Ep. 34, Mariano Gomide de Faria – He cut his team from 870 to 260 people. Then VTEX sold more.

Episode von UNFILTERED Podcast von Benedikt Böhnke, Daniel Kormann · 10. Oktober 2026 · 1 h 44 min

Diese Folge ist auf Englisch, unsere erste.

Seventeen months ago, my guest looked at the 870 people in his part of the company and decided to refound it from the future backwards. Today there are 260. And he says: we sell more, we implement better, our clients get better support. He also says what it cost him: people who had worked for him for 25 years.

Mariano Gomide de Faria co-founded VTEX in Brazil 26 years ago, without venture capital, in a country that was still on dial-up during the internet boom. The company was profitable in 23 of those years. With four clients on the books he took Walmart live, a year and a half before Oracle managed it in Europe. Today Walmart, Samsung and Carrefour run on his platform, in 48 countries. And the founders still hold control.

This is the first English episode of Unfiltered. My friends in Dubai asked for it for a year, and I wanted the first one to be with someone who tells owners things nobody else says out loud. Mariano says budget and headcount are the cancer of any organization, because that is how power is handed out. He says executives are not paid to take risk but to protect the status quo. He says he is always afraid and proud of it. He has banned AI dashboards in his company. And he and his wife have written a will that gives away 95 percent of their assets, because he wants his kids to stay hungry.

Because I come from a family business with 5,000 employees, we talk about the second generation, about titles instead of raises, and about what a Brazilian founder in New York would tell German owners: fire half of your board, ask for a plan for 50 years instead of five. Germans are bigger than Germany. Plus the story of how one phone call, via Richard Branson, brought Barack Obama to VTEX Day in São Paulo.

Enjoy the episode.

📲 The best moments of the episode on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/unhyde.me/

▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@Unhyde

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In diesem Business-Podcast geht es um ungefilterte Gespräche von erfolgreichen Persönlichkeiten. Gespräche, die inspirieren, bewegen und der jungen Generation Mut machen.

UNFILTERED Podcast

Ep. 34, Mariano Gomide de Faria – He cut his team from 870 to 260 people. Then VTEX sold more.

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