Student CEO: Mateus Fonseca, BSBA ’23
Unlike many students who start their own companies while studying at the Sawyer School of Business, Mateusz Fonseca, Class of 2023, came to Suffolk having already launched a global business.
In 2018, while in his third year of high school, he co-founded Moonsworth with three friends. The company is a software development company that operates the Lunar Client, which allows players of the popular video game Minecraft to customize and extend their user experience. In fact, Lunar Client is currently the number one third-party launcher for Minecraft, with over 10 million downloads. The company employs 24 software engineers and 24 staff members and works with over 100 content creators.
Fonseca attributes the company’s success to a combination of luck, great software, deep relationships with the gaming community, and the pandemic: People were forced to stay home and find ways to entertain themselves, and Minecraft was one of those ways.
“It was only at the end of 2020 that things started to pick up,” Fonseca says, “and then at the beginning of 2021, things really picked up when we released a new update to make the Lunar Client available to more players.”In fact, Moonsworth aims to make Minecraft and the game more accessible to people around the world by translating the Lunar Client into 12 languages, hiring moderators who speak Spanish, Polish, Spanish and Hindi, and helping the community interact with each other on the social platform Discord.
Fonseca’s success was by no means predestined. He came to the US as an illegal immigrant from Brazil at age 5. Through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, he was able to work, get his ID, and eventually enroll at Suffolk University. While he was already CEO by his freshman year, Fonseca credits many of his professors and classes at Suffolk with giving him the additional skills he needed to run a company.
“I already knew a lot about how to run a business,” Fonseca says, “but taking courses like business writing and organizational behavior and working with professors really enriched my skill set.”
It was during his final year graduate studies that Fonseca was able to combine his CEO experience with his classroom learning, when his team was tasked with devising a social media and search engine optimization strategy for a small cardiology practice in Boston. “Having developed the social media strategy at Moonsworth for the last four years, this was right in my league,” he says. “Our client knew very little about social media, but they were very appreciative of our research and recommendations.”
Last fall, Moonsworth’s impressive growth led Fonseca and his co-founders to be named to Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” list, recognizing them as “young leaders and entrepreneurs.”
Since completing his BSBA in December 2022, Fonseca has been able to focus full-time on his company and get more involved in gaming community events such as TwitchCon, a convention focused on livestreaming and video game culture in general. It’s through these experiences that Fonseca says he’s realized the success of his Luna clients is 100% authentic.
“We hosted live games with some of the top Minecraft streamers on their computers and showcased the game in front of an audience playing our game,” he says. “We appeared on a big screen with a professional play-by-play announcer and lighting. It was a real production. We said to ourselves many times, ‘This is pretty real.'”