Welcome to the Brazil StartupDigest!

São Paulo StartupDigest is curated by:
Pierre Schurmann, Investor at The Experience Club & General Partner at Bossa Nova Angels, @pierreschurmann

What’s Going on in the Brazil Startup Community

The following is StartupDigest‘s fourth edition of “Your Guide to the Startup World” with Bedy, Diego, and Yuri, who I met at the Startup Weekend Sao Paulo.

Why should a startup thinking about moving to a new place choose Brazil?

It’s very clear that the Brazilian economy is a huge global opportunity. Brazil is part of the BRIC nations,  it has 80,000,000 internet users, 200,000,000 inhabitants, and the economy is growing at 8.8% per annum (one of the highest rates in the world).

And even with this huge opportunity the economy here is virtually untapped by foreign and national entrepreneurs. It’s unique culture, language dominated by Portuguese, and lack of investment makes it a difficult market to reach initially.

But Brazil is currently being  looked at heavily by outside VC’s, hedge funds, and PE firms. People and capital want to know what is going on inside Brazil and take advantage of the opportunities here.

What are some examples of successful companies that were started here?

	VideoLog was the first video sharing platform in the world, even before YouTube.

What are some of the organizations that are big supporters of the Sao Paulo startup community?

Brazil Innovators – Links together Silicon Valley founders and Brazilian founders through events, tours, and initiatives. This group is also the one who organized the Startup Weekend here in Brazil.

Aceleradora – A mentor network in Brazil who advises tech startups on early stage funding and product development.

FGV – A University where all of the top executives of public companies come from. They started an entrepreneurship center in 2004 which has been influencial in brings angels into the conversation in Brazil.

Sebrae – A national insititution, dedicated to supporting entreprenuership of all types.

Endeavor – Is the Kauffman Foundation for the rest of the world. They work with emerging economies all around the world and help high growth entrepreneurs within them.

What are the best startup events in Sao Paulo?

3 events were repeated over and over again as the best ones in Sao Paulo. They are:

1. Campus Party – A huge event bringing 6,000+ geeks together to celebrate, hack, and work.
2. “Startup Meetup” – Held in every major city of Brazil. It brings together one famous founder to speak to a crowd of 200+ inspiring entrepreneurs.
3. Startup Weekend – A 54 hour event to experience startup life firsthand. The event here (going on right now) brought together founders from 20+ states in Brazil all to work and build for an entire weekend.

If a group of founders moved to Sao Paulo tomorrow, who are the first 5 people they should meet?

If you could wave a magic wand and change one specific part about your startup community, what would it be?

While the Brazilian economy has huge opportunities it also has big challenges. Here are the 3 points our interviewees, Bedy, Diego, and Yuri, said they would change.

1. The culture to accept more acceptance of risk
2. A permanent place or area to hack and work together. Because of Sao Paulo’s size its hard to get a concentration of startup activity on a continuous basis
3. Not going for the easy money in services but to go for the big opportunity. It’s easy to make several million dollars a year in services here with the large population but it’s hard to build a true global product business.