to have some leisure. Not often, to be honest, with— I have two young daughters at home, 4-year-old and 1-year-old. So there's always logistics to prepare and to work with. But Friday for me, it's a day for logistics. It's a day for also where I read, research AI, try different things with attention and with intent. Those things make a difference because if you try to work with AI while at work, um, tougher, you know, it is tougher to make time when you are in the noise, in the activity, you have the pressure of the company, you still work a lot.

To check the result, to the output, verify, refine, is that what you mean?

Yeah, because it's a muscle to build. Yeah. How to work with AI, how to prompt, what to build, to think about creative things that you didn't think about, um, to solve problems for yourself. It can be something as simple as I don't know, we, we, I built an application for, for me and my wife to do a weekly menu. Like just like we have a weekly menu, we have to prepare everything for us. It was always a discussion, et cetera. Now I have a small application we built. It suggests based on our family traits, allergies, and says, hey, this is a suggestion for this week's menu. And then it creates a shopping list. It's very simple, but it was nice to build together with my wife, for example. And both of us like saying, hey, but let's do this, let's set this, this could work. I could maybe should approve if you want. Oh, maybe should pull the recipes. All of these things start to become really interesting on the possibilities of AI, which comes to my second point. This is the age of the builder for now. And when I say age, it seems a big wording. Let's just say the next 2 to 3 years is about to build a builder. Then we see it from there. But I really think it's about the builder mindset to build things, whatever that means. And that's what I empower a lot of the teams to do. Just build, for now just build, because you're gonna hit a wall, you're gonna fail, you're gonna have a problem. You're gonna get into a situation where, oh, I actually would like to pull my emails, or you have to create an API. And a lot of people will be like, what is an API? And you go to the next stage, next stage. It is for me, AI building at the moment, I see it as a game. I was a gamer when I was younger, Zelda, et cetera. I just see it as a game. Okay, what is the next threshold? What is the next boss to beat? And I just go to one, to another level, another level, another level. I just don't know what is the final boss or when the map ends, but that's my element to it. But the difference, and then it coming down to the third point, which is overwhelming. The whole AI momentum is just simply overwhelming. Because there's just too much happening, which means that you have to make a choice for yourself on—

Too much noise, maybe.

Yeah, there's too much noise and there's too much noise and development that creates anxiety in people in a sense of like, there's a new model, everyone has to jump into the model. There's a new feature, everyone has a new feature. Then there is a new application. Oh, there is a new application. And then you can, you cannot master anything if you keep being interrupted. Now you have to make, it's like that old say, you have 10,000 hours to master something. That's also the, it also comes to an element here. You have to make a choice. At the moment, I'm only using AI to build things that for either giving me joy or to solve a problem. That's it. And sometimes it solves, sometimes it doesn't solve, sometimes you have joy, sometimes it doesn't have joy. And I do the same for the customers. Sometimes it's just for fun and it becomes something big, sometimes to solve a problem. And if I feel that the result is slop, yeah, I slop, I just let it go. Sometimes just not good enough and I say, okay, it's not good enough, it's not worth my time. I tried to build, for example, a better to-do app and I just felt it was one more, you know, I tried to make it for me in my own way and I realized, you know what, I still prefer my pen and paper. And I was like, yeah, it was worth a try. I did my best, went back to my pen and paper.

Is that using say Lovable or Cursor or what did you use?

Yeah, Lovable, Cursor, Cloth Code. Replit, I've been trying around now. The most common ones I use is Cloud Code and Lovable. Lovable because of the user interface is just easy to interact and to get a first version or a full prototype in some of the times. Also for customers and teams, it's easy to understand the interface. Cloud Code requires more, you know, efforts of understanding how it helps you. But yeah, for me locally, I use more Cloud Code for myself and use Lovable more for the customers.

And in a world where AI is now also making everything cheaper, faster, and easier to produce, we're talking about the builder age that you've just mentioned. There's going to be a flood of these things on the market, but there's only going to be so many eyeballs, attention, and ways to reach users. So then if everybody can build so cheaply and easily, what's going to be next? How, how, how are we going to find out about everything? Are we just going to build our own tools because it's going to be so easy? It's easy to copy something that you've seen, but how do you know, how do you find something else to inspire you?

Well, um, there's, there's a few things in my mind. The first one, I think we're going to go through a mindset shift of what software means. I know people are saying software is dead, this whole momentum, et cetera. I try to avoid too much getting into that crystal ball, uh, because okay, there's a lot of theory. There's a lot of like experts on that field. I believe no one knows exactly what will happen. I think we are at the mid of the shift. And I don't believe everyone has a clarity on what's happening in the middle. Maybe there's a few people in the world that have a really good clarity because they have access to certain things that we don't have, but overall—

Like what?

Like what the potential of the models is. I think only a few people in the world really understand what's coming next that we might not know about. To give an example, my mindset of developing a software is that the software gets better after a few months, after a year, after 2 years, you know, features move slowly. We are at a level where our assumption model has to rewire because people might say, oh, it's crap at design. Design in AI makes terrible design. And I was like, yeah, a month ago.

That has certainly improved. Yes.

And then if this is, this is a new base and then a month from now will be different and a month from now will be different and a month from now will be different. It's really fast, which means that that's why it's important to stay curious and adaptable because what you tried a month ago might be completely different or much better a month later. So you cannot just have like food thinking in these mindsets, which was before, yeah, before we test a product as a software or the software is crap, you're not going to go back for 10 years. Now you might have to think about, oh, the software is not that great today, but tomorrow, in a month, 2 months, it might be day and night.

And so has been the case in modern era, say with the technology such as Apple Maps. They were greatly criticized when it was launched. We know why, because they wanted to reduce their dependence on Google Maps. And in the years that followed, it's neck to neck, if not sometimes in certain places better than Google Maps, but it took massive investment and iteration to do that.

Yeah. But so, so that's one of the first things. The other thing is that, yeah, so the concept of software will have to change because yes, there is, there is a situation is already happening. Where there'll be a lot of building, but not necessarily all the building is commercialized. I think that's the, that's what people are failing to, not failing, it's a bit of a strong word. That's what people might not be aware of what behavior change is. A lot of people will just build for themselves instead of buying. And that means that yes, we might have 1,000 to-do lists built by 1,000 people all for themselves. And it means that a lot of like the to-do lists, uh, apps that existed might have a big problem and that affects. So yes, so, so there is, there is a shift that is happening already today. And there are certain applications that I have purchased and now today I don't have. Also the mindset shifts. There's these voice note applications. Yeah. For example, like Whisperflow, which I love.

I'm using that too. Yeah.

At a certain point in time, I must have—

On the iPhone though, because you have to open it all the time.

Yeah, exactly. Because of that, I start thinking, well, maybe I should build my own Whisperflow for myself, like with, with like limited approach. Is it possible even? And then you think about, is it possible? Then you try it out and you realize, oh, it's actually, you know, far away, but it's not like terribly far away. And you might leave it there and you say like, okay, this was a good trial. This was what it is today. You close the project, you leave. But in a year's time, two years' time, it might change. You might want to have something specifically for you. I just came out of an offsite for a customer and we largely dislike, I don't wanna say the name of the tool because I don't wanna bitch about the tool, but we largely dislike these work management, task management tools. Let's put it like Asana, ClickUp, Mondays. I never was a fan of them. I think they create a lot of noise.

You've done something about that, haven't you?

And I've done some other thing about that. I failed doing something about that as a founder. But I still think the pain point is there today, which is like, is, is tough to love a task management tool because the people that are diligent and love project management and detailing everything, and they love it because it's very clear, but there's a whole set of creative people that just like to have a dot in the horizon. I have to deliver this by this date and get out of there.

And you can see why people want to do it on a spreadsheet or in a table versus inputting a thousand fields.

Exactly.

For something. So now sales to project management.

So now one of the questions we were having yesterday on the team is like, okay, but should we build our own that fits this team? It was a valid conversation. And of course the question comes down, okay, how many iterations, who owns it, you know, who maintains, who's going to get there, who defines a feature? And you realize, okay, it is a stretch, but we are now building. I'm like, I started building yesterday because I got so excited. A chief of staff, so a layer on top of the task management tool that extracts the insights and starts building as a chief of staff for everyone on the team. And that becomes really interesting as a power of AI. You are like—

So is that a chatbot, like an automation layer on top of it?

So the first initial setup is, we don't know it's gonna work or not, seems interesting, is extract everything from Asana, but don't put like dashboards after dashboards, but contextualize and provide insights immediately on These people might be overworked. These people are underworked. These projects miss a bit of tasks. But the challenge with these tools is that after it's like, okay, but now propose me—

who interprets the data in these?

But now we also interpret the data of the company and the team because we upload the knowledge base of the company, of the team data, of the team insights, of the plan and say, everything you read and everything of this application has to be built on top of this knowledge. You are the most knowledgeable about this company and this team. So go, let's go back to the plan, to the strategy, to the reports. Contextualize it. He accesses our Slack, reads the Slack channels, and contextualizes the content to propose the weekly priorities and to propose things that might be missing out for everyone individually. So it's an experiment. Is it gonna work out? We don't know. Is it gonna add noise? No. But the mindset was like, okay, let's build something that helps us declutter the overwhelm of having 90 tasks map out for 3 months, which is something hard to— some people love it, some people hate it. In this way, maybe everyone can cater to themselves. And this is just one person building the first iteration. But then if you have 10 people on a team that says, oh, me, I can iterate a little bit more for myself. And then, you know, and this is something that you're not going to commercialize because it's built for that purpose. And then, and at least for this case, but it means that in the future, you might not use another tool for that. So that's why I'm saying the building for yourself might be something that is underestimated that will happen. And, but it brings to the final point, which is, yes, I think there is a consequence coming in the future that teams and companies will be leaner and the expectations of growth might have to change or what expectations of success might have to change. Yeah. And I'm still one that I prefer sustainable growth at hypergrowth even after EVBox. So yeah. So maybe we are in an go back to an era where, back to the '80s or '90s, where profitability and sustainable growth is more important than hypergrowth, nonstop, and then burn everyone and then get out. But there is a consequence coming and yeah, with every technological advancement, there is an implication on the workforce and this one might be, you know, a little bit bigger than for the, you know, white collar than other consequence.

And by that consequence, you mean that people will lose their jobs?

People will lose their jobs, or an excuse will be made that this is the reason why they're losing their jobs.

Um, that is pretty clear that sometimes it's used as reason to do that, but nevertheless, a business still has to maintain either a margin or reduce staffing or any other part of the cost.

But that, but that's why I think is the age of the builder. And now we are too much on AI. To make, to make a side note, the reason why I'm saying I'm pushing so much for this building is because this trend, it is tough. I, I, I really feel affected when I see, I know 30,000 people recently laid off by, by Oracle or Amazon or other ones. I know I'm saying the larger ones because they are the impact, but there's also a lot of small ones you don't read on the news that they fire 100 people, 50 people. It's a lot of people coming all at once in the workforce. And because people, companies are shrinking, or at least we are realizing they can be leaner. Of course, I think there are still opportunities for everyone, for a lot of people, but the building mindset doesn't mean just build software. The building mindset can also build custom furniture. It can be also build something that you particularly are good at. I don't think building is just the, it's just like all this kind of like piece of AI. I think there's also a value to other things that will come along that will be creative. So, so yeah, so you're asking me about being a portfolio. I, I think my next journey post-Fractional when the context finishes, and for me, my personal context is I have a young family, I'm an immigrant, and because I'm from Portugal, but I live in the Netherlands, I don't have family around, which means that the support system is very community and our own family driven. I made a conscious choice that I want to be present for the first 6 years, very present for the first 6 years of my daughters. And that means I don't want to go into a scale-up. I don't want to go into hypergrowth. I don't want to work 12, 14, 15 hours at this stage and travel a lot because I know there is implications and it's my choice. There are people that can make it work both with boundaries. I just don't want that context. But I know that that context will change in 2, 3 years' time. And when that is over, something else will pop up because I don't want to be a fractional.

Yeah.

I don't want to be a fractional forever. I want to build. I am a builder. I just not sure if I'm going to build software, to be honest. Um, I just don't know where else.

I feel like you have an idea, but you're not going to say it on this episode.

Not yet. Not yet. Yet. But it's not software for sure. Idea-wise. But again, I have 2, 3 years to mature on that.

Now, Hugo, as we prepare to wrap up our chat today, you had that post about turning 40 and thinking about staying relevant. And I liked the honesty in that. I'm going to be turning 40 this summer as well. So tell me, what does staying relevant actually mean to you now?

Good. It's a good question. I do not have a precise answer at the moment.

Um, tell me from the other side of 40. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I think the 40 was a realization and this is, I still tell, well, to my wife and friends, I say I hit a third of my life because I say I want to live until 120. And they say, you know, I think you have to start realizing this is half of your life. And I'm like, well, we'll see about that. And you know, we know what we know, we cannot control certain things and death is definitely not one of those yet, or that I know of. So yeah, so I did wonder about what does relevance mean because say, okay, if AI is here, if it builds so fast, if I'm a generalist that has a lot of curiosity, a lot of like productivity power, but at the end of the day, what does it look like 10 years from now, 20 years from now? And I don't have an answer and I'm someone that likes to have very clear purpose. And for now, up until today, my purpose was very driven to be, I want to be an agent of positive change. And that was enough of a guidance. And I feel that there's no longer enough because this positive change is becoming hard to define. So I'm scoping. I think that's the only way I can cope with it is to scope a little bit more and to say, okay, for me to stay relevant in the next 2, 3 years, there's a few things I want to be. I want to be AI fluent. And within that, you know, for me, I fluent means I am comfortable with, I don't have to be like these LinkedIn person that builds workflows and shares and says, hey, here is my 40-step workflow or these great AI tools.

Selling prompts. Yeah.

Selling prompts. I'm not going to go that direction whatsoever. But I, but I want to be fluent in a scene like I know how to use the technology. I know how to be not ahead, but at least in the leading front of what it enables to do, even if I'm not the one doing it, that I want to be in that. Yeah.

And it, as you said, it's evolving very quickly. So it's learning daily and weekly and experimenting.

And because of that relevance, that's why I take, that's where a lot of people realize that when you make a choice, you have to make, when you make a long-term choice and long-term ambition, you also have to start thinking about what implications does it have on your lifestyle. And for me, that means like Fridays are off so that I can, you know, find the time and space to keep up, to learn, to see, And, and, and stay active and stay, stay an active learner.

So it's not really off, it's thinking or personal development time.

Yeah. Personal development time. Sometimes it's catching up with friends. Sometimes just doing nothing so that I can let the brain process all the things that are coming. Sometimes even when I write a lot of the thoughts, that was the second one. The other one of staying relevant, and I know it's a bit strange, but sometimes I want relevance for the people that I have the highest impact in my life. And that means that at least in that first layer is my family. When in my family, there's my wife and kids, etc. Etc. And that means presence. So for me, relevance equals presence at this moment. But because I like to write, that's why I started this Fractional Dad newsletter where I write about parenting with this fractional portfolio career.

It will be linked in the show notes.

And I don't know why I started that. I started because I want to keep writing. I want to keep my copy alive, my tone of voice. And I feel that there's not enough writing from the dad side. It's as simple as that. I feel like, you know, there's not enough people talking about parenting, the struggles, and I just want to write what it means to raise two daughters and my fears and hopes and the work that I do on the site. And sometimes there's analogy between both, sometimes there's no analogy whatsoever. So I committed myself for a year and for me, I don't know where it's gonna lead.

How far are you into the journey now?

I think I wrote 6 weeks, 6 articles every week. So until the end of the year means, you know, there'll be 40 articles or what comes. And there's no metrics I'm following. I just, my, for me, it's consistency. I just want to not fail a single week until the end of the year. That's it. That's my, that's my success. Um, it's not about relevance for me. The relevance is presence, and this is the way I debrief presence and the learnings. And, and, and that's it. That's, that's the way I see relevance today. But yeah, and then I'll see, and for me, relevance is to figure out in this path, what does the next building journey look like and get that clarity. So yeah, it seems a bit strange to set up the time to find clarity, but it gives me comfort that, okay, I don't have to find clarity tomorrow. You know, it's not that I'm gonna set up a bunch of flip charts, write what is clarity for me and find the answer. I have to just, you know, stay close and keep building and listening to the market and see where that leads me. And that's why I'm also doing the fractional work because I meet a lot of different businesses. I met a lot of different organizations.

That's how you stay relevant and understand the ongoing needs of businesses.

Yeah. Because transformation is the more relevant.

Is presence. That's, that's, that's the key here, I think.

Yeah.

And a perfect idea to end this episode in whether it's presence in your field, in your industry, in your community, or in your family. That's how you stay relevant, not by hiding. Thank you so much, Hugo, for joining joining on this episode and sharing your journey and your learnings and all this interesting stuff. And I'm sure we're gonna have to catch up sooner or later again about all this AI stuff because I have been going very deep in it as well and it's the next thing.

Sounds great. Thank you so much for having me.

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