My story with the internet begins with a broken femur.

I was 12, living in Caxambu, in the south of Minas Gerais, and a femur problem kept me stuck at home. While the boys on my street played football, I stayed close to a computer — and started teaching myself to code. My father, watching it happen, opened an internet café in town. It was the first bridge between the small-town boy and the whole world.

At 16 came my first job — remote before the word even arrived around here: the Los Hermanos website, through my friends Mateus Pedalino and Marcos, "Esquete." A teenager in Caxambu building the website of one of Brazil's biggest bands, from his bedroom.

At 18 I moved to Rio de Janeiro. On September 12, 2007, the Métrica agency was born; I took it over for good in 2009. In the years that followed, we built the first four years of Anitta's career — before her first show —, worked with Chico Buarque, Maria Bethânia, more than 150 artists and, for years, every Warner Music release in Brazil.

Washington Olivetto, the adman who made me dream of this profession, heard of me twice: he praised an unusual website I built in 2008, at 19, and signed a dedication with my name in it at a book-signing night. I never met him in person. But he knew I existed — and that alone was a north star.

At the agency's peak, I broke: anxiety and depression, together. What came next was not a flipped switch — it was a process. I like to say my recovery was a six-year transition, not a break. Six years reorganizing on the inside what the outside insisted on calling success.

In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, I joined a retreat called Residências Regenerativas, at Espaço Lua Branca, inside the Céu do Gamarra Ecovillage, in Baependi — twenty minutes from where I was born. I said I would stay two months, "but maybe I'll only come back to pick up my things." And so it was. Thirteen years after leaving the countryside, I returned. The full story of the move is here.

The change of address became a change of purpose. Agência Métrica became Métrica.Social: positive-impact projects only — Doctors Without Borders, UN agencies, the energy transition. That is when the thesis that stitches together everything I do was born: aligning the material, the emotional and the spiritual. People first, then processes, then results.

From that alignment came the invitations that honor me to this day: the seat on the UNESCO-SOST advisory board, where I hold the "Connection" lens — connecting with myself without undoing myself —, the stages, the mentoring, the poetry that began to sprout again.

In 2021, G1 told the story of the adman who traded Rio for the Circuito das Águas without letting go of his clients. In 2020, a mural I painted with friends across from the Maracanã — Hopinho, the mascot of Casa Hope, in gratitude for the three months the institution sheltered my father through a bone-marrow transplant — also made the news.