Hugo H. Macedo

Hugo Macedo has 25+ years of experience in marketing, product, and growth across B2B tech, consulting, and consumer brands. He is currently CGO at Human Ready, where he leads commercial strategy for an AI-native advisory platform built for enterprise FP&A teams. He is also a Partner at Forge, an operator-led program for founders and changemakers, and founder of Farol Growth Partners, a growth advisory for B2B tech CEOs.

Previously, Hugo led Global Product Marketing at PandaDoc, the document automation B2B SaaS, where he contributed to doubling its scale. Before PandaDoc, he spent over six years at Unbabel, the AI translation startup, joining shortly after its Y Combinator programme in 2014. As a member of the Leadership Team and VP of Marketing, he led the company's marketing through a 10x growth phase. Earlier at Unbabel, he built the Community team that managed operations of the human-in-the-loop component of the translation pipeline, and created the Customer Products Team responsible for API integrations with Zendesk, Salesforce, and Freshdesk.

Before Unbabel, Hugo worked at McKinsey & Company on engagements in Angola. Earlier, he co-founded and served as COO of ActualSales, the first performance-based advertising agency in Portugal, which grew to €13M in annual turnover and 85 employees across four countries. He held several marketing positions at Optimus (now NOS), where he created and led a business unit that grew to 300K customers and €50M in annual revenue, and at Procter & Gamble, where he managed multi-million-euro budgets for consumer brands in Iberia.

Hugo is a co-founder of Beta-i, Portugal's leading startup acceleration organisation, and its Corporate Innovation Consultancy arm. During his time at Beta-i he co-led the first Founders Institute programme in Portugal and contributed to the early stages of startups including Hole19 and BestTables (acquired by TripAdvisor).

He holds an MSc in Electronic Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and an MBA from Porto Business School, where he won the José Valente award for best student.