Why did you decide to become a mentor?
I decided to become a mentor because, after a long career across different corners of entertainment and media, I realized that many talented people are not actually lacking effort or ambition. What they are lacking is clarity. They are often sitting on strong instincts, good ideas, real work ethic, and even real experience, but they do not yet have a framework that helps them understand what makes them valuable, where the friction is, and how to move forward with more precision. That is the part of the work I care about most. I like helping people organize what is already there, especially when their problem is not talent but signal. Mentoring gives me a direct way to do that. It lets me work closely with people at the level where strategy becomes practical and personal. It also fits naturally with what I do through Fandom Builder, because so much of my work is about diagnosing where connection breaks down, whether that is between a creator and their audience, a business and its positioning, or someone’s skills and the way they present them to the world.
How did you get your career start?
My career really started when Rubens Ewald Filho took a chance on me. In Brazil, he was the closest thing we had to Roger Ebert: the country’s most famous film critic and one of its best-known Oscars hosts. I was 18, very green, scattered, and honestly still figuring myself out, but he saw potential in me anyway. More importantly, he gave me structure. He taught me how to see what other people were missing, how to identify the gaps in a process or a story, and how to make myself essential instead of just passionate. That lesson stayed with me because my career was built across formats and industries that kept changing, and sometimes disappearing. I worked with CDs, LaserDiscs, DVDs, magazines, and other products that many people would now call dead categories. But those changes never ended my path, because I learned early that formats die, while real skills transfer. Editorial judgment transfers. Audience understanding transfers. Communication transfers. Strategic thinking transfers. That ability to reinvent myself without losing my core value is one of the most important things I carry into my work today, and it shapes the way I mentor other people as well.
What do mentees usually come to you for?
Most mentees come to me when they know they have something real, but it is not landing as clearly or as powerfully as it should. Sometimes they are creators who have talent, range, and strong instincts, but their positioning is muddy and their work is not translating into momentum. Sometimes they are founders or operators whose business has content, audience, or even traction, but the pieces are not reinforcing each other. Sometimes they are experienced professionals who have done a lot, but struggle to explain their value in a way that feels sharp, coherent, and credible. My mentorship style is practical and diagnostic. I usually start by trying to identify the real source of friction. Is the problem message clarity, positioning, offer design, audience understanding, content strategy, or confidence in decision-making? Once that becomes visible, the work gets much easier. Mentees can expect direct feedback, pattern recognition, honest analysis, and frameworks that are meant to be applied in real life. I am less interested in motivational talk than in helping people understand what is actually happening, what is getting in their way, and how to build a more repeatable way forward.
What's been your favourite mentorship success story so far?
One of my favorite mentorship experiences so far has been working with someone who already had real depth, strong instincts, and a clear point of view, but did not yet have a solid framework for understanding and repeating his own process. He knew how to think, but not yet how to break that thinking down into something he could trust, explain, and build on consistently. That kind of gap creates a lot of invisible friction. You can feel that you have something valuable, but it still feels harder than it should to use it with confidence. What made that mentorship especially rewarding was seeing the shift from intuition to structure. Once we started putting language, process, and tools around what he was already doing well, things became clearer very quickly. His thinking became easier to articulate, his process became easier to repeat, and his confidence grew because he could finally see the logic inside his own strengths. That is the kind of mentorship outcome I value most. Not just a quick win, but helping someone recognize the real shape of their ability and make it more usable.
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
Being a mentor sharpens me. It forces precision, because it is one thing to have experience and another to make that experience useful to someone else. Mentoring pushes me to separate what sounds good from what actually helps. It makes me listen more carefully, explain things more clearly, and keep refining the frameworks and instincts I have built over the years. In that sense, it is not separate from my work, it is an enhancement. It also connects directly to the bigger mission behind Fandom Builder. A lot of my work is about understanding why attention does or does not become trust, why trust does or does not become loyalty, and why so many smart people struggle to create real compounding value from the audience they already have. Mentoring keeps me close to those problems in a very human way. It reminds me that behind every strategy question there is usually a person trying to make sense of their own work, their own ambition, and their own next step. Helping with that is professionally valuable, but it is also personally meaningful.
