Chapter 1 · Calgary, 1993
Calgary kid with Azorean roots.
Born in Calgary in 1993. My family's roots go back to the Azores, but at home we mostly spoke English. I was the kid who took computers apart to see how they worked — and usually got them back together.
§ about
Hi, I'm Marco.
I'm a Portuguese-Canadian software engineer, architect and founder in Denver. I was born in Calgary in 1993 with family roots in the Azores, moved to the US in 2010, started coding as a teenager, speak English, hold everyday conversations in Spanish, and am slowly learning Portuguese, and for over ten years I've helped teams turn messy requirements and aging platforms into systems that are secure, fast and easy to keep running.
My work spans logistics, payments, music, education and AI. I like the hard middle part — where business rules meet infrastructure — and I like writing it down so the next person isn't lost.
Portuguese coast, arms out
The name & the crest
Lopes means wolf.
Lopes comes from the medieval name Lopo — from the Latin lupus, wolf — so it literally reads "son of the wolf". It's one of Portugal's oldest surnames, carried by noble lines like the Lopes de Sousa, whose arms used crimson and gold.
- + Wolf — the name itself
- + Tower — a nod to the old Lopes arms
- + Crimson & gold — Portuguese heraldic colors
My own take on it, redrawn for this site — not an official family coat of arms.
How I work
01
Discover
Untangle the requirements, the legacy and the people.
02
Architect
Draw the boundaries: data, tenants, security, cost.
03
Build
Ship in small, reviewable pieces with tests and docs.
04
Ship
Release readiness, monitoring and a clean hand-off.
The road so far
- Beginnings
1993
Born in Calgary
Azorean roots, prairie winters.
2010
Moved to the USA
New country, new school, first code.
2011
Graduated
Camas High School, 3.1 GPA, W3Schools certs.
- Building Kordspace
2013
First company
Websites, hosting and fixes under an earlier name.
2014
Kordspace
The side gig becomes the consultancy.
2016
Colorado
Mountains, snowboarding and a new base.
- Logistics & AI
2018
Logistics era
Freight network tech ops: VoIP, pricing automation.
2019
Early AI
ARCQ conversational agents, Fynda music ML.
- Ventures
2020
SVRGE
Founded and built from the ground up.
2021
Wurla
CTO and #2 shareholder — still going.
2022
Scale & cloud
MyFBAPrep warehouses, UMG artist stores, Musiclear.
2023
Payments
Tuzo Rewards gateway and rewards SaaS.
2025
SquareCoil
Multi-tenant SaaS for sign shops.
2026
Svive Ventures
Plus Karnelian, RamQuest and Fable Shrine.
Companies I've built & backed
Kordspace
Founder · built from the ground up
My software consultancy and product studio — started in 2013 under an earlier name, Kordspace since 2014.
Svive Ventures
3rd-largest shareholder · founded 2026
Home of RamIQ & RamQuest, where I lead R&D as CRDO.
Wurla
2nd-largest shareholder · CTO · since 2021 · active
Supply-chain and 3PL materials platform on Ethereum.
SVRGE
Founder · since 2020
Creative and entertainment ventures — games, worlds and interactive experiments, built from the ground up.
Languages
English native, Spanish conversational — comfortable in general conversation, not claiming fluency yet. Portuguese is a newer project. The rest are for fun — I'm not claiming them on a contract yet.
English
Native / full professional
Spanish
Conversational — everyday conversations
Portuguese
Learning — basics
Japanese
Learning for fun
Italian
Learning for fun
German
Learning for fun
Russian
Learning for fun
Right now
Building
Karnelian (a Rust kernel OS for AI agents), RamQuest in Unreal Engine 5 and Fable Shrine on Roblox.
Leading
Kordspace client work, RamIQ & RamQuest product strategy, venture boards.
Learning
Japanese, Italian, German and Russian — badly, but daily.
Writing
Field notes on the blog and Substack about architecture and building companies.
Off the clock
When the laptop closes, I'm usually somewhere with mountains in the background.
🎛️
EXVRT
Experimental electronic music and sound design.
📖
Tomas Quaid
Fiction, world-building and the occasional imaginary universe.
🌶️
Spicy cooking
Ramen, curries, tacos — the hotter the better.
🛞
One wheel
Electric unicycle around Denver. Balance is a skill.
🏂
Snowboarding & mountains
Carving Colorado powder in winter, hiking and road trips the rest of the year.
🔭
Big ideas
Astronomy, AI, philosophy and connecting odd dots.
Kysely's corner
Head of Morale.
As efficient as Kysely the ORM — lightweight, dependable, and never runs a query she doesn't need. (She's the dog, not the TypeScript library, but the resemblance is uncanny.)
- + Role: Head of Morale
- + Breed: Black Mouth Cur
- + Build: Lightweight, type-safe
- + Uptime: 100% (naps excluded)