I live in Zug, Switzerland, with my partner and our three daughters. I work in pharma, and this is where I write to understand things.
I grew up in Lisbon, a city of hills, light, and tiled façades that I still measure other places against. I left to follow work and curiosity, and somewhere along the way the map kept pointing north.
These days that map ends in Zug, a small, tidy town on a lake, the kind of place outsiders mostly know for its tax rate and its quiet. Lisbon gave me the warmth; Switzerland gave me the order. I came here for work and stayed for the life. Most of my days are ordinary in the best way: school runs, a commute, dinner for five, the cheerful chaos of a house with three girls in it.
I have spent more than fifteen years in pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and the path was not a straight line. I worked across a handful of names you may or may not recognise, including Mettler-Toledo, Bristol Myers Squibb, Galderma, and Novavax. Different roles, different countries, but they kept pulling me toward the same place: the messy intersection of marketing, technology, and getting useful information to the people who actually need it.
These days I work in eye care, on the digital side of how a medical company talks to the doctors and patients it serves. I like that the work is never quite finished and never quite the same twice.
Away from the job I am a tinkerer. I run my own small home infrastructure, the kind of self-hosted setup that stays invisible until a DNS record breaks at 11pm and I am the only person in the house who can fix it. I have a long-running fascination with markets and systematic trading, less for the money than for the puzzle of it. And I keep a soft spot for mechanical watches, snowboarding and long rides on the bike.
Why I write
The name of this blog, write to understand, is the whole point. I think best with my hands on a keyboard. When something will not sit still in my head, whether an idea, a problem, or a half-formed opinion, writing it down is how I find out what I actually believe.
So this is not a polished publication. It is a diary. Short notes, new ideas, things I am working through and the occasional story worth keeping.
I was born in 1978, which means I grew up alongside the early web, and some part of me never got over how good it feels to put words on a page that anyone, anywhere, can read.
If you'd like to contact me, you can send me an email using the form below.