How I Built My Company, And What the Field Taught Me About Entrepreneurship

By Felipe Germini | Founder & Managing Director, Germini Energy | Partner, A|F Consulting Partners

Felipe is a Brazilian energy executive and entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience across the oil and gas value chain, spanning operations, trading, and executive leadership.

He is the Founder and Managing Director of Germini Energy, where he is building a lean, risk-focused brokerage and trading platform across Latin America, and a partner at A|F Consulting Partners, advising on strategy, M&A, and operational transformation.

Previously, he spent nearly two decades at Schlumberger, including as Country Managing Director for Brazil, and later served as SVP of Well Construction at Seacrest Petróleo, leading major drilling programs. His career combines deep operational experience with commercial and strategic leadership across the industry, and this newsletter entry distils the key lessons he has taken from his move into entrepreneurship...

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Nobody called for six weeks.

I need you to understand what that means. I had just left a role managing a $350 million P&L at SLB — a thousand employees, thirty-seven deepwater rigs off the coast of Brazil, an office in Rio where the phone never stopped. Before that, I’d run operations in Qatar, Oklahoma, Tanzania, Angola. Twenty-plus years of the machine working beneath me — procurement, legal, HR, logistics, all of it humming along, whether I was brilliant on any given Tuesday or not.

Then I sat down at a desk in Ipanema, and the phone didn’t ring.

That silence rearranges you. It forces a question that the corporate world never asks because the corporate world doesn’t need to: what, exactly, do I bring that someone will pay for? Not what’s on my CV. Not the title. The actual thing I can do that solves a problem for a specific person on a specific day.

I didn’t have a clean answer at first. Most founders don’t. You fumble through it.

Here’s what I figured out, and it took longer than I’d like to admit: the economy I’d built my career inside of had changed underneath me while I was busy running rigs.

The old model was vertical. One company drills, cements, completes, produces, transports. Scale wins. You want the biggest P&L, the most headcount, the longest client list. That’s the world SLB trained me in, and it worked — for a while.

What I see now, trading diesel and crude into Brazilian ports, is different. The value moved. It’s in precision now — several small, sharp offerings connected to each other. A brokerage or a trade deal here. An advisory mandate there. A market intelligence piece that answers a question a refinery manager didn’t even know he had. An application that can solve a problem for a small upstream operator onshore. None of these is big on its own. But stitched together, they’re a business that a generalist trading house can’t replicate because they’d never bother to build it. Too small for them. Right-sized for me.

Steve Jobs understood this better than anyone in our lifetime. The iPhone wasn’t a better Nokia. It was a map, a music player, a camera, an email client, and a phone — converged into one device. The value wasn’t in any single function. It was in the fact that he saw they belonged together before anyone else did.

I keep asking myself that question: what are the things in my corner of the energy market that don’t know they belong together yet?

AI changed my operation. I’ll be specific. I run Claude, GPT, and a set of custom automation pipelines that handle market scanning, document drafting, compliance checks, and data aggregation. My trading platform operates with a footprint that would have required eight people five years ago.

But — and I want to be careful here because the conference circuit is full of people overselling this — the software only works because I know what to do with the output. I’ve sat across from enough refinery procurement managers to know when the data says one thing and the room says another. I’ve been on enough rig floors to know that the model’s recommendation and the wellbore’s reality don’t always agree.

AI doesn’t replace that. It can’t. The technology needs a human service layer around it or it’s just a very fast way to produce mediocre analysis.

Lawyers are about to learn this. Traders too. The ones who survive the compression won’t be the ones who resist AI — they’ll be the ones who figured out that the tool amplifies judgment but doesn’t generate it. The edge used to be information. I knew something you didn’t. That’s over. The edge now is what you do with information that everyone has access to simultaneously. Speed of interpretation. Quality of relationships. Willingness to act on 60% certainty when the algorithm is still waiting for 90%.

I didn’t plan any of this. That’s the part that’s hardest to explain to someone in their twenties who wants a career roadmap.

In 2006 I was running cementing jobs in Qatar. By 2013 I was managing deepwater operations across East Africa — I remember a night in Dar es Salaam, after a cementing failure on a Total rig at Kaombo in Angola, sitting in my home office at midnight trying to write the incident report while my daughter slept in the next room. She was three. I was thinking about casing integrity and annular pressure. I was not thinking about the fact that a decade later, the technical credibility I was building in that moment — the hard, specific knowledge of what happens downhole when things go wrong — would become the foundation for everything I do today.

That operational base gave me the readiness to become a top-performing management consulting partner, advising operators and investors on strategy, M&A, and turnarounds across Brazil’s upstream and downstream. And it gave me the credibility to build a trading business that moves real barrels for international players — not a domestic shop serving local clients, but a trading platform recognized by counterparties in Houston, London, Geneva, and Dubai. Both businesses exist because of those years on rig floors and in incident rooms. Neither would have been possible without them.

You can’t see that from inside the moment. The dots only connect backwards. Steve Jobs said it, and he was right, but it’s one thing to hear it at a commencement speech and another to live it at midnight with a failed cement job and a sleeping kid.

So I stopped trying to design the trajectory. I just got better at whatever was in front of me. The coherence came later. It always does — but only if each dot was real work.

There’s one more thing, and it’s not a business lesson.

There will be months — I’ve had them, plural — when the pipeline is bone dry. When the deal you’ve been working on for ninety days collapses because someone in a procurement department changed their mind over lunch. When the counterparty stops answering. When the market moves against everything you wrote last week, and your analysis looks like wishful thinking.

No framework helps you there. No tool. No mentor on speed dial.

What helps me is a line that predates every business book ever written: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

I come back to that more than I come back to any pricing model. Not because it promises results — Psalm 23 is not a business plan. But because it resets the definition of “enough.” It puts the anxiety back in proportion. It reminds me that twenty-five years of work, preparation, and relationships don’t evaporate because one quarter was thin. They compound. On their schedule, not mine.

Build your thing. Use every tool available. Chase the ugly problems — those are the ones worth solving. Write what you actually know, not what sounds impressive. And when the phone goes quiet again — because it will — remember that the shepherd knows the terrain better than you do.

Keep walking.

Key Lessons for Future Energy Leaders

1.Build an ecosystem, not a single product. Small, connected offerings create resilience that monolithic solutions can’t match. The value is in the integration.

2.AI amplifies judgment — it doesn’t generate it. Learn the tools. Build the pipelines. But never forget that the human service layer is what turns output into insight.

3.Go where the problems are ugly. Regulatory complexity, port logistics that make no sense, currency swings that kill margins overnight — that mess is your moat. The problems everyone avoids are the ones worth your time.

4.Write what you know. Not content marketing. Your actual analysis. The thinking that only you can produce because only you have lived it. That builds trust faster than any sales deck.

5.The dots connect backwards. Stop designing the perfect career arc. Get excellent at the thing in front of you. The coherence reveals itself — but only to people who did the real work at each stage.

6.Have faith in you. There will be stretches when the pipeline is dry and the phone goes silent. No tool or framework saves you there. What saves you is the quiet conviction that twenty-five years of work, preparation, and relationships don't evaporate because one quarter was thin. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. That line has carried me further than any pricing model ever did.

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