I work on what people and organisations do when incentives and institutions change. In research that means
applied microeconometrics on Brazilian higher education, illegal markets and entrepreneurial entry. In practice
it means running the operating layer around a chief executive: the forecast, the board materials, the commercial
models, and the projects that need one person to carry them. I am Brazilian, based in South Korea, and I build
and run my own software.
Experience
Chief of Staff, Strategy and New Technologies · SalesSparx, United States, remote
2024 to present
Own the annual revenue forecast model and the board deck built on it. Rebuilt the pipeline tie out after
finding a row limit in the source extract that had silently dropped 23 open deals, a multi million dollar
correction made before the plan reached leadership.
Built the staffing, ramp and margin model behind an 18 month build operate transfer proposal for an equipment
services company, and the pricing that went with it: a flat monthly fee plus a success fee above breakeven,
chosen because the client was cash constrained and could not absorb month to month swings.
Led AI adoption across the firm, from no enablement to a library of reusable ChatGPT and Claude skills used
inside client deliverables, with training for non technical colleagues on model choice, prompting, and where
the output cannot be trusted without checking.
Keep the operating cadence around the chief executive and the partner team: planning, weekly updates,
agendas, decision follow up, hiring scorecards, and coordination across go to market, finance and delivery.
Program Manager, B2B Sales · Stages, São Paulo, Brazil
2023 to 2024
Built the B2B side of the business from nothing: positioning between the product team and enterprise clients,
the commercial materials, and the account routine the team did not have before.
Ran international activations, including Monaco and Madrid: budget, vendors, logistics across time zones, and
the client follow up afterwards.
Rebuilt forecasting and reporting for the B2B pipeline, which shortened the reporting cycle and made the
forecast something leadership could plan against.
Chief of Staff, Strategy and Governance · Aegro, agtech SaaS, Brazil
2021 to 2023
Ran the strategy cycle for the executive team of a venture backed company: planning, priorities and follow
through across market research, marketing, sales and operations.
Kept the board reporting cycle and the materials behind it, and supported the company through fundraising.
Built the market insights work: interviews with farmers and clients directly, intelligence reports for the
executive team, and client demands carried back into the product roadmap.
Researcher · KDI School of Public Policy, Sejong, South Korea
2020 to 2021
Econometric analysis of household expenditure survey microdata, written up for development practitioners
rather than for an academic audience.
Administrative Analyst · HT Micron Semicondutores, Brazil
2013 to 2017
Four years inside a Brazil and Korea semiconductor joint venture, supporting administration and operations in
a plant run by two management cultures at once, and organising corporate events and delegation visits.
Education
PhD, Economics · Korea University, Sejong
in progress
Applied microeconometrics on Brazilian higher education using national administrative microdata: panel fixed
effects, difference in differences, event studies and staggered adoption estimators in Stata. Current chapter
measures the effect of acquisitions among higher education institutions on course quality, on a sample of 142
institutions. Advisor: Prof. Hyung Jai Choi. Korean Government Scholarship (GKS).
Executive Program, Chief of Staff · University of Oxford
2025
MSc, Economics · UNISINOS, Brazil
2016 to 2017
Dissertation on rationality in illegal markets, using structural equation modelling and panel GMM. CAPES
scholarship.
BA, Economics · UNISINOS, Brazil
2012 to 2015
Monograph built on an experiment testing how different economic scenarios change voter decisions.
Awards
Prêmio Corecon/RS 2016, first place, monograph category
Conselho Regional de Economia do Rio Grande do Sul, for "A racionalidade na tomada de decisão: um
experimento para avaliar o efeito de cenários econômicos na decisão dos eleitores em uma eleição presidencial".
Announcement
XXIII Prêmio Brasil de Economia 2017, third place, undergraduate monograph category
Conselho Federal de Economia, for the same work, carried from the regional prize to the national one.
Announcement
XXIV Prêmio Brasil de Economia 2018, third place, master's dissertation category
Conselho Federal de Economia, for "A racionalidade no mercado ilegal: o efeito da demanda de bens
ilícitos na taxa de criminalidade do Rio Grande do Sul entre 2002 e 2015".
Announcement
Special Prize, Korean Public Diplomacy Paper Contest 2020
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Korea, for a paper on the Korean New Deal and eco-diplomacy.
Publications
Leiria, I. R. R.; Alves, T. W. (2020). A racionalidade na tomada de decisão: o efeito de cenários econômicos na
decisão de eleitores. Brazilian Journal of Business, 2(1), 113 to 136.
Article
Leiria, I. R. R.; Alves, T. W.; Carvalho, A. M. (2020). Racionalidade no mercado ilegal: o efeito da demanda de
bens ilícitos na taxa de criminalidade. In O Conhecimento Científico na Fronteira das Diversas Áreas da
Economia, Atena Editora, 153 to 178. DOI 10.22533/at.ed.21620240410.
Book
Leiria, I. R. R. (2017). A racionalidade no mercado ilegal: o efeito da demanda de bens ilícitos na taxa de
criminalidade do Rio Grande do Sul entre 2002 e 2015. Master's dissertation, UNISINOS.
Repository
Leiria, I. R. R. (2021). Eco-diplomacy and the Korean New Deal. Asia Power Watch.
Article
Two papers presented at the Asia-Pacific Conference on Economics and Finance, Singapore, 2018: on voter
rationality, and on rationality in illegal markets.
Open source
breaktalk-skills· More than 100 open working instructions, MIT licence
2026
Five tracks: Chief of Staff work, PhD research, brand and writing, commercial and data, and web and presentation. Written as
plain Markdown methods rather than prompts, so they run in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or a coding assistant. The
argument behind them is that a clever prompt is tied to a model and a written method is not.
In production at a private surgical practice in southern Brazil. The design decision that matters is the
boundary: when a message needs clinical judgment, or the model's confidence in its own answer is not high
enough, the conversation is handed to the practice rather than answered.
A daily scrape of ten authenticated resale platforms across South Korea and Brazil, written into a
longitudinal panel: one observation per listing per day, so price trajectories and time to sale stay
reconstructable. The panel feeds hedonic price models, value retention, and survival models of liquidity.
Trilingual product on React, Node.js and PostgreSQL with pgvector.
Describe an economic model in plain language and get working Stata, R or Python code back, run in an
integrated terminal with the output formatted to replication standards. Built because students with good
economic intuition were being stopped by syntax, and it carries a gamified path that teaches the same methods.
Writing
BreakTalk is where I write about
chief of staff practice, AI adoption and the economics underneath both. The through line across the archive is one
question: how professionals actually reason under pressure, from a behavioural experiment I ran as an undergraduate
to how AI adoption spreads inside a firm.