About — Mário Neto
Marketing touches product, finance, and strategy in a way most other functions at a company don’t. Marketing is the strategic foundation of every business.
I didn’t start in marketing. My early jobs moved across a handful of functions at bigger, more traditional Fortune 500 companies: social responsibility at Abbott Laboratories, HR at Sky, internal audit at Louis Dreyfus, before I ended up running alumni relations for my university’s business school.
The real pivot came when I moved to a much smaller B2B company, a video-production business serving the L&D industry, and got handed a sales job.
I was genuinely bad at it. Six months of struggling, close to getting fired.
YouTube was taking off, the company already had a production studio and a founder with real industry credibility, and turning that into content was the closest thing to a hail mary I’ve tried at work. It worked. I fell in love with content in the process, and that’s the moment I knew I’d end up leading marketing.
I think about a career like an hourglass: go wide early to absorb as much as possible, narrow down and specialize once you know what you’re good at, then go wide again on purpose once you’re leading. That last stretch is why I can hold a real conversation with a CFO about ARPU or an engineer about implementation complexity, not just with a designer about a headline.
None of that came from a marketing career ladder. It came from refusing to accept that a problem had no solution, and from building an entire marketing career remotely, for companies I’ve never lived near, long before distributed teams were the default.
I am a Fractional CMO at Kalungi, where I partner with early-stage software companies as they scale from MVP to T2D3, working remotely with teams in the US, the UK, and Europe. Across my marketing career I have led and supported engagements at companies ranging from roughly $1M to $100M ARR, across education, L&D, gaming, martech, fintech, and AI tech.
I am based in São Paulo and work in Portuguese and English.
Focus areas
The way I work
Most of what I do happens in a working session, not a formal review: a whiteboard, a doc shared on screen, a team talking through what they already half-know and just haven’t said out loud yet. I would rather sit in that room for an hour than send a deck.
