Podcast
He exchanged a top career in the United States for his mission to return to Mozambique, parents where he was born, and recover the factory his father had raised in the past. From there the story is written from challenges, failures, losses and restarts, but never with withdrawal. Because even to give up it is necessary to do so. Frederico Magalhães, founder and CEO of Sisqual is the guest of this episode of the podcast “The CEO is the limit”
He was born and raised in Mozambique, a country he left in 1974, pushed by the civil war. He headed to Portugal, but with the promise that one day he would return to help the country’s economy and the friends he left behind. Of the match, Frederico Magalhães, founder and current CEO of Sisqual, recalls the inequality marked to him: “There were people at the airport waiting to be saved, to die, victims of war, and we left. I felt such a great contrast among the sorts.”
Frederico’s passage through Portuguese lands would be short. Shortly after arriving in Porto, he headed to the UK to complete a degree in Mechanical Engineering and, later, a PhD in Automation at the University of Cranfield. It was staying, became a teacher and researcher and led the University’s department of robotics. At the same time, it was thrown into business life.
As a researcher and teacher, Frederico worked, in automation, the “vision” area for robots: “at the time, recalls,” the robots had no vision, today they already have a lot. And I patented, with a group of my students, these vision algorithms and we started to have many business requests, ”he recalls. The current CEO recalls that “there was something very important we had in hand and that was worth a lot of money. And I wanted to make a lot of money to help my friends in Mozambique.”
He founded together with two students to Integral Vision. “The key when creating a company is not being alone, not only two partners. When one is very bad the others pull for him and when he picks up with C, there is B to pacify,” he stresses, while noting that “one cannot always be 100% without falling from time to time.”
And along the way Frederico gave several falls. But not with your first experience as an entrepreneur. Integral Vision was sold for 20 million euros for the American to mediate and Frederico continued in the company as an employee. He has arrived in the vice president and prepares to set residence in the United States and assume the global direction of MEARA Operations, When, in the moved return to Mozambique to “help friends, supporting their business with the money from the sale of Integral Vision,” he realizes that the textile factory built by his father, decades earlier, Texáfrica, was for sale, “with 3400 people on the way to be farewell.”
He didn’t think twice and plunged headlong. He invested what he had together with his father. From then on and to the founding of Sisqual, the Human Resources Management and Optimization Software Development Company, which has founded and currently generates from Portugal, history is written from challenges, impasses, failures and losses. But never with withdrawal.
A legislative impasse in the country eventually poured all the investment by land and dictated the closure of the factory. “This was a lesson: with business you can’t put the feeling above reason,” he says. But it nevertheless stresses that “the leader of the future, if not very human, will not be able to win.” And he underlines: “We have fantastic people who are terrible leaders, they are lone wolves.”
The CEO is the limit is the leadership podcast and career of Expresso. Every week journalist Cátia Mateus shows him who they are, how they started and what they did to reach the top the Portuguese managers who marked the past, those who drive the present, and those who promise to shape the future. Inspiring stories, told in the first person, who dare to make it happen. Listen to other episodes:
