I said I'd never start a company again. I was wrong.

My son was born while I was trying to keep a startup alive. We had few clients. My wife needed more of me than usual, and I needed to build whatever kept those few clients from leaving. We hadn't planned the baby. When a company from outside Brazil bought the startup, I promised myself I'd never start a company again.

I didn't tell anyone. I went back to a job as a project manager, driving 84 kilometers a day to send emails and set deadlines. Then remote work as a developer. Then I moved my family to Caçapava, in the Paraíba Valley, to live off the samba, the adult site I ran.

One month after the move, the company that held the site's cash flow changed its rules. I couldn't withdraw the money the site was making. I described it later as "o samba me fez sambar", the samba made me dance. Without planning it, I was running a business again.

In 2015 I finally put the promise in writing, in a post called I'll never start a business again. Read it today and the joke is on me. The post is about breaking the promise.

In 2016 I sold the samba to PornHub. The last meeting was in New York. Walking out of it, I made the promise to myself again. I meant it for the rest of my life.

Ten years later I'm a co-founder of a wine company my wife runs. Either I lied to myself, or the promise was aimed at the wrong thing.

It was the second one.

What the founder's seat cost me

Selling the samba didn't get me out of the seat. Nuveo already existed. I co-founded it in 2015, and the idea came out of a hole. One of my companies was in a crisis. I took a few weeks off to figure out how to climb out of the financial mess. Nuveo is what I came back with. A few months in, the business model we started with was dead. We couldn't get traction and it wouldn't scale.

I never took the CEO title. In 2017 I wrote a post about the fake glamour of being a CEO and said it plainly. I didn't have the profile and didn't want it. Refusing the title was easy. The weight came anyway.

Ben Horowitz has a line in The Hard Thing About Hard Things that describes it better than I can. "The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced." The second half is what I mean by the seat, knowing nobody can take it from you.

When I add up 2011 to 2018, my health and my family paid the most.

When I finally stopped, I wrote the line that sums up those years. People say starting companies makes you a lot of money, but you spend the same or more on therapy. It was half a joke. The numbers behind it aren't. Michael Freeman and colleagues surveyed 242 entrepreneurs and found mental health differences affected 72% of them, directly or through family history. 30% reported depression (Freeman et al., 2019).

When people say founder burnout, they usually mean being tired. Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, after decades of burnout research, warn against reducing it to exhaustion. Their model also has cynicism and the feeling that your work stopped being effective (Maslach and Leiter, 2016).

Stepping out of Nuveo

There's one moment from Nuveo I still tell people about. The day it hit me that my work there wasn't just code. We had very little time to build a solution for a client. What I delivered was pretty bad. It still brought the client a lot of results. I split the team into isolated pieces, each person building one part. My job was making sure everything connected at the end. That only works if you trust the person next to you. We call it "confiar no amiguinho do lado", trusting your little buddy on the side.

I stepped out of Nuveo's day-to-day in 2018. The last straw was a disagreement about how to manage the company, and I wouldn't go along with it. It didn't make sense to me. Some things don't need to be opened in a blog post.

Admitting what stepping out meant took almost another year. I put pros and cons on paper. I did a lot of therapy. I wrote down the questions I didn't want to answer. Am I broke? Can I only go back to a job if I fail? Once a businessman, always a businessman?

I wasn't broke. In mid-2019 I took a job as head of engineering at Jusbrasil and wrote about trading a businessman's mindset for an employee's. That post has the sentence I skipped for years. Making the company happen is a trait of mine, and I didn't want to change it. What I was quitting was the seat.

In 2022, taking the CTO job at Buser, I said it again without noticing. After a few years as an entrepreneur, I wrote, I didn't want to build a company from zero to 500 people. The scale-up was the problem I wanted. I told the rest of that choice in I sold my company and became an employee.

Founder vs partner, seven years on the other side

Noam Wasserman calls the founder's version of this the rich versus king trade-off. He looked at 212 American startups and found that most founders end up giving up control. The ones who give up more tend to build more valuable companies (Wasserman, 2008). I had a different problem. I never wanted to be king. I just hadn't found a way to build without the crown.

Soluevo, a recruiting and outsourcing company, is where partner life got concrete. I stepped back from its day-to-day in 2021 and stayed a partner. In November 2024 one of the partners left. The board met, and the agenda had one honest question. Who takes what? The CEO kept sales and recruiting. Finance, operations and HR went to someone else. For myself I proposed chairman. Chairman meant a vote without the day-to-day.

A few weeks later I sent the CEO what I called a provocation. I'm the person who talks most about remote work, and I'm the one who taught him it works. Still, I asked if it works for every area of Soluevo, starting with sales. At Buser, sales doesn't work remote. Someone has to be in the room beating the drum. I asked the question and left the call with him. The same day I suggested turning part of 2024's net profit into a bonus. Not split evenly across everyone. For the people who got us to that number.

The Samba Capital, the investment vehicle I opened in 2018, was the same move with money. Between September 2025 and March 2026 that meant talks with a company in the legal space and a founder raising a round. It also meant an investment in an auto business, then a loan contract for the same business. I lost sleep over cash flows that weren't mine. None of it put me in the seat.

The itch never left either. In December 2024, talking about a possible new company, I wrote that I was honestly excited about it.

Starting a company again, with Samara in the seat

The wine idea was mine, and it came from our own need. We had to catalog the wines we were drinking and liking, so we could drink them again later. vinellu started there. It shows up in my notes for the first time on June 27, 2025. The next day I was drawing the app's basic UI. In August I made the color palette closer to red wine. In September I found a dataset with 118 thousand unique labels to fill the database and pushed the first build to TestFlight. Version 0.1 went out on October 6, 2025.

Samara is the CEO and the founder of vinellu. She runs the day-to-day, and since August every accounting question in the company is hers. I'm the advisor founder. In practice, a very expensive developer.

In August 2026 I reviewed the events feature, the guide people use inside a wine fair. The main blocker was ugly. A paid event that sold out was letting people register for free, right at the peak of interest. Three of the fixes were for bugs I had introduced while fixing something else. My note to myself says simplifying without a regression test is trading bugs, not removing them.

In September I wrote the brief for our stand at a wine fair. Promoters get forty seconds per person, so their only goal is that the person leaves with the app installed and one wine saved in it. Samara's part is different. Her pitch to a retailer changes with who's in front of her, an importer, a neighborhood wine shop, a winery, a tasting club, a restaurant. The last line of her section says a retailer without a date set is a cold lead by Monday.

One line in the promoters' part goes for me too. Don't talk about fees, commission or retailers. That subject is Samara's, always.

That's the difference from 2016. I started a company again, and this time Samara is the one in the seat.

"Never again" was the wrong sentence

Between 2011 and 2019 I said "never again" more than once. After the first sale, with a newborn at home. After the samba. In the year of pros and cons on paper. Every time it was true about the seat and false about the rest.

I didn't lie to myself in 2016. I just didn't have the words yet for the difference between quitting entrepreneurship and quitting the founder's seat. Seven years, one recruiting company, one investment vehicle and a wine app later, I do.

References

• Freeman, M. A., Staudenmaier, P. J., Zisser, M. R., and Andresen, L. A. (2019). "The prevalence and co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions among entrepreneurs and their families." Small Business Economics, 53(2), 323-342. doi:10.1007/s11187-018-0059-8
• Horowitz, B. (2014). The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Harper Business. Publisher page
• Maslach, C., and Leiter, M. P. (2016). "Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry." World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103-111. doi:10.1002/wps.20311
• Wasserman, N. (2008). "The Founder's Dilemma." Harvard Business Review, February 2008. hbr.org