In memoriam of Francisco Carvalho Guerra (1932-2026), one of the greatest Portuguese builders that ever lived, and to the great Portuguese meals we had together
Look at a plate of “cataplana” or “cozido à portuguesa”. Or the fact that a small country facing the Atlantic somehow has one of the most varied, most inventive cuisines in Europe. One that was built from spices out of Asia, tomatoes and potatoes out of the Americas, techniques out of Africa and Brazil, absorbed and recombined by generations of cooks nobody will ever name.
No ministry planned that. No committee selected the ten most efficient dishes and told the country’s kitchens to standardize. Portuguese cuisine is what happens when people are free to explore, adopt without shame, and build locally for centuries, without permission, without any plan.
That is what I call the Game. And when Portuguese people are allowed to play it freely, we are extraordinary at it. Not just in the kitchen but also in engineering, in software, in science, in football and in craft of every kind.
But there is a second layer, one that Portuguese food also exposes with total clarity. Call it the Game on Top of the Game, a phrase I borrow from Hit-Man Jackson’s line in Netflix’s High Flying Bird: the real leverage is not in playing the game, it is in owning the system that decides who profits from it.
Italy built that layer around its food. So did France. They turned regional cooking into global industries. Portugal produced dishes just as good, arguably more diverse and built almost none of the machine to amplify them. The “cataplana” never needed defending. It needed a system willing to sell it to the world.
That is the diagnosis, and it generalizes far beyond food. We are not short on creativity. We are short on the capacity to amplify it.
The failure is not the absence of a game on top of the game. It is that where we do build one in academia, in how startups get funded, in how careers get made, we build it to optimize, not to amplify. We install committees, KPIs, evaluations, rankings, certifications, accelerators, consultants. An entire architecture (often Napoleonic) whose job is to select among options that were never allowed to be wild enough in the first place. We call the result rigor. What we actually get is excellent mediocrity: extremely competent people, extremely low risk, extremely little that is new.
Picture a bureaucrat five centuries ago “optimizing” Portuguese cuisine: identifying the ten most efficient dishes, standardizing preparation, measuring cooks by compliance. It would have been perfectly rational. It would have destroyed everything that makes this cuisine worth talking about today. Variation has to come before selection. Exploration has to come before optimization. Get the order wrong and you get a bureaucratic monster that produces uniform, defensible, forgettable output. Fortunately, we still have rebels among us.
So here is the sequence I think actually works: Explore → Select → Amplify.
Exploration needs freedom, curiosity, and real tolerance for failure. This the condition Portuguese cooks always had. Selection needs judgment: some dishes genuinely are better than others and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. Amplification needs capital, institutions, distribution, and ambition. This the layer we have historically failed to build, in food and in nearly everything else.
And one more thing the metaphor makes concrete: adoption is not the goal. Tomatoes, potatoes, spices: Portugal adopted all of them. But adoption alone, without the exploring that recombines borrowed things into something new, just makes you a good consumer of other people’s discoveries. Exploration is what makes something ours. Adoption is merely a sufficient condition for staying current; it was never a sufficient condition for building anything that lasts.
This is what CONSTRUIR is for. Not another institution built to optimize what already exists. Not another committee deciding, in advance, which ideas deserve a chance. A place with a high density of people willing to explore first and, this time, willing to build the amplification machine we have always been missing, so that when something extraordinary emerges from a Portuguese kitchen, lab, or garage, it does not stay a local secret fifty kilometers from where it was made.
Explore like Portuguese cuisine. Build like Portuguese craftsmen. Amplify like the world’s best ecosystems ever have.
Let’s cook
CONSTRUIR