Born from a real transformation.

I grew up in Camanducaia, a small town in the countryside of Minas Gerais, Brazil. My whole family is from there. I was the kid who was never home: playing in the street, exploring farms, joining whatever sport showed up in town. My life started physical.

At thirteen I moved to São Paulo on a scholarship to a competitive high school. That move set the pattern I would follow for years: work hard, compete, climb. I studied Industrial Engineering at USP, the best university in Latin America. I wrote code as a back-end developer at RevMob, a startup in São Paulo. After the startup years I wanted the corporate structure, so I moved into strategy consulting, working in payments and managing advanced analytics projects, building predictive AI for companies before AI was a headline. I always saw myself as a founder one day, one with real impact on society. I was building the skills for it.

But somewhere in that climb, the kid who was never home became a man who never left the desk.

Since I started working, my body cycled. Fatter, then thinner, then fatter again. Every cycle a little worse.

Then the pandemic locked the world inside, and maybe you remember exactly how that felt. Life shrank to one apartment and one screen. The desk became the office, the couch became the plan, the kitchen was thirty seconds away. My consulting hours grew and the cycle peaked. The motivation to move disappeared. The energy went with it. My body ached from sitting, and my health was draining in a way I could feel. The day I decided to quit, I looked in the mirror and did not recognize myself. That was the turning point.

The gyms were closed, so the comeback started on the street and in the kitchen. I ran. I changed the way I ate: fresh food, almost nothing ultra-processed, intermittent fasting. Within months the mirror started giving back someone I knew. The photos are real and so was the work.

Then the gyms reopened, and I walked into a place I had quit a dozen times. My relationship with the gym had always been intermittent: start, stop, start again. Honestly, I found it unbearably boring. This time was different. The mindset had changed, and I had professionals guiding me, the way Brazilian gyms do by default. The more I engaged, the more I studied what science had actually proven about training, and the more I adjusted it to my real routine. Rebuilding my body into a stronger one taught me what running never could: form creates confidence, failure creates adaptation, frequency creates change.

The gym also gave back what the desk had taken. It got me out of the house after the pandemic. It gave me new people. It reminded me that my existence is physical, way past the screen, and that life is real, and it is today.

At some point I realized the process had become a method. It worked for me. And I wanted to understand it deeply enough to share it with the largest number of people possible, for physical and mental health.

So I did what engineers do with a process that works: I studied how to scale it. I came to the US to understand how data and AI could carry this transformation to other people. I did an MBA at Cornell to reconnect with technology just as GenAI changed everything. At Cornell Tech I joined the PiTech initiative as an associate, working on public-interest technology. That phrase is the whole product. The Project is public-interest technology for the body.

One more thing, because it matters. Wellness became an industry, and somewhere in that rise, wellbeing left the picture. Training turned into content. Bodies turned into posts. Looks for the feed. That is not what fitness meant to me, and it is not what The Project will ever be. Fitness meant discipline. It meant feeling comfortable in my own body again. The body is not something I have. The body is me. It will carry me forward. Yours will carry you.