Paulo Velho Cabral: For me, entrepreneurship is about taking responsibility for creating sustainable value. It is turning a dream into a vision that becomes metrics, processes and results that stand the test of time.
As CFO and co-founder, I see the entrepreneur as a manager of risk and opportunity, balancing capital, talent and purpose to generate economic and social impact. It is discipline, not just passion.
It wasn’t always like this – passion has sometimes spoken louder than discipline, and in those cases the projects were not as successful!
Entrepreneurship means being ready to face failure, and when it comes, not giving up – being resilient and believing it is always possible to make it happen.

Hugo Rosa Ferreira: To me, entrepreneurship is the ability to transform insight into action and action into impact. It is seeing what others overlook, connecting dots across markets, technologies and human behaviour, and building solutions that genuinely improve people’s lives.
Entrepreneurship is not only about creating companies; it is about creating progress and impacting society. Ultimately, it is a responsibility: when you recognise an opportunity to create value, you act on it.

Paulo Velho Cabral: Throughout my journey I have learned many lessons, and I cannot highlight just one!
One of them is that people are always at the centre – all businesses are made by people for people, and we are all different, so we must respect and safeguard that difference.
Another lesson was realising that professionalising early — in processes, reporting and culture — accelerates scalability and builds market trust. This was the strategy we adopted at Doutor Finanças from day one. It had costs at the start, but it reduced many growing pains over time. Our mindset was always to act as if we were a listed company, even though we were a small business, but with the ambition of one day becoming a unicorn.
Knowledge cannot stop. As entrepreneurs, it is our responsibility to teach and share know-how, but we also need to keep learning. Balance is key: we must stay close to universities, learn from the market, from competitors and from the experiences of our teams and peers. That’s why programmes like ELITE are a real asset for those hungry for knowledge.
Finally, transparency. Throughout my career I have always been very transparent and ethical in everything I did. My father taught me early on that we should go to bed every day with the conscience that we gave our best and that our actions followed the highest ethical standards.

Hugo Rosa Ferreira: The most important lesson has been that you can't stop. Stopping means that you are losing ground, losing opportunities and basically getting stuck.
I have also learned that humility and adaptation are strategic assets. Markets change, technology evolves, and organisations must evolve with them. The leaders who grow faster are those who listen more, experiment often, and act decisively.

Paulo Velho Cabral: Doutor Finanças aims to redefine the way families relate to personal finance in every country where we operate! We want money to stop being a taboo and become a topic of conversation among families and friends – but to achieve that, we need to raise financial literacy levels.
We are a fintech with a human touch: we use technology to improve client relationships and create even more closeness. How? By freeing up our clients and our advisers so they have more time to communicate and create financial well-being.
Alongside proximity, we work with rigour and aim to make life easier for clients in all matters related to the home environment and their financial decisions – savings, costs and investments.
Our value proposition is always based on working to the highest ethical standards and ensuring the well-being of our clients and partners. We want to be a benchmark for all our stakeholders.

Hugo Rosa Ferreira: We are challenging the traditional way people interact with financial decisions. For too long, individuals and families have faced a system that is complex, opaque and stressful. We are turning that into an experience that is simple, transparent, educational and empowering.

Paulo Velho Cabral: “Serve first. Always grow. Make it happen with integrity.”
Serve people and teams before numbers (they are very important and must be sustainable, but they will be a consequence); grow in impact, not just in size; and execute with uncompromising ethical standards. Recognising mistakes is crucial. And I have a dream: to be the reference in financial literacy everywhere we operate.

Hugo Rosa Ferreira: "If you build it, they will come. If you don't, others will" reminds us that opportunities don’t wait. Either you take the initiative and shape the future, or someone else will happily shape it for you. In business—as in life—the cost of inaction is usually watching someone else succeed with the idea you didn’t pursue.

Paulo Velho Cabral: By participating in the ELITE programme, my feeling was that I had entered a true accelerator of business maturity! As I had the chance to mention, our strategy has always been to think and act as if we were a listed company, and ELITE reinforced that this is the right path. It served to validate much of what we are doing, but it also brought several highly relevant questions to the table that made us reflect and even adjust some of the things we were doing.
If I had to summarise the programme in one sentence, I would say:
it is not just a programme – it is a seal of readiness to compete in a global market where capital, trust and governance are decisive.

Hugo Rosa Ferreira: ELITE is a unique accelerator because it prepares companies not just to raise capital, but to think and operate like world-class organisations.
It exposes leaders to the highest standards of governance, financial discipline, strategic planning and international growth. It opens doors to experienced mentors, peers, investors and global partners who challenge companies to elevate their ambition and refine their execution.
For many SMEs, the main barrier to scaling is not the lack of opportunity; it is the lack of structured preparation. ELITE fills that gap. It transforms companies from the inside out—equipping them to access capital markets, attract long-term investors and compete globally.
In a landscape where speed, credibility and resilience define success, ELITE can be the catalyst that turns a promising company into a market leader.