How I Accidentally Landed My First Investor Over Lunch
Some dates just stick with you. For me, one of them is January 3rd, 2022, 1 p.m. That was the day I walked into a random lunch near my house in Lisbon… and walked out with my first investor (even though I had zero clue what I was doing).
It all started pretty casually. He invited me to lunch, said he wanted to chat about an idea. We sat down at this corner table by the wall. His pitch? Opening a CISCO Training Academy and maybe having me run it. I was 21, still finishing my degree, and honestly had no idea what “running an academy” even meant. At the time, I was way more focused on CTF competitions – I was ranking top 1000 hackers in the world, top 10 in Portugal – and on my internship at Loqr, building container pipelines and custom operating systems.
At one point, I found myself explaining what a container was. Since he was president of a football club, I ended up comparing containers to football tactics. Weirdly enough, it worked – he got it.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t really want to talk about CISCO academies. So I hijacked the conversation and spent 20 minutes pitching what me and a college friend had been working on – a project we called NOT (NFTs of Things), which later evolved into ROOTKey. I went full geek mode: blockchain, trust, resilience, information integrity, you name it. He listened, asked a few sharp questions, and then said something that hit me like a truck:
“We’ll be partners one day, Gonçalo. Send me a deck by the end of the month.”
I walked out of that restaurant buzzing. My heart was racing, my head spinning. Until that day, I never thought anyone would invest in something I built. I was just a kid trying to build cool stuff.
Twenty-eight days later, I sent him a “deck.” And let me tell you… looking back, it was terrible. Ten slides. No business model, no team, no traction, no clients, no shiny awards. Just:
- a cover,
- one slide explaining the tech,
- one slide with “advantages”,
- a roadmap that literally said “Research, Develop, Production, Automation”,
- and one slide for the index.
PS: These are some of the actual slides from the presentation.
That was it. Two 20-year-old engineers building because we loved it. Money? That wasn’t even on our radar.
On February 5th, we met again. This time he brought an advisor. Two hours later, we’d agreed to build something together. Three months later, we were officially partners.
That lunch was the first “yes.” The first real validation. The moment I realized that even if I didn’t have all the answers, someone believed in me and in what I was building.
The rest of the story? That’s for another post.
