What early experience shaped your growth mindset and made you so relentlessly focused on scaling?

Just before turning 21, I sold all of my shares of my marketing agency to my co-founders, bought a bright yellow VW van 🐝 and then packed all of my bags to go down south to Portugal in search for meaning and for my next adventure.

While there, I spent a couple of months living in parking lots like a bum and surfing on coasts of Ericeira, Peniche, Arrifana. There was a lot of ocean time and I had some quality time learning to read waves.

The idea for Sintra came while coming back from this trip, in a small pitstop apartment in Berlin. We became one of the first ones to sell ChatGPT prompts – and eventually bootstrapped from there.

It felt like our growth was driven by the market and knowing how to surf the waves at the right time. With waves, as with markets, you can't stop them and you can't control them. The bigger the wave, the higher the skill required – and if there are no waves, you have no surf.

Surfing in startups means that you can spot where the market is headed and what customers truly want – and then knowing how to capture that demand into a product that they'd use and love.

It's a skill which we're still learning – to catch even bigger waves.

With Sintra.ai growing so quickly, how do you and your team stay grounded amid constant change?

Gut feeling.

Usually, the glitz and glamour of startups are the shiny headlines, the big revenue numbers, huge investment rounds and record growth. People look at that and think, wow, that's impressive.

However, what we usually don’t see are the internal battles behind the scenes and the struggles within the heads of the founders. How the people feel at the company. How much do the founders trust each other. How the company holds true to its values and integrity. How our gut feels.

In reality, the outcomes of startups, the metrics, the vanity, none of that matters if people doing the work don't feel like doing the work. It's the journey and the feeling that comes from this journey that makes us go back every single time.

Sintra was born because of this feeling.

The real risk for Sintra will never be a lack of capital. It will always be about people losing this gut feeling. Because then you can work for free, even during the weekends, out of abandoned garages, eating buckwheat just to get by. It's what drives everything.

Your gut knows.

You launched your first marketing business at just 16—what would you tell today’s teenagers who want to build something after school?

First of all, I'm honestly a bad role model to follow. There are so many beautiful paths you can take in life.

What really helped me was the realization that It's all in your hands. Time is ticking and nobody is coming to save you. Nobody is going to hand you anything on a silver platter. You have the ability to plant beautiful flowers in the world while you're still here. Why waste a second of this precious gift?

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