Strategy & Execution Principal at our Faro office, David Pedro, shares his experience of running his own company and how it led him to join Metyis, where he feels he’s finally found a supportive and inspiring team that can deliver impact and grow together.
Meet David Pedro, our Strategy & Execution Principal in Faro
The growth, love, and life I embrace in sunny Algarve
I was born in Lisbon, but as my mother was a teacher, we moved to Algarve while I was still young. Despite the trials and tribulations of moving, I was very happy to live in a beautiful, sunny place that offered an excellent quality of life. I stayed in the region, studying both my bachelor’s and master’s in Faro, where I now reside together with my wife Marcia and our son and daughter. I feel immense joy seeing my two children grow up and learning something from them each day. There is genuinely no better sensation than receiving a big hug and kiss from the ones we most love, especially after a long day at work.
Entrepreneurship became a way for me to blend passion, business, and teamwork
Looking back, I always wanted to become a football player, a common enough aspiration for a child, but with time, I began to realise that really the dream was to be a team player, and this didn’t necessarily have to be tethered to sport, as this is the first experience most of us have with a sense of synergy. I started gravitating towards my love for entrepreneurship, business processes and innovation, eventually finding that I could both live my dream and enjoy my passion in one profession.
In 2012, I had the career opportunity to live and work abroad for six months, which had a significant impact on me, and in 2015 I left the bank I was working for at the time to establish my own company. It was a bold move but a natural one, as I was always connecting the dots and blending business and technology. It enabled me to flourish on my own terms, making use of my background and experience in Management, Finance and Banking and nourishing my entrepreneurial mindset.
Five years later, in January 2020, I joined the Metyis team as a Strategy and Execution Manager at our Faro office, finding the right environment to support innovation and create impact as a team. Three years later, I was fortunate enough to be promoted to the role of Principal. It was a rewarding experience to be part of something on a bigger scale, working together, doing what we love and discovering what teamwork is all about: trust and friendship – so really not too different from football.
Finding joy in friendship, support, and collective achievement as a team
My responsibilities entail several client projects and, more recently, working closely with internal recruitment and staffing and using tech tools to optimise these processes. The key concept is facilitating and implementing better understanding and efficiency through a blend of business and technology, offering different stakeholders’ perspectives to generate global impact. It’s a method not without risk; sometimes it can be challenging, but ultimately there is no better professional reward than being part of pivotal moments that forge positive results for our company and witnessing how it makes colleagues' lives easier and more pleasant.
This positivity permeates the company, creating an informal and friendly working environment, almost with a kind of startup energy, where we can leverage our individual capabilities and collaborate as closely-knit teams across offices, countries, hierarchies or skill sets. Our compassion for one another is akin to friendship, inspiring us to openly share thoughts, celebrate individual or collective achievements, and project support and advice.
In fact, at our first global Metyis event in Porto, many colleagues from other offices and countries came to me and commented on how pleasant it was to see us party together because we were dancing and drinking all night in such an amicable way. Knowing how hard we work and how we help each other regardless of different projects, a well-known expression came to mind, which I slightly adapted: “As a team, tell me how you party, and I’ll say how you work together”. This is something I have the fortune of saying I learnt from working at Metyis.
Growing with Metyis has been amazing, from creating local impact to global possibilities
Thinking about our team here in Faro instils excitement in me about the wider Metyis community and the global future of the firm. Taking Portugal as an example, we can see the evidence that Metyis is a fast-growing company – even throughout the pandemic, we managed to expand from 20 to 200 people. Assembling a new team in Faro and being part of the initial 20 employees, the impact and legacy we were able to develop and deliver to multiple projects and clients using data expertise (where it all began) and seeing how we grew over time really make me proud. In three and a half years, only four colleagues went their separate ways, which speaks volumes about how we faced challenges together and the strength of the team we built. I put this down to Metyis’ culture and values and what it brings out in us as individuals.
Creating this kind of active contribution to social and economic change in a region is super motivating, especially as I have a history with the area. There are now even other companies in the tech sector relocating here. I’m thrilled to see what we can do together, especially now with the Metyis Campus in Porto, which will increase capacity and be a hub for furthering capabilities and forging partnerships worldwide. On a global scale, knowing our colleagues recently travelled to Mexico and Turkey for a project makes me realise what we could achieve and consolidates the possibilities yet to come.