From JBL on the Bus to IPO: A Leadership Journey

I was on the bus heading to a super important meeting on Faria Lima about the exponential growth of my MRR, when I suddenly noticed a critical situation: a group of young guys was bothering an elderly lady at the back of the bus.

Cap turned backwards, fanny pack across the chest, JBL speaker at full volume blasting trap with no headphones. Clearly they hadn’t yet understood that the real hustle wasn’t doing wheelies on an Itaú-branded bike, but rather optimizing CAC, increasing LTV, and finding PMF before the next venture capital winter.

I had to act.

I opened my MacBook on my lap, balancing between the turnstile and someone’s college backpack, connected to the Vivo 4G network that miraculously had two bars of signal, and showed Claude the situation.

“Claude, we need to do something,” I typed.

“You’re absolutely right,” he replied, in a calm, confident font with a subtle Endeavor mentor vibe.

Thanks to --dangerously-skip-permissions, he started coding before I even validated the hypothesis with the market. It was practically a moral MVP. A minimum viable product of urban civility.

While the youngsters cranked up the volume and shouted “get off at the next stop, lady!”, Claude had already built a full-stack, serverless, scalable solution, with Gov.br authentication, PIX integration, a Next.js dashboard, an SQS queue, and a generative AI module for behavioral education based on OKRs.

“We need to deploy now,” I typed with the speed of someone who has already lost a seed round to technical debt.

“It’s already in production,” Claude replied. “Pushed it to http://localhost:8080, but with a reverse tunnel, edge functions, and Datadog observability. Their phones will be impacted any second now.”

Before I could ask about LGPD compliance, the kids’ devices lit up.

On the screen, a sepia-toned Studio Ghibli-style infographic appeared, explaining in a humanized and data-driven way that bothering elderly women on public transport was a terrible use case, with limited TAM, low retention, and extremely high reputational risk.

They went silent.

One of them looked at the other and said:

“Bro… we’re outside the ICP.”

The other added:

“Worse. Our roadmap doesn’t lead to an IPO. It leads only to a TikTok exposed and maybe a small claims court lawsuit.”

That’s when I stood up, handed them my business card, and said:

“You don’t need to give up the hustle. You just need to pivot. I have a R$ 7,997 course on how to turn urban annoyance into a B2B SaaS operation with AI, high margins, and roll-up potential.”

They immediately sat down.

The elderly lady, moved, thanked me:

“Sweetheart, you saved my day.”

The entire bus applauded.

The driver pulled the hand brake and turned around.

It was Jorge Paulo Lemann.

He said he had also tried to intervene, but was still choosing between Vue and React to build the solution’s landing page. “I was 10x for many years,” he confessed, eyes welling up, “but you are clearly 100x. Maybe 1000x, considering your emotional burn rate.”

At that very moment, the turnstile opened by itself.

The fare collector took off his cap.

It was the founder of Nubank.

The elderly lady took off her wig.

It was Jeff Bezos.

I hadn’t noticed because he was disguised as a retired woman waiting for service at INSS.

He smiled and said:

“It was all a test. We wanted to know if you had real founder mode.”

The bus stopped.

But it wasn’t a bus.

It was an executive electric, autonomous, tokenized chartered vehicle with a clean cap table.

I was taken straight to a penthouse in Vila Olímpia, where I signed a term sheet on a bakery napkin, received an investment in dollars, a lifetime voucher for drip coffee at a coworking space, and a 15-minute mentorship with a person who sold a company to a big tech in 2017 and never updated their LinkedIn again.

The young guys, by the way, were Elon Musk and Sam Altman in disguise.

I didn’t recognize them because of the Cyclone shorts and the Kenner flip-flops.

In the end, I learned three important things today:

1. Not every social problem needs empathy. Sometimes, it just needs an MVP.
2. Brazil is not for amateurs, but it’s excellent for those who know how to turn chaos into ARR.
3. If you see an elderly lady being bothered on the bus, it might just be a business opportunity waiting for validation.

Gratitude to Claude, to the Brazilian innovation ecosystem, and to public transportation for teaching me that leadership is this: opening the MacBook where no one else would.

#grindset #foundermode #MRR #CAC #LTV #PMF #BrazilInnovates #LinkedInBrazil