Endeavor Portugal Scaling Sessions| When Everything Is Urgent - an operator's view of scaling under founder mode
In a fast-growing company, everything is urgent at the same time.
Manuel Guedes de Oliveira has spent six years inside that problem at Kitopi, a food-tech platform running 120+ restaurant brands across the GCC, with $500M+ in annual revenue. He has held several roles - from Head of Growth to interim Managing Director for the UAE - and today leads a five-market cluster with 300+ people and a $60M+ P&L. Along the way, he built the growth teams and operating structure behind 20x revenue growth in under six years, and helped integrate a dozen acquired groups.
He'll use Kitopi's different phases as a working example - what worked, what went wrong, and the trade-offs at each stage - with most of the weight on the early ones.
What he'll cover:
• Why everything feels urgent
• Constraints as a thinking tool
• Going deep without becoming the bottleneck - and what only the founder can decide
• When people stop scaling
• Complexity as a real cost
Format: 20-25 minutes of content, followed by open discussion. Bring your own situation. The best of these sessions solve real problems in the room - not just the speaker's.
This is an online session hosted by Endeavor Portugal, open to founders. Register below and we'll send you the link.
Bio:
Manuel is a Director and Cluster Lead at Kitopi, where he runs the P&L of one of its largest divisions across five markets (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain) and a team of 300+ spanning operations, commercial, growth, marketing and culinary. He joined Kitopi six years ago, when the company was in its early days, and has helped grow it into a $500M+ ARR platform operating 120+ restaurants across the GCC. Along the way he took on several roles, from Head of Growth to interim MD of the UAE, where he led the post-merger integration of 12 acquired groups. Before Kitopi, Manuel spent nine years at GLG, the world's largest expert network, working across different teams in London and Dublin before moving to New York, where he grew its Latin America business sixfold. His clients were the major private equity funds, hedge funds and strategy consulting firms. Alongside his work at Kitopi, he sits on the board of his family's textile business, which he has helped accelerate in recent years. Manuel studied at UMinho and Imperial College London, and has lived and worked in Dublin, London, New York and Dubai, where he is currently based.