Engineer by training.
Business owner by necessity.

I was born in the Algarve in 1980. I went to Lisbon to study Computer Engineering at ISEL. When I graduated, in 2006, everyone around me was leaving: London, Amsterdam, Berlin. It was the logical path for a Portuguese engineer back then.

I hesitated, and I stayed. In 2007 I opened RUPEAL. The name is literally mine (Rui Pedro Alves). It was not marketing, it was convenience that over time turned into identity.

I started as a consultant working out of my first client’s office. I used their reception, their security guard, their infrastructure. I did not wait for resources to begin; I began with the resources in front of me.

That was the first operating rule I distilled: use what you have instead of waiting for what is missing. It is still one of my rules.

The numbers, the systems and the logic came to me early, through engineering. The human side of management I had to build afterwards, in parallel, over almost two decades.

We were one step away from signing a lease on an enormous office in Alvalade. A heavy commitment, a long term, rising costs.

Before signing, I took it to a mastermind session. People who had already walked that road showed me, in half an hour, that it was madness: I was locking in large fixed costs at the exact moment I should have been preserving flexibility.

I got back to Lisbon that night and killed the contract.

Five months later COVID arrived. Had I signed, it would have sunk me.