Quave is my company, as you probably know since you're reading my blog. But that doesn't mean Quave is my baby, as some people refer to their own companies. I've always told all collaborators that people are always more important than any company, even my own.

That said, Quave is important to me because even its name describes a lot about what I believe should be the goal of every professional: to seek a balance between quality (qua) and velocity (ve). It seems easy in theory, but I believe this is where most good professionals don't become great professionals. Either they want to go too fast or have too much quality.

In white-collar professions, it's very common to seek perfection, but there's no such thing. There's no perfect code, and even if there is, it's really inefficient to create it. So balance is the key, not quality alone.

But why am I writing this crazy essay? It's because someone asked me to explain Quave and our journey, so I'll start from the beginning.

13 years ago, I had a SaaS product for churches. When I closed the deal with the first church, the pastor said I had to be a company to send invoices monthly, so I had to open my company. At the time, this idea of quality and velocity was already on my mind, so I opened Quave. Over the years, I did a few side jobs, even complex ones like a water-on-soil simulator for Embrapa, but Quave was always a side project.

Then in 2019, specifically on Fri, Oct 4, 2019, 2:30 AM (UTC-4), when I was living in Milano, I sent an email to Tiny as they had just announced they bought Meteor.js. Meteor.js was my big passion (and still is in many ways). The subject was "How can I help in the future of Meteor? Count on me," and this email led to a bunch of conversations, then an offer to be a Meteor evangelist that later became a CTO role. But why is this important?

At the time, I was working for Pathable. During this transition, I also started to help ClearSale International build an Oracle Commerce integration with two interns (Denilson and Luiz) through Quave. Then I had to leave Pathable to focus on Meteor and also on my father, but that's another story.

In 2020, right before the pandemic, I was in New York, and Pathable's founder, Jordan, was also there. We had lunch together. During this lunch, I briefly mentioned that we were helping ClearSale, and then Jordan said: "What? And why are you not helping me? You know everything about our system, and you have good connections in Brazil. Let's build a team so you can help us even without being full-time." And that's how Quave Services really started.

During the pandemic, Pathable was the first company (or one of the first) to be ready for online events, and then the company took off. We had about 15 people working for them, and it was a great time.

But deep inside, I knew what I wanted to do in the long term: have a product company. Life has weird ways of presenting itself. One day, a great friend, Paulo Milreu, approached me with a weird talk: "I did a great interview, but I don't want to proceed. I think you'll match with the company, product, and mostly the founder, Mario," he said.

I listened to my friend, talked with Mario, and accepted to become Provi's CTO, going back to work for a Brazilian company after some years working only abroad. While all this was happening, I was also running a product for restaurants at Quave with a team of about 26 people at this point. But a little bit before joining Provi, I had given up on Bemarke as a Quave product, and since then it's been run by a friend, Reynardt.

So I had to make a very hard decision to leave Meteor and join Provi full-time while still having Quave on the side and helping customers like Pathable. But why join Provi? My goal was to have a product, and Provi was already a product needing my help, so it sounded like a great way to start ahead. Provi was a VC-backed company, and with the Russian war and other external factors, investments became a problem. After almost a year, I decided to leave. But leave to where? I decided to, for the first time, become full-time at Quave, my own company.

A few months before, Rafael, my partner at Quave Services, had returned to Brazil from Germany and was already full-time at Quave, looking for more customers. Then it was an easy choice: work with my friend - and many other friends who were at Pathable - and run the company as my main occupation.

After one or two weeks, we had terrible news: Pathable was shutting down. The private equity that acquired Pathable decided to shut it down. We had to work fast because they were our biggest customer. Our revenue was going to drop basically to 5%, and we had just a couple of months. And that's what we did.

With a bunch of people and companies connected with me from my time running Meteor (in the end, I was Meteor CEO), we started reaching out to people asking if they needed help. Since we knew a lot about Meteor, it wasn't that hard for them to want to work with us. And like this, out of a problem, we started to grow the company in a more sustainable way, with more customers and helping them not only with Meteor but also with all dev-related things.

Our team was getting stronger and stronger. For example, Adrian, the best designer I've worked with, from Pathable, also joined us. Then later Renan, our current head of engineering, and other really talented devs like Emmanuel and Matheus. Everything was going well (and still is), but services is not my big passion. I love to help customers, and all our customers know that because I'm really involved with them. But we have great people running services, as I mentioned many names here already and many others, so I decided to build a product.

But then comes the question: which product? First, we tried in a small way Lemeno, a product for creators, but we didn't know much about creators. Then the obvious: return to the cloud business. You may not know, but Meteor.js is an open-source JS framework with a cloud business to make money, so this was my business for 3 years. I had a lot of DevOps knowledge because I was doing everything with servers, deploys, CI/CD, etc., since 2011 probably. And there was a plus to this option: I also had Edimar, a great DevOps engineer who had been working with me for a long time and had great ideas on how to create an affordable cloud for our customers.

After a few months of back-and-forth, the decision was made: we're going to create a cloud company. A few months after that, less than 4, we had our first customers running on a very good cloud solution built by two people (Edimar and me) and in the end joined by João (our prodigy developer) and Adrian (our designer). It's amazing to look back and see what we were able to build with so few people. Important: before the new wave of AI tools and models for devs hehe.

With the new product, which was initially called zCloud (that's why our unit is still called zCloud), we started to get some traction even being bootstrapped. A few months in, we became profitable and saw ways to help even more, not only being focused on our own providers with our own accounts but expanding to help customers with their providers, on their accounts with their credits.

Then, getting close to today, we decided to rename again, from Quave Cloud to Quave ONE

Quave Cloud was confusing because we also run on any cloud provider, so we're in a sense not a cloud but a solution to run on top of cloud providers. But we also have our own regions, so we decided to remove Cloud from the name. Today our product is mature, stable, and with a touch of intelligence with our great MCP.

Recently, the founder of Provi, Mario, joined us as CRO, so we're reaching potential customers for the first time in a methodical way, and it's already paying off. We're creating an actual holding with many businesses inside and with an actual process to acquire customers and sell.

To recap: everything started from a lunch in New York, with a request for help from Jordan, then with a strong desire to build a product, and in the end, to be able to help and impact even more companies around the world. We'll keep it going. Now Quave is no longer just "Filipe's company." As you can see, we have a bunch of great people, and we're always looking for great people to join, founders to help, and companies that we can also be part of.

So if you like what we're building here and how we're building it, check our holdings website and get in touch.