Why 3 foul mouthed Brazilians are Exosphere’s first incubated team
By: Ezequiel Djeredjian
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Startups, Brazil

Why 3 foul mouthed Brazilians are Exosphere’s first incubated team

The first time you meet the Scribe team you might think you had run into the Brazilian version of “Jersey Shore”. The way they talk to each other might be strange for someone who is not aware of how these three co-founders came to be. Luckily, the Exosphere staff saw them sprout and as none of us speaks Portuguese we aren’t shocked by the profanity they are constantly spewing at each other in their native language.

As an organization we do not encourage this sort of behaviour at all. We entirely disapprove of it actually. Then why are they one of the first teams we have decided to incubate?

Well, you might think it must be their product…for sure they must be on to a killer product that will go viral in a couple of weeks and change the entire Internet as we know it, making millions for the founders and investors alike.

In reality their product is still pretty flawed. They added the ability to create hyperlinks only a few weeks ago…Pretty shocking considering they are an online writing and publishing platform isn’t it?

They are in beta after all. So, maybe it is because the buzz they have already generated with nothing more than their early-stage beta. People in Brazil and all over the world must already be talking about leaving Wordpress for a platform that really gives them what they want. This must be the reason.

No, it’s not the buzz either. Although they have been quite successful and already attracted an impressive number of users and generated content in less than 3 months, they are still relatively unknown and working on getting themselves in the mind of users as a writing platform worthy of consideration.

Then why did we choose them? Why did we decide to invite them to stay with us at our Viña del Mar campus in Chile, and support them in building Scribe?

In the ever-incisive wisdom of @FAKEGRIMLOCK:

RIGHT PEOPLE MOST IMPORTANT STEP FOR STARTUP. PEOPLE WHAT STARTUP MADE FROM!

BUILD STARTUP FROM RIGHT PEOPLE? THEM EVENTUALLY BUILD RIGHT THING.

Getting the right people to build the right thing is what we do at Exosphere, and is the mission of our boot camps to attract the right people and help them develop and reach their full potential, regardless if that is building a startup or taking life-changing decisions they would have never thought of in the confines of their everyday environment. We are not a startup incubator, we are a people incubator.

Attracting the right people is not an easy job, and it never follows a plan. But the good thing about it is that once you get the first one it creates a positive snowball effect that spreads really fast. Paulo Ribeiro, a friend of one of Exosphere’s founders, was attracted to our philosophy and started spreading the word about us in Brazil. Alberto Brandao found Exosphere because of Paulo, and attended the first boot camp, where he started blogging about his experience here. Eventually, three Brazilians from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and São José dos Campos, read about Alberto’s experience and applied to the following boot camp. So this is how everything started: five Brazilians from five different cities who didn’t previously know each other.

Get the right people on board, because, sooner or later, they will build the right products.

Alex, Eduardo and Kelvin are young, they don’t have years of startup experience, and they have never lived in Silicon Valley.

But when you spend a couple of months with someone discussing Emerson’s Self-Reliance, Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile and Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled, you don’t need long CVs to know what they are capable of creating. You don’t need a pitch of their product to be convinced of their true value or several interviews to get to know them, because you know them as real people, not the persona portrayed in an accelerator application.

This is the reason why we don’t hold pitch events, or have open applications for our incubation programs. You can learn little of a team’s potential in a canned ten minute presentation.

But if you spend more than 200 hours with them discussing their path in life, their goals, their fears and motivations, their relationships in life and how they deal with everyday challenges, then you know their real Curriculum vitae, experience and qualifications not just from their businesses but from their lives. This is what we do in our Hydra boot camp in Chile.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is it to be an entrepreneur but to pursue and keep the integrity of one’s mind? To be a nonconformist and dare to want more? The only thing that empowers one to reach her potential is the strength of her mind.

We don’t want the next over-hyped app that Facebook will buy to defend its market territory against nascent competition. We want to incubate teams that are serious about solving a real problem for real people. Teams that are serious and committed to their own personal growth, not only as entrepreneurs, but as individuals. Teams that loudly embrace with their actions and aspirations our mantra Disturb the Universe.

This is what we found in the Scribe team.

This is where we stand—this is what we believe. It won’t be the so called “disruptive technologies” that will achieve real disruption. It won’t be the low-cost space industry, the 3D printing, the Internet of Things, or mind reading technology. It will be the people behind them. The people who dare not to conform, the people who dare to defend with vigour the sacred integrity of their mind, the people who dare disturb the Universe.

The world is full of small ideas and small-minded people behind them— just read the business tabloids like Business Insider, you’ll find a lot of stories about them. But for the story of people with big ideas, stay tuned to Exosphere. This is just the beginning.