I just ran DELETE on 5 years of my life. Here’s why.

Every now and then, I post about failures and lows in my career. Just to remind people that the neighbor’s grass is not always greener. We’re all in this for growth. I have a constant reminder that some of the “superheroes” we see on social media take antidepressants and have not found peace.

So today is a symbolic and sad day. I’m starting to phase out and shut down a startup I dedicated 5 years of my life to. Jitzs.com!

I remember waking up at 4am some days while I was at Microsoft just to invest time in this. I coded every single line, at a time when there was no vibe coding, from multi-tenant architecture, CI/CD, to an end-to-end video streaming pipeline with Azure Media Service and then OSS. I learned a ton, and looking back, it gave me a lot of confidence when talking with large ISV and SaaS vendors during my time as Evangelist and Strategist at Microsoft. It also gave me ideas and sample code that fed directly into my GenAI work at AlterX.

But as a grown man, you have to make hard decisions. Every yes is a no to something else. Right now, my most important yeses are my daughters, my wife, and Databricks. So I’m saying no to Jitzs.com after 5 years of trying.

The mission was close to my heart: drive engagement in martial arts using digital tools. It started as a tool to measure Jiu-Jitsu belt progression and evolved into a full martial arts engagement platform. My challenge was never finding product-market fit the way I envisioned it. School owners are not very digital-savvy, and making the platform truly self-driving required more investment than I could give it right now.

This has been a good lifestyle business, but my heart and upside potential are with Databricks.

So yeah, this morning I ran: DELETE FROM jitzs_db.tenants WHERE tenant_id = 1;

That’s my first customer. Someone who never had to pay but chose to. 250 active students. In two weeks, 5,000 students will no longer be on my platform.
Thank you to the advisors who were with me throughout this journey: Gustavo Trindade, Gustavo Buonnacorso, Michael Johnson, Diego Martins, Paul Nganguem. A special thanks to Julio Martins de Sousa, developer number 2, partner, and now a dear friend!!

Hopefully Michael Johnson‘s fork of my solution will take this IP and build something truly great with it.

It’s time to focus on ‘turning’ my daughters into amazing women and help make Databricks a $1T company. Focusing on intrapreneurship for now, but after that, I might find my way back to entrepreneurship again.

So long… Farewell Jitzs!