Ricardo Maekawa

I first touched the web in 1997, while studying Geology at the University of São Paulo — the very first website I built was for AGID (Association of Geoscientists for International Development).

Back then, most of Brazil still accessed the internet via dial-up modems — and that was exactly the world where I took my first professional steps, as a trainee at Super11.net, one of Brazil’s very first startups, built on dial-up connections, right before the 2000 bubble.

What began as tinkering quickly became a vocation: understanding how people move through digital spaces — and how to make those spaces work harder for the humans on both sides of the screen.

Out of the dust of the bubble came Revista Científica (revistacientifica.com.br) — my own science and technology site, which joined the iBest circuit and ended up syndicated on Brazil’s major portals, such as Terra and IG. Around the same time I wrote technical articles for Revista W, Brazil’s webmaster magazine, and worked as a writer at Época Online (Editora Globo).

Over the next two and a half decades, I held leadership roles at organisations that shaped Brazil’s digital media landscape. At Abril, one of the country’s largest publishing groups, I led SEO across a portfolio generating billions of pageviews a year. At Remessa Online, I brought that editorial discipline to fintech, building an organic acquisition engine from near-zero to a dominant category position.

Today, through Maeka, I combine that institutional depth with AI-assisted workflows to deliver the kind of strategic clarity and executional precision that used to require an entire department.

I believe growth should be honest, durable and compounding — not a sugar rush of paid traffic that vanishes the moment the budget does. That belief sits at the core of everything Maeka does.