The short version
Marco doesn't particularly love IT. He loves the power it gives him to turn imagination into reality.
He's a technology polymath, an unconventional technology leader and a builder who has spent more than three decades moving across disciplines, technological revolutions and seemingly impossible challenges.
His story began in poverty, in a developing country, long before the Internet made knowledge accessible to everyone.
From pencil and paper
Marco wanted to create Atari games when he was just 10 years old. To do that, he would have to learn programming.
So he did.
Without a computer of his own, he learned BASIC at a friend's house, spent weekdays writing programs using pencil and paper, and returned on weekends to test them on his friend's 8-bit machine.
To technological pioneering
At 18, Marco and his first line manager were technically responsible for Microsoft's startup in Brazil, working through one of its earliest local technology partners.
At 21, he built the world's first virtual supermarket, pioneering a new way of doing business at a time when commercial e-commerce barely existed. The Brazilian press would eventually call him the Father of E-Commerce in Latin America.
For approximately fifteen years, his name appeared almost weekly in the Brazilian technology press, where he became recognised as an expert, innovator and commentator on emerging digital technologies. His work also earned him an iBest Award, one of Brazil's best-known early Internet distinctions.
And that was only the beginning.
A specialist in many disciplines. Simultaneously.
Software Engineering. Architecture. Cloud. Data. AI/ML. UX/UI. Product Development. Marketing. Advertising. 3D Modelling. Animation. Digital Experiences. Business Strategy.
Marco operates with substantial expertise across all of them. His most unusual capability is the ability to bring these disciplines together, thinking across technical, creative, commercial and human dimensions while taking responsibility for the complete solution.
He never chose disciplines. The things he wanted to build chose them for him.
Intelligence beyond conventional engineering
Academically, he was once considered the worst student in school. Ironically, his first visit to a university was to deliver a lecture rather than attend one.
Today, he's completing an MSc in Artificial Intelligence at St Mary's University and preparing to pursue PhD research in 2027.
His approach to AI is fundamentally different from conventional software engineering. He believes too many engineers attempt to force probabilistic intelligence into deterministic architectures, using rules and rigid workflows to constrain models rather than understanding how to make them genuinely useful.
He advocates Model Empathy: understanding how models interpret context, instructions, information and human intentions. He combines this with agentic engineering, creativity, emotional intelligence and an unusually broad technical background to extract remarkable capabilities from AI systems.
Built for the situations without a playbook
Marco has spent his career at the beginning of technological revolutions: client-server computing, the commercial Internet, e-commerce, immersive virtual worlds, cloud and now generative AI.
He is particularly effective where the technology is immature, the problem is ambiguous, the conventional approach has failed and no established roadmap exists.
He calls this Off-Road Engineering.
Give him the destination. He doesn't particularly care whether there's a road.
That's the mastermind
His leadership style is direct, intensely autonomous, creative and mission-driven. He's comfortable advising executives, defining strategy, challenging established assumptions and getting his hands dirty building the solution himself.
He's far from the conventional polished executive, and he's spent years discovering that trying to fit that stereotype often suppresses the very qualities that make him effective. At Cat Criminals, those qualities are precisely the point.
The company reflects his belief that exceptional technology products require more than technical expertise. They require imagination, curiosity, courage, multidisciplinary thinking and the determination to make something real.
He imagines things. He builds them. He delivers value.
That's the mastermind behind Cat Criminals.
