As long as I can remember, I was on that floor.
The factory floor of my father’s small manufacturing business.
Since I was five or six years old, I have spent afternoons and weekends there. Sometimes waiting. Sometimes doing homework. Sometimes playing with Legos. Often helping with whatever was needed. There were always workers around. I heard their stories. I learned about their dreams. I watched them take pride in what they built together.
My father had chosen this path instead of the security of becoming a doctor, after graduating from the University of Lisbon and moving to Brazil with no clear plan. This was Brazil in the 1980s. Economic instability was the norm. Reforms came and went. People and businesses learned to adapt, to improvise, to stay agile.
That environment shaped my earliest understanding of work. Uncertainty was not an exception. It was the condition.
Years later, after decades of operating in global organizations and pursuing world-class business education, those early memories never left me. As a child, I helped produce Brazil’s first skateboards, which became so popular in São Paulo they sold out before Christmas of 1988. I helped assemble thousands of umbrellas. I watched my father navigate years of abundance and years of scarcity. When things turned sour, he always found a new idea to pursue, something creative to try.
There was never a guarantee. There was always agency.
When it came time to choose my own path, I made a different decision. I believed that working for large organizations would allow me to contribute at scale, pursue meaningful impact, and find the stability I had not experienced growing up. And it did.
Over more than twenty-five years, I worked with extraordinary people, traveled the world, and helped organizations grow, transform, and deliver value to society. I contributed to launching life-saving therapies. I helped build data infrastructures that millions now depend on. I was able to create the conditions to raise a healthy, grounded family. I am deeply grateful for that chapter.
I built a reputation as someone curious, experimental, and focused on simplifying complexity. Always asking what problem truly mattered, and how to approach it differently.
And then, slowly, something shifted.
I was no longer enjoying the work. I found myself hearing, more often than not, “this is the way we do things here.” From the outside, everything looked solid, even impressive. From the inside, it felt like breathing rarefied air. Technically alive, but struggling to take a full breath.
It was not burnout. It was misalignment.
I realized I had outgrown the structures that once gave me stability. Something new was emerging, though I could not yet name it.
So I decided to go solo.
For the first time, there would be no corporate shield. No titles. No sponsors. No organizational exoskeleton. It was both terrifying and liberating. Over the past months, I began offering my experience, creativity, and scientific grounding in service of helping leaders and organizations thrive, but in a fundamentally different way.
Not by choosing risk over stability. But by integrating both.
Unmaze is the name I gave to this phase of my life. Not first as a company, but as a practice. A commitment to redesign how work gets done, so people and performance can thrive together. A refusal to accept false trade-offs. A way of claiming agency, wherever I am.
I do not know exactly how this journey will unfold. I do know the values I will carry with me: service, curiosity, collaboration, positivity, and the disciplined use of science to drive meaningful business impact. This no longer feels like a job. It feels like a calling.
Two weeks before the launch of Unmaze, my son Gabriel, now eleven, asked me, “Dad, what if it fails?”
I paused. Took a breath. Filled my lungs. And answered honestly.
“It has already been a success.”
Because success, I have learned, is not certainty. It is alignment.
As I begin this next chapter, I often picture that little boy on the factory floor, watching his father navigate chaos with courage and creativity. I trust that good things will come. And that, along the way, I will meet and help wonderful people.
If these reflections resonate with you, I invite you to follow along. I will be sharing what I am learning as I continue to unmaze work, organizations, and myself.
Thiago Licias de Oliveira – Founder of Unmaze
