press +p to print

Antônio Moraes

Ex-Founder & CPTO

background

6+ years building products from scratch. Built a ticketing platform from zero to acquisition in 2 years as a solo founder — product, design, engineering, all of it. Now leading a team of 6 engineers at the company that acquired me.

First touched code at 9, customizing Blogspot templates — table layouts, background images, the works. Won 2nd place at Startup Weekend at 15. Did it again at 19 (1st place). Built the same product twice — first time wrong, second time right — got acquired at 25. Somewhere in between I built a tracking app and lost 20kg using it.

I care about the full loop: figuring out what to build (talking to users, not guessing), building it (fast, not perfect), and getting it in front of people.

experience

CPTO — Ficpass

São Paulo, Brazil · 04/2025 - Present

Platform for selling tickets for shows, expositions, and conferences. Joined via acquisition of Qual a Boa.

  • Led engineering team of 6, transitioning from solo founder to technical leadership
  • Architected microservices migration from monolith — each engineer now owns services end-to-end
  • Scaled platform to handle 20k ticket emissions in 2 days during peak events
  • Built payment infrastructure with multi-provider fallbacks and load balancing
  • Built B2B2C analytics dashboard on PostHog — event producers discovered 40% of sales came from referrals
  • Shipped session-based ticketing for multi-day events using iCalendar recurrence rules
  • Reduced admin panel response time to sub-400ms via query optimization and Redis

Founder — Qual a Boa

São Paulo, Brazil · 02/2023 - 04/2025 · Acquired by Ficpass

Built from zero to acquisition in 2 years. Solo founder.

  • Grew from 0 to 10k users in 4 months
  • Shipped UI that consolidated 50+ competitor pages into 3 simple ones — ticketing, POS, sales, teams
  • Trained 2 people with no tech background into junior developers
  • Deployed Azure infrastructure from scratch: Application Gateway, VM Scale Set, PostgreSQL, Key Vault
  • Set up CI/CD with Playwright tests, Storybook docs, Sentry monitoring
  • Ran user interviews to prioritize roadmap based on what actually hurt

Co-founder & CTO — Qual a Boa v1

São Paulo, Brazil · 05/2021 - 04/2022

First attempt. Solo designed and built the entire platform.

  • Built with Next.js, Express, Postgres, TypeORM — moved faster than established platforms to launch right after COVID
  • Lots of overnight sessions shipping features while closing deals with party organizers
  • Shut it down after 10 months — no payment gateway, spaghetti code, burned out
  • Planned to rebuild and come back. Lost momentum. Came back a year later anyway.

Learned more from this failure than from anything that worked.

Co-founder — Futlab

Belo Horizonte, Brazil · 12/2018 - 01/2020

Content platform for FIFA Ultimate Team players — tutorials, tips, tools.

  • Built with Node.js, Express, EJS, Passport.js
  • Designed social media content for promotion

projects

ValeMax — Vale S.A. + Inteli (04/2024)

Logistics optimization for ore distribution. Algorithm (Java, Spring Boot, Edmonds-Karp) + dashboard (React/Next.js, D3.js) that maximizes throughput.

Big Mother — Sírio-Libanês Hospital + Inteli (12/2023)

Real-time location tracking for ER teams. ESP-32, MQTT, Ubidots, C#. Speeds up emergency response.

LaPlace — BCG + Inteli (09/2023)

Churn prediction model for a European energy company. Python, Pandas, Scikit-Learn.

Corbik — Personal (11/2020 - 06/2021)

Human performance tracking app. Built it, used it, lost 20kg in 6 months. Paused when Qual a Boa got traction.

education

Computer Science — Inteli - Instituto de Tecnologia e Liderança

São Paulo · 2023 - 2024 (paused post-acquisition)

Business Administration — Link School of Business

São Paulo · 2021 - 2022 (dropped out to build Qual a Boa)

High School Exchange

North Dakota, USA · 2017 - 2018

awards

  • 2019: 1st Place, Global Startup Weekend Sustainability Revolution — carbon offset platform for ride-sharing
  • 2015: 2nd Place (Youth), Startup Weekend Belo Horizonte — P2P rental marketplace, age 15

languages

Portuguese (native), English (fluent), Spanish (basic)

stack

languagesTypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, SQL
frontendReact, Next.js, Tailwind, Styled Components, Framer Motion, D3.js
backendNode.js, Nest.js, Express, PostgreSQL, Redis, SQS
cloudAzure (App Gateway, VM Scale Set, PostgreSQL, Key Vault), AWS, Vercel
toolsDocker, Git, CI/CD, Playwright, Storybook, Sentry, Figma
analyticsPostHog, Amplitude