Every opportunity is born from a need.

I was 16 when the first computer arrived at our home in Manaus. The TV had arrived only two years earlier. I grew up between the rainforest and a city that never stopped growing, playing in the street, with almost no technology around. That is why the machine fascinated me right away: I wanted to understand what was inside it.

I grew up watching my parents teach people at church, and my siblings follow the same path. My sister became a teacher. From them I inherited effort, ethics, commitment and faith in people. But I always wanted to go one step further: to understand why someone was not learning. Looking for the cause of the difficulty became the way I work.

Until eighth grade, I was not a good student. Everything changed when I had an accident and saw my mother crying in a hospital line, with very little means. Right there I decided I needed to be a better son. In high school I became a different student and started helping classmates who were struggling. I learned early that having little does not define how far someone can go.

I started teaching technical courses at 20, became a university professor at 22 and head of the Business Administration program at 24. I have advised more than 100 final projects and more than 50 business plans.

In all these years, I have told my students the same thing: for an entrepreneur, every opportunity is born from a need.

I remember an entrepreneur I worked with. Smart, she won customers over, spoke well and had a great idea. From the outside, hers was the business that was going to make it. On the inside, she was trying to balance everything at once: sales, service, purchasing, bills. One day the numbers did not add up. The business closed its doors, and it was not for lack of talent.

I saw that scene repeat itself many times. Effort was never missing. Management was. And technology companies offered off-the-shelf products that did not fit the reality of each business.

In my PhD, I studied more than 300 entrepreneurs and confirmed what researcher Saras Sarasvathy showed: good entrepreneurs start with what they have in hand. When you have little, you have to be creative. I know that well.

Tiel is the way I found to help more people, at scale, with technology that gives time back, so entrepreneurs can have a better quality of life. And that is why every Tiel project starts with an assessment: before talking about technology, I want to understand the cause of your difficulty.

My dream is simple: a few years from now, to hear a client say that Tiel changed their life. That they gained time, kept the dream of running their own business alive and watched it grow.

Dr. Ayrton Santos de QueirozFounder of Tiel