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Thiago Avelino
Thiago Avelino

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From wanting to be part of the CTO

After seeing the initiative Buser had to train people at home with the Buser Tech program (led by Renzo as Buser’s head of education), I wanted to approach them somehow — I didn’t know how or what to do, but I wanted to be part of the “party”.

I have helped many engineering people evolve professionally (that's 0.001%), but I have never trained anyone from scratch and I felt it was time to learn from those who have been doing it for a few years.

I have known Tony (ex-CTO of Buser) for many years, in late 2021 I took the liberty to message him and express my interest.

I didn’t feel comfortable coming into Buser to suck knowledge, so I proposed to join the engineering team as a developer and follow what is going on in Buser Tech.

In the 1:1 with Tony he shared with me that he was looking for someone to take over the CTO role at Buser. I confess I didn’t understand why he was sharing that with me, the only answer that came to me at the moment was:

“If you are saying this for me to be CTO you are saying it to the wrong person.”

Upon arriving and bumping into the software we developed at Buser I started to wonder how the folks in the Buser Tech program (with virtually zero software development experience) were going to get up the development environment that I with a few years of engineering experience was having some friction. I took this as my first challenge to reduce the friction of onboarding the engineering team by bringing a developer experience look.

After a few days/weeks I felt that we could improve our people and project management, I went to talk to Tony and made myself available to help as Tech Manager.

The subject of possibly being a CTO stayed in my mind for days and days, I even indicated a CTO for the position that unfortunately did not match, but life goes on, and my internal monsters kept haunting me about the CTO position.

Usually when I get a chill in my stomach it sounds like I am looking at a big challenge and there is a big unknown — especially what I need to evolve as a person and a manager, in this case a company with more than 500 people.

After being an entrepreneur for a few years, I don’t want to make a company from scratch until I reach 500 people (Buser’s current moment), but I am sure that the challenge of Scale-up a startup takes me closer to my professional goal.

Even though my stomach is chilly and I believe I have many skills to evolve, I am taking on the CTO position at Buser.

Is Tony leaving Buser? No, he is moving back closer to the engineering and education team — where he feels he delivers much better results for the company. See here the post he made publicly about this move (publication written in Portuguese).

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