The story
nobody tells.
I lost €250,000 in two years. Every penny I had saved over fifteen years of consulting. Gone.
I was 45 years old. In a foreign country. With no network that could help. Starting from zero.
This is how I rebuilt, and what I learned about the only real safety net. I put it on the site for one reason: it's the most expensive lesson I own, and I now teach founders not to make it.
Twenty years of building.
Ten years building for others. Nokia, SAP, Fortune 500s. Learning what makes large organisations tick, and what makes them break.
Then ten years building my own company. Consulting, training, speaking. Five books. Fifty-plus organisations transformed across three continents. I teach at Porto Business School.
By every external measure I was successful. But late at night, staring at another corporate transformation project, I felt empty. I was always helping other companies scale, watching other founders take the risks while I played it safe with consulting contracts.
I kept saying “someday I'll build my own thing.” Someday never came.
The fall.
In 2020 I was invited to Saudi Arabia to work with the chief executive of the country's biggest digital bank. The kind of opportunity you don't say no to. Then COVID hit, and I left.
In October 2023 I came back — this time with €250,000 in savings and a plan to land consulting contracts, doing the corporate transformation work I'd done for fifteen years.
The entire country was being built from scratch. The main industry was startups. Nobody wanted digital transformation consultants.
Everything I had planned was wrong for the market, and I found out after I was fully committed. I watched the savings disappear. Setup costs. Living expenses in a foreign country. Marketing that didn't work. Pivots that went nowhere.
I reached out to hundreds of people I'd met over a career. Three of them actually helped.
The darkness.
Something shifted in that darkness. When everything was stripped away — reputation, money, network — I was left with just myself.
Then one of the founders I had mentored in a Saudi accelerator programme showed me Claude, and taught me what AI could actually do. The person I had helped was now helping me.
That's the part I think about most. Not the loss — the fact that the only thing that came back to me came from someone I'd given something to years earlier, with no expectation of anything.
The gift.
With no money left I came home to Portugal, back to my parents' house, and picked up where the founder in Saudi had left off — building with AI.
I was 45 years old and my parents were paying for my software. I'm not going to dress that up. The shame was physical.
Underneath it was something harder and more useful. That was the last money I was willing to waste. Failure was no longer an option. It was no longer allowed.
The build.
I dropped enterprises and turned to entrepreneurship. GoSolopreneur and YourMachine — one method each — and FIKR Space, the infrastructure underneath the whole thing. All three sit under QeVentures, the group I set up to hold them as Evolution4all winds down in 2026. Software built with AI, methodologies refined with AI, everything with AI.
Not because I'm a genius developer. Because I learned how to make AI build production software — and then built the methodology to teach other people how to do it.
From nothing to an entire ecosystem — alone.