What It's Really Like Selling Enterprise Software After College in São Paulo, Brazil

After graduating from the department of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell, I got my first job in Brazil with Vale, the world's second largest mining company. I had what I call the Best First Job Ever, as I got to live in a hotel for free in Brazil for 8 months, 6 of which were on an island. I learned Portuguese, travelled, and had a great time both in and outside of work. After that, I moved back to Canada and started really missing Brazil. After another 8 months working in Toronto and St. John's with Vale, I decided to leave and work for a startup from Stanford that was doing market research in the favelas. It was a huge life change and I was never 100% sure that it was the right decision, but I went with my gut. I worked at two other startups in the education space, helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed investment and learned all about building online businesses. I used a lot of the skills I learned in school, especially the leadership and interpersonal skills. I was outside of my culture and comfort zone for most of my post graduate life and had to learn a lot in a short amount of time. Cornell prepared me well for that.

Well, generally living in Brazil is an adventure for everyone. My life here is very much the same. The country is going through a huge transition in many aspects, economic, technological, cultural, social. People here want a better life, but unfortunately not everyone is so lucky. My life is full of events, people and time spent thinking about how to make that change happen faster. I live with a manager of a local accelerator and a programer who happens to work at one of the startups there. Most of the people I hangout with are also expats in the startups space, so I have a lot of fun sharing the experience with them. São Paulo is a massive city, larger than New York by population, so there is plenty to do on a given night. A couple downsides are the traffic, safety (I haven't had a problem in 3 years though) and general inefficiency of things.