In the early '90s, on a VHS tape rented from the Big One video club, I watched a film that had nothing to do with business. Films always took a while to reach Angola back then. Field of Dreams, with Kevin Costner, is about a farmer who hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field in the middle of his cornfield. One line stayed with me, though I didn't quite understand why at the time: "If you build it, they will come."
I didn't know then that this line would become my working method. A few years earlier, I had helped my older brother write a small program in BASIC on the ZX Spectrum, just to animate the logo of my father's garment factory, Only Industrial Angolana.
It was simple: it consisted of drawing the word "Onli," with an I at the end, which then morphed into a Y, forming "Only" and simulating a zipper being pulled open.
It was shown at FILDA, the year the company won the Gold Lion. Nobody had asked us for that program. We built it first, and only later understood what it was for.
For as long as I can remember I've loved building things. First with Playmobil, then with real Lego. In early adolescence I became obsessed with the idea of building an indestructible car. I'd assemble it, throw it off the table, study the pattern of damage, and rebuild it, over and over, more times than I can count. What interested me wasn't really the car, it was the process of building itself. Long before I ever watched that film, that idea was already taking shape in me: if you build it, they will come.
Over the years I noticed I kept doing the same thing: building first, and only later finding out who needed it.
In 2010, when I founded 3GS, most of the Angolan state's critical systems were in the hands of foreign companies. I could have spent months trying to convince someone that an Angolan company could do the same work. Instead, we started by building.
The first project was a document management system for the office of the Chief of Staff of the Presidency's Civil House, sensitive work with little visibility, but it proved we could deliver. The larger contracts came afterward: licensing systems, foreign trade, the National Bank of Angola. None of that would have happened if I had started with a presentation about digital sovereignty.
The same thing happened a decade later, in a field that had nothing to do with software. In 2020 we bought our first 3D construction printer without knowing that the printers on the market only worked with mortar, a material not produced in Angola. We spent over a year solving that problem, working with COBOD and CEMEX, testing until we could print with real concrete made from local sand, gravel, water, and cement.
Only after we had a finished house, the first in the world printed with this technology in real concrete, did we start talking to clients in earnest. The house already existed. It wasn't a promise.
There's a strong temptation, especially in technology, to sell first and build later, or never. To promise something that doesn't yet exist, raise money or clients on the strength of an idea, and only afterward find out whether it works. I prefer the slower path: build something that works, even if no one is watching, and let the work speak for itself. It worked with a computer program nobody asked for, and it still works decades later, with companies that now employ dozens of people.
If I ever build the foundation I still carry in my head, I'll do exactly what I've always done. I won't start by asking for attention. I'll start by building. The rest was never up to me.