São Paulo: Motoboys, Cubo, and Visionary Timing

Sao Paulo is the largest city in the southern hemisphere, with chaos and opportunity to match. My few days spent running around meeting founders and visiting museums in my free time confirmed the adage that so many LATAM focused investors often share: Brazil is its own beast.

Language, culture, history, and an entirely unique ecosystem of corporate leaders and political initiatives make the place nearly impossible to wrap my head around without great guides. Fortunately, my friends from Canary, Barn, Global Founders Capital, and Valor Capital made it slightly more approachable. Nevertheless, I leave reminded that investing in a new country, regardless of size, requires close partnership with local funds. Below are a few moments that helped to color my experience and excitement to keep returning to Brazil in the future.

I have never visited a space as ambitious as Cubo, the innovation and co-working center sponsored by Itau Bank. A massive skyscraper in downtown Sao Paulo where each floor has a theme: fintech, agtech, mobility, health and more. Each floor puts top startups, venture firms, and corporations relevant to the theme in the same space. In the case of agtech, you have breakout startups like Agrotoken right next to CVCs and potential customers such as Cargill, bringing extreme efficiency and coordination to the startup community. I came away from my tour with Marcella Falcao, a former investor at SP Ventures who now leads all investor facing programs for Cubo, believing that this should be the model for how big corporations support and encourage innovation. In this case they have sponsored the heart of the startup ecosystem in Sao Paulo, secured a direct line to the next generation of breakout companies, and can serve their biggest banking clients more dutifully by connecting them with the leaders in their industries to study, invest, and eventually acquire. As Cubo builds momentum, I could imagine BBVA trying something similar in Mexico, or Bancolombia in Colombia.

In the hour I spent visiting with Jack at Vammo HQ, I watched nearly a dozen “Moto Boys” come in for their battery swap. Moto Boys is the local slang for the nearly 5 million last mile delivery riders across Latin America, many of which ride for Rappi, iFood, Uber Eats or any number of regional delivery platforms. No surprise, the vast majority of these delivery drivers are on gas powered motorcycles. Jack Sarvary and his team at Vammo are working to electrify these bikes through new designs, financing, and a battery swapping platform on pace with a Formula 1 pit crew.

Moto Boys are on their bikes all day, sometimes covering over 70 km zipping around the city making deliveries. I was inspired by the space and how clear it was that their battery swapping garage was also intended to be a place of reprieve and rest, with coffee, clean bathrooms, and a place to take a rest before these drivers get back out on the hectic streets of Sao Paulo. If you believe that how you do anything is how you do everything, it is clear that Vammo is decarbonizing this key part of the mobility sector with drivers at the center of the equation. Let´s not forget that the mobility sector accounts for over 35% of global emissions.

I also had the good fortune of co-hosting a happy hour with some of the most brilliant climate investors on the continent, Barn Investments. From their office overlooking Jardines, we met with founders and investors from across the climate innovation ecosystem, ranging from distributed energy (Clarke), to agroforestry (Courageous Land), to a circular economy platform for major technology OEMs (Circular Brain), and many more. While the conversations from this event alone could be its own blog post, I will highlight one quote that stuck with me from Phil Krauders, founder and CEO of Courageous Lands. His vision is to fight deforestation with agroforestry programs that also produce sustainable CPG food products and a robust carbon offsets program. We discussed the challenges of aligning incentives around Amazon conservation, educating smallholding farmers, building a venture-backable business model, and the corresponding global movement towards agroforestry.

Phil had to leave the event as he was flying early the next morning to Switzerland to meet with global political and industry leaders to advance the cause for agroforestry. His optimism was infectious, so I just asked him straight up: “are you living your dream right now?” He smiled, said yes, and said something I will never forget: “the size of your impact directly corresponds to the size of your courage.” I am sure all of the founders in the room that night would have agreed.

Now for a quick history lesson. Winston Churchill said this about the importance of rebuilding East London to its previous grandeur after the Blitz, “first we shape our spaces, then they shape us.” I have always been a fan of architecture and the great minds behind our built environment, and it just so happens that Brazil is home to some of the best architects and designers of the 20th century. While I did not have the time to visit Brasilia, famous for being one of the few “Radiant Cities” around the world designed by Le Courbusier, I was able to visit a few sites from Lina Bo Bardi.

During World War II, Brazil became a refuge for pioneering designers and architects seeking more creative freedom. One morning, I had the chance to visit Lina Bo Bardi´s Glass House. Bo Bardi was a decorated architect and designer in Italy before she was forced to emigrate to Brazil after continued antagonism from the government towards the modernist architecture movement (read: her studio in Milan was bombed in an air raid). Bo Bardi in many ways was before her time, as a female architect in Brazil in the 1930s her work rarely received critical acclaim in what was a very male dominated profession at the time. At the peak of her career, she was rejected from a professorship at the University of Sao Paulo, even though now her application for the role is widely cited and regarded as emblematic of a shift in architecture pedagogy.

Walking through the Glass House, guests are able to flip through framed photographs that show the land when it was under construction — on a barren hillside pasture far from the city. It seems unimaginable as now it is overgrown with high trees making the space feel like a modern treehouse. Welcome the visionary — Bo Bardi knew at the point of design, that the city would expand, and the seedlings planted around the house would grow. She wasn’t thinking about the next fiscal quarter, she was thinking of the next quarter century.

I believe the lesson of Bo Bardi which is relevant for entrepreneurs and investors alike is around timing. The goal is to cultivate a sense and ability to identify the things you can control entirely (the design of the house), the things you can control somewhat (the planting and growth of trees), and the thing you have a strong feeling about, but have no control over (the growth of the city). And in the end, to have peace with the things we are desperate to control but is largely left to the cosmos (how we, or our businesses are remembered long after we are gone).

Thank you to the brilliant people not mentioned who filled my visit with insight and adventure: Lemon Energy, Global Founders Capital, Flori Ventures and more.