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For many years, I lived two lives in parallel.
One was normal. Like almost everyone else’s. School, classes, schedules, teachers talking, subjects to memorize, tests to pass. A predictable, safe, boring life.
The other was silent. Invisible. It happened at night, on weekends, in between moments, when no one was watching. It was a life driven by curiosity, by obsession, by that almost physical need to understand how things work on the inside – and what happens when they stop working.
Today, at 25, I realize those two lives were never truly separate. They were just out of sync.
I Was Never the Example
In the “normal” life, I was never the example.
I was never the model student, never had outstanding grades, never the son or brother adults pointed to and said, “you should be like him at school.” If someone was supposed to be the reference at home, it was never me. And I knew it.
While others naturally fit into the system – good grades, good behavior, the right path – I was almost always out of rhythm. Not out of conscious rebellion, but because that model simply didn’t speak to me. I didn’t see myself there. I didn’t recognize myself there. And deep down, I felt like I was failing at a game I never chose to play.
For a long time, that weighed on me. Not meeting expectations, not being the “example” for my siblings, not fitting into what a good student or a good kid was supposed to look like. And maybe the hardest part of all: feeling like no one truly understood me.
It Started Early (and by Choice)
At 13, I started working for a simple reason: I didn’t want to go to the boredom of summer camps… and I wanted to buy my first computer – one that was truly mine.
While others went away for the summer, I chose to work. Greenhouses picking tomatoes, harvests, stripping corn, painting walls, small manual jobs. Nothing glamorous. But there was something important there: freedom. Every day of work brought me closer to a concrete goal – having my own computer, without depending on anyone.
That detail changed everything.
It wasn’t just about the money. It was the sense of control. The idea that if I wanted something, I could earn it through effort. That logic never left me.
My Grandfather, Electricity, and the Beginning of Everything
Long before computers, there was electricity.
And there, I wasn’t alone.
My grandfather had a huge presence in this phase. Everything related to electricity, I learned from him. Outlets, switches, electrical panels, improvised connections, understanding how current flows, where it can fail, where it’s dangerous, where it’s simple.
They weren’t formal lessons. They were moments. Observation. Questions. Hands-on work.
It was him explaining, me experimenting, and learning that systems – even the most basic ones – have invisible rules. And that ignoring them has consequences.
Without realizing it, I learned something fundamental there: respecting systems doesn’t mean being afraid of them. It means understanding them.
School, Isolation, and the Other Life
At school, I was average. Not because I wasn’t capable, but because I wasn’t interested. I rarely saw meaning in it. While many memorized material, I was obsessed with computers, routers, switches, firewalls. I wanted to understand networks, systems, failures. I wanted to build things – and take them apart.
But there was a less visible side to this phase: intellectual loneliness.
I had no one to truly talk to about this. Whenever I tried to explain what I was doing, the first question was almost always the same:
“Is that legal?”
Or:
“But why is that important to know?”
Very few people wanted to understand why. Almost everyone wanted to know whether I should.
And that created distance. I was learning things that no one around me valued – or even understood. And at 15 or 16 years old, that weighs on you.
On top of that, in 2014 or 2015, cybersecurity wasn’t a trendy topic. There were no podcasts, creators, Twitter threads, accessible courses, or much openness to teach, write, or talk about it online. It was a niche topic. Almost strange. Not glamorous. Poorly understood.
Still, I kept going.
I started programming at 14. At 15, I spent more time testing systems than studying for exams. At 16 and 17, I began building offensive tools: network and website reconnaissance, mapping digital exposure of people and organizations, automating exploitation of simple vulnerabilities, systems that connected dots no one else seemed to be connecting.
I didn’t follow tutorials. I learned by doing. By failing. By repeating.
At school, I began testing real systems. Internal platforms, attendance systems (my way of not failing due to absences…), digital tools everyone assumed “just worked.” During COVID, I attacked the school’s online testing system.
And here comes the irony: I was never a great student… except then. That’s when I got 20s – the maximum grade – in all Portuguese exams. I was never particularly good at languages. But when the system interested me, I became excellent.
It was never about grades. It was always about motivation.
The Power of Knowing What No One Else Knows
There was a feeling that repeated itself every time I found a flaw. A mix of curiosity, control, and clarity. Suddenly, you saw the system as it really was – not as people believed it was.
Sometimes this happened in almost absurd contexts. Being bored while waiting for an order and, while waiting, discovering a logical flaw that exposed an entire database of customers and orders. Other times realizing it was possible to get coffee capsules delivered without paying (coffee has always been one of my favorite drinks…).
It was never about the coffee. Or about destroying things for the sake of it.
It was about leverage. About finding the weak point no one else was seeing. About knowing something no one else knew.
When Curiosity Became Serious (and Doubt Appeared)
At 17, I built a facial recognition system from scratch. Not because I needed it, but because I wanted to understand how it worked – and how it could be attacked.
It was also around that time that I had one of the hardest conversations with my parents.
I told them I wanted to move to Felgueiras – about 400 km from home – to study cybersecurity. Their reaction was honest, worried, legitimate:
“Are you really sure that has a future?”
“The job market isn’t easy.”
It wasn’t lack of support. It was fear. And love.
But I was sure. Not because I had guarantees, but because I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else.
Later, that mindset found a professional place. At LOQR, I helped build highly customized operating systems for banking-grade infrastructure. Ultra-lightweight operating systems, running entirely in RAM inside virtual machines.
It was the same obsession as always. Just with real impact.
The Bathroom That Became a Datacenter
At university, money was scarce (or nonexistent). Cloud was expensive. But the need was huge.
So we did what we always did: we removed the limitation. We built our own “datacenter” in the apartment bathroom. That’s where the first ROOTKey cloud was born. Kubernetes, container orchestration, auto-scaling. That’s where the first pilots ran.
None of this was part of a beautiful plan. It came from a simple need: this has to work.
The Turning Point
There was a moment when everything became clear.
With enough time, I could exploit critical vulnerabilities in almost any company. But the real impact wasn’t in attacking. It was in helping organizations recover when everything fails.
That’s when NOTCyberSec was born (later ROOTKey).
Not as a polished business idea – especially since I never wanted to “start a company” – but as the natural consequence of everything I had lived up to that point.
Two Lives, One Direction
Today, at 25, I realize I never really had two lives. I had one life, seen from two angles.
The “normal” life taught me responsibility.
The parallel life taught me depth.
One gave me discipline. The other gave me vision.
One showed me limits. The other taught me how to go around them – or remove them entirely.
And at the very beginning of it all, there was someone who taught me to respect systems long before I knew what that even meant.
This is me.
I’m not the perfect founder.
I’m not the obvious example.
But I am someone who has always needed to understand what lies beneath the surface.
And who has never been able to stop after that.
