Someone's Else Map

A guy posted on Reddit looking for people into Ethereum in Rio de Janeiro. I don’t remember the exact words. Something casual, the way you sound when you’re looking for your people and you’re not sure they exist yet.

I answered. His name was Victor. We met where he worked — a company called Stone, though I didn’t know that then. While I was there I bumped into Raphael in the hallway, and we started talking. About crypto, about game development, about finance. Three hours later we were still going.

I worked with Rapha at Stone for about a year. When I left, we kept in touch — because we liked talking to each other. We share interests, we share a sense of integrity, and the conversation that started in that hallway never really stopped. Two years later, he mentioned his friend Edu, Stone’s founder, who was building something new in London. Would I be interested?

I moved to London. I met Meriam. We have a son named Leo. And ten years after that hallway, Rapha became my co-founder at Awa.

I keep looking at this chain. A Reddit reply, a hallway, a three-hour conversation about games and crypto. Remove any single link and this life doesn’t exist. I couldn’t have planned any of it. I didn’t know any of it was available to be planned.

People talk about luck like it’s weather. Something that falls on you or doesn’t. And maybe some of it is. But there’s another kind that has a structure to it, even if you can only see the structure afterwards.

I’ve always been terrible at planning. I can do it — I’ve built plans, shipped plans, executed plans that worked. But the thing about a good plan is that it eliminates variance. It protects you from the worst outcomes, and in the same motion, it locks you out of the best ones. A good plan normalises your results. You’ll never do too badly. You’ll never stumble into anything that changes your life, either.

A great plan leaves a door open that the planner can’t justify keeping open. Not every door — that’s not a plan, that’s wandering. But one or two, left ajar because you’ve learned that the most important things that ever happened to you came through doors you didn’t know were there.

The best strikers in football don’t chase the ball. They move to where it might arrive. Watch them long enough and it starts to look like instinct, like they’re just lucky, always in the right place. But what you’re watching is someone who’s practiced reading a game that hasn’t happened yet — not by predicting it, but by being in enough positions that when the moment comes, they’re already there.

You can’t choose where the ball lands. You can be the one who stayed three hours when nothing told you to.

At Awa, we’re building this way — me, Rapha, and Breno, three co-founders with our own improbable stories of how we found each other. We could run tighter. We could optimise for the outcomes we can already name. But we’ve all lived the version where the thing that mattered most was the thing we never saw coming, and we’d rather stay open than stay safe.

I sometimes use business language for this. Luck surface area. Optionality. Positioning. They’re useful words. But when I’m honest — really honest, the kind that comes late at night — I know I didn’t position myself in that hallway. I was placed there. The Reddit post, the three hours, the friendship that outlasted the job, the referral that became the hinge of my entire life — I can draw the map now, but I didn’t draw it then. Someone else did.

You do your part. You show up. You answer the post. You stay for the conversation. You keep calling because the person matters, not because the connection might. And then something happens that’s too precise to be your doing, too deliberate to be accident, and the honest response isn’t a framework.

It’s the oldest kind of gratitude. The kind you pray.

Amen.