With a background in engineering and design, Marco has built several interdisciplinary teams on high-profile projects like BABOOM, and has been responsible for igniting tech and creative communities.

An artist with a geek vein, Marco has been living with his feet in two worlds, going back and forward between design and engineering for the past 15 years.

Throughout his career, Marco has spent years in different roles in multiple award-winning companies, from Software Developer, to CTO, to now CEO at MOXY, giving him the chance to take charge managing companies, doing product and software design, software development, business and people management.

More details on Marco can be found at here

MOXY was founded in 2016, by four young entrepreneurs, at a moment in their life where they had to choose whether to stay together, or each go down their own path.

A year later, MOXY had already 19 full-time employees, with a growth of 666%, and a repertoire of clients in the luxury fashion and crypto spaces, having worked on high profile international brands and products.

MOXY’s focus is quality software engineering and design, through which it enables fast-growing technology driven businesses looking for sustainable and reliable software solutions. The bulk of MOXY’s work lies within the web and mobile, be it rich user interfaces, or frontend, or even information systems and services, or backend.

For the last year and a half, MOXY has paid special attention to three areas, decentralized web, luxury e-commerce, and Internet of Things. Each with its own set of challenges, all of them demand a deep understanding of the inner workings of several systems due to their specific requirements, around performance, security and reliability, all critical to the success of each project.

It was an honor for a company so young to have such an important global projection, reinforcing the already spread out concept that Portuguese tech talent is among the best in the world. For us, it serves as proof that all the hard effort we put into the smallest details adds up to a result that we can be proud of, and one that others recognize and cheer us for it.

We entered with our very own website. Having spent over a year with a website that was little more than a landing page with a couple of PDFs, we wanted to build a website that would represent our brand and communicate the type of company we where. That’s the initial motivation for the website, and we wanted to make sure people understood we had deep software engineering skills, not just design.

That ended up driving our process, as we investigated and developed solutions for a high impact experience, one that should be consistent, regardless of being on a computer or mobile device, accessible, inclusive for users with physical challenges, and high performance, without sacrificing the experience.

A significant portion of our website is built using WebGL technologies, which tends to be resource heavy and since it’s not your cookie-cutter solution, that means that you end up having to investigate lightly documented techniques and technologies, You will need a creative engineering mindset in order to find the right solutions to squeeze out every cycle out of your CPU and GPU.

Winning this Award had a couple of very noticeable effects. One, it gave us a lot of visibility, validating our work, and creating business opportunities. Second, it raised everyone’s expectations on the type of work we’d be doing, both internally with the team, and with our clients.

I believe that Portugal offers a unique combination of factors. Being geographically well located, we can easily fly anywhere in Europe or US. On top of this, Portuguese are very hard-working people which, coupled with the fact that the country offers amazing education, makes Portugal a world-class talent and opportunity generating machine.

I believe that in the next 5-10 years, we’ll continue to see a pattern of democratization of creativity. For a long time, creativity was “exclusive to creatives”, who were actually just people who mastered the tools to exercise creativity. As technology creates more and more ways for people to express their creativity and create on their own, we see more user generated content and solutions, people serve themselves, instead of relying on other people for everything, and see an ever increase of customization and niche. This ultimately leads to professionals having to step up their game, and delivering something that is absolutely unique and added value, or they’re redundant.

I’d say you need to have an opinion of what the world is and what it could be. This doesn’t mean your vision needs to be absolutely unique, but you need to believe it and then pursue relentlessly your goals, learning and trying as much as you can, and crystallize your vision through actions and projects that you feel represent your way of seeing the world.

I’m very thankful for the people who have inspired me, and I could list a lot more, but going to focus on some key ones:

Nuno Job: Showed me how someone really young, almost my age, could be doing some really impactful work on the world stage, and that was not only ok, but even praised. This ended up impacting much of how I handle my career, my business, and my communities. He continues to be a reference for me today and keeps inspiring me.

João Figueiredo: My first manager, with whom I created a special relationship with, gave me a great baseline of what a good manager is. Even though he didn’t fully understand everything I was doing, he was understanding, enabling, but also meticulous, making sure we were getting progress, without getting in the way. I always felt a healthy amount of pressure, but also supported.

Kim Dotcom: I’ve worked with Kim for years, from client, to boss, to client again. What stroke me the most with Kim was how he was able to get up from the ground, after many occasions that would be fatal for most, often coming out stronger because of it.

Chris Do: Had the chance to meet him in person recently, I was so happy when I found his content online, reinforcing a lot of what I had been saying and doing in the creative business space. His very logical and methodic approach to creative business puts serving the client in the center of your doing, right there next to serving yourself in the process.

I would say that the two most important precursors for success are grit and curiosity.

First, I think that you need grit, to keep going at it, resisting adversity, without giving up. Not to confuse with mindlessly hitting the same wall over and over, but looking for different ways to go past it, and not just give up on first try.

Then, you need to stay curious. We live in an ever-accelerating world, in which change is the constant. This means that habits change regularly, opportunities and threats creep from everywhere. You need to stay curious, keep learning, and adjusting course as you gain clarity on the future.