I became an investor because I remembered what it was like to have no one to call

In 1998 I was setting up servers on my own, at home, barely 17. No degree, no partner, no investor. I had a computer and an electricity bill that arrived every month, right on time, whether or not the business was working.

KingHost, in 2006, was my fourth company. Nobody remembers the three before it - WeBrasil, HostNet, Cyberweb - and that's fine. They're where I learned to configure the machines that made the fourth one work. We romanticize the founder who gets it right the first time. I got it right on the fourth, and only because I got it wrong on the first three.

I'm not telling you this out of nostalgia. I'm telling you because when Locaweb bought KingHost in 2019, I finally understood something obvious that took me twenty-one years to see: for most of the journey, the hardest problem was never money. Money you can find - expensive, bad, with the wrong partner, but you find it. What was missing was someone to call when the floor gave out.

And the floor gave out. There were more late nights with the database down than I'd care to admit. But there's one I remember from start to finish: the database disk died, and the RAID had already taken a hit before that - the redundancy that existed for exactly this moment was already gone. No plan B. No one to call who understood and cared. All that was left was shipping the disks off to a data recovery company and paying through the nose for their time, counting the hours, knowing every hour was a customer thinking about walking away. The only "phone" available billed by the hour and couldn't have cared less about my company.

When I stepped out of the operation in 2023, I took a year to do nothing - which, for someone who hadn't stopped since 17, is harder than it sounds. By the end of that year, Mahalo was obvious. I didn't want to start another company. I wanted to be, for other people, the phone I never had.

I didn't become an investor because of a thesis. I became one because the only thing that still interested me was sitting next to the person in the thick of the problem. Not to lead the round, build the cap table, fight over terms - there are people better than me at that, and I'm glad to come in alongside them. I'm useful afterward: for the Sunday night when a founder is deciding whether to let go of their first employee or hold on one more month. That's where I'm worth something, because I've let people go, I've held on, and I've done the math wrong both times.

I come in early, seed and Series A, when someone who has broken and rebuilt is worth more than the check. After that, money becomes a commodity and there are people with deeper pockets than mine. And I don't much care where you are - more than 120 startups have come through here, from Brazil to the Valley. A sleepless night has no accent.

I don't have a map, I don't have a framework, I don't have a thesis PDF to send you. I have 25 years of scars and a phone that answers. If you're in the middle of a problem like that and need to talk to someone who's been there, find me on LinkedIn. I read everything.

- Juliano