Get Into the Weeds

Get into the weeds means I refuse to stay superficial on anything important I am part of.

I do not need to execute every task myself, that would be a bad use of my time and a sign of poor delegation, but I do need to understand the details well enough to judge quality, guide direction, ask sharp questions, and challenge a weak assumption when I see one. You can delegate execution. You should not blindly delegate judgment on the things that matter. That line is central to how I work.

There is a comfortable version of leadership where everything arrives as a summary. The numbers are summarized, the customer conversations are summarized, the product problems are summarized, the legal issues are summarized, the technical tradeoffs are summarized, the team dynamics are summarized, the investment thesis is summarized.

Summaries are useful, but a summary can also hide reality. It removes the friction, the weird detail, the emotional tone, the edge case, the part that does not fit neatly into the story. It often reflects what the summarizer noticed, understood, or wanted you to emphasize. If the decision is small, a summary is fine. If the decision matters, I want to see the underlying material.

So I read the numbers, look at the contract, open the product, and read the code if the code matters. I listen to the customer and understand the operational flow. Then I ask why the thing works this way, what happens when it fails, who owns the next step, and what assumption would make the plan wrong.

Maybe you are thinking, "Filipe, that is just micromanagement." It is not, when you apply it to the right problems. It becomes micromanagement when a leader gets into everything regardless of leverage, and that is not what I mean. The right place to get into the weeds is in bottlenecks and important decisions, where being close to the detail helps you unblock, decide, challenge, or improve the outcome.

The model matters in Quave Run. We are exploring verticals, including compounding pharmacies in Brazil, real estate in the US, and possibly construction in Brazil. It would be easy to say "AI for non-tech companies" and stay there, but that phrase is too generic to build anything from. The real opportunity is in the details: how the business actually operates, where the pain shows up, who makes the decisions, what the current workflow looks like, what customers trust, what data exists, what regulations or habits shape behavior, and where software can actually help.

It matters in QuaveONE. A cloud platform is not a pitch. It lives in infrastructure, deployment, billing, support, customer trust, reliability, and the thousand small details that decide whether a user feels safe. Stay too high-level and you make strategic decisions that sound good and break the moment they touch operational reality.

It matters in Quave Services too. That business came from my own thinking, so I need to stay aware of how it works and why it works. A profitable business can be misunderstood by its own owner, when the owner only looks at the result and stops understanding the engine.

And it will matter in InvestPass if the deal closes and involvement begins. A minority stake gets passive fast when the investor does not understand the product, the customer, and the quality of delivery. If the point is only to put money in and hope, that is one kind of investment. But if our knowledge can improve the product, then getting into the weeds becomes part of the value.

This also protects me from a specific mistake: outsourcing taste. Experts are useful, I want experts, I want people who know more than I do, but there is a difference between learning from someone's expertise and surrendering all your judgment to it. When I say "I trust the expert" and I do not understand the core tradeoffs, I am usually just avoiding responsibility.

The goal is never to become the expert in every domain. The goal is to understand enough to ask a better question. Good questions are leverage. They reveal weak assumptions, expose missing ownership, clarify constraints, and force reality into the conversation. Bad questions are just noise, they come from ego, from anxiety, or from wanting to prove you are smart.

Getting into the weeds takes humility, because sometimes the details show that my initial idea was wrong, and that is one of the reasons people avoid the details. High-level thinking lets you keep your theory clean. Reality makes it messy. But messy reality is where the better judgment comes from.

This connects to my childhood and the ball more than it seems. When you play, the game is not a concept. The ball moves, the surface changes, the other team reacts. You cannot understand the game from the stands. At some point you have to be close enough to feel the speed.

Business is similar. Investing is similar. Health is similar. Family is similar. If something matters, do not just admire it from above. Get close enough to know what is actually happening, and then decide.