I built in Angola to understand what I want to build in Portugal.
I founded Quente & Bom. I started with one store and opened six.
Bakeries. It was the first business I built from scratch, in Lisbon — and where I learned the things I still apply every day: that serving well is measured in the till, not in the speech; that no one respects a business its owner does not respect; that reputation takes decades to build and one bad decision to lose.
In 2011 I closed the Portuguese operation and went to Angola to open Quente & Bom Angola. I left to build in a harder market. Years later, I came back to understand that what I had learned here had no equivalent anywhere else.
Leading when the macro environment doesn't help.
In Angola, since 2011, I have run and grown companies in difficult conditions. I have led teams across management, commercial, logistics, production, finance and quality. I have negotiated with banks, suppliers, and government institutions. I have lived through every cycle — expansion, recession, euphoria and currency crisis.
What that experience left me was the ability to separate volatility from error. To understand that operational discipline is the one asset that doesn't depreciate. And that people, when well led, do the best work they can with the resources they have.
The evening at home when three assets aligned.
The decision to build Terrae was not made in a boardroom. It was made at home, in a family council — myself, Ana Lobo de Sousa (my wife), Maria Goreti (my mother) and Bruna Sousa (my sister) — when three things converged in the same conversation. The Jardins do Anjo development was already lined up, with own capital committed in the SPV. The architecture of an integrated brand fit on a single sheet of paper. And it was Ana Lobo de Sousa who told me that the name that resonated most with our family story was Terrae.
From Lisbon to Luanda happened in 2011. The Angolan operation continues. In Lisbon, the three women who sat around the table to decide to build Terrae are the same women who, under this brand, today welcome the client, walk the construction sites and negotiate the mortgage. I am an investor, a property developer and the founder. But Terrae is, first and foremost, a family business.
