Cesar Gon
Cofounder & CEO, CI&T
As CEO of CI&T, Gon has been at the forefront of the trend to combine lean thinking (from the Toyota world) with agile and scrum (from the information technology world), which the company calls digital lean. He and his coauthors describe their journey bringing these two approaches together, where lean management is used to manage agile teams, in the book Faster, Faster: The Dawn of Lean Digital. Today, with 5,000+ professionals and operations across North America, Latin America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, CI&T counts some of the world’s biggest brands as clients.
An entrepreneur in the tech/digital space since the age of 13, when, having taught himself computer programming by the time he was 11, he sold the code of a chess game to a technology magazine. When he was 23, he founded CI&T, a pioneering digital service company to help large enterprises make shifts at scale, connecting business outcomes with technology solutions. Under his leadership, CI&T — short for collaborate, innovate, and transform — achieved 26 years of consecutive growth and global expansion and became the first Brazilian-based company to go public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021.
Gon is a computer engineer by education, holding a master’s degree in computer science from the State University of Campinas. He is also an active investor in venture funds and start-ups. In 2019, the global professional services network EY Named Gon Brazil’s Entrepreneur™ of the Year. He has three children, loves tech, lean, wines, cigars, and football.