05/09/2022
Teaching with an aim to provide thorough, multidisciplinary education in line with market demands helps find and motivate business talents
How do you create an entrepreneur? In fact, how do you find young people with the profile to lead successful initiatives? The experience of professional education at Insper may have the answer to those questions. After all, as of early 2021 at least 33 startups founded or co-founded by former Insper students, and which operate in the most diverse economic sectors, have raised the significant amount of BRL 4 billion in funds. The list includes successful cases recognized in their fields, such as fintech Conta Simples, healthtech Alice, benefits management company Caju and electric bike subscription startup E-Moving.
“There is a widespread movement to encourage the growth of the startup ecosystem”, says David Kallás, professor at Insper and vice president of the National Association of Finance Executives (ANEFAC, for the acronym in Portuguese). “Also, the school guidelines say we are to not only teach administration and management to those who intend to work in large companies, but what we want is to spark the entrepreneurial spirit in the classroom and through several activities.”
Kallás points out that the talents that make up a successful entrepreneur are varied. “For you to become an entrepreneur, you need a complete educational background. And that’s what we aim to provide our students: a combination of expertise in financial planning, strategy and legal issues. To get to the fundraising level of those startups, these entrepreneurs certainly have a thorough understanding of those fields, as well as the ability to work in a team, among other attributes”.
In the classroom, the motivation to develop projects according to market needs and pain points drive many students to start designing their own startups in the first semesters of their programmes. On the other hand, the interaction across different areas is instrumental for the entrepreneurial spirit to extend to the most varied programs offered by the institution, including the most recent ones, such as Law and Computer Science. “The school environment is open to innovation,” adds Kallás.
As their entrepreneurial skills are sparked or encouraged, students find the structures ready within the school to strengthen bonds with other students, with professors and also with market leaders. The founders of influential startups with a record of large-scale fundraising, for example, have at some point been part of Insper’s League of Entrepreneurs, a space for sharing experiences.
Insper also encourages students to participate in national and international competitions — such as Matheus Dias Marotzke, co-founder of the startup Klubi, who studied Engineering at Insper and was part of the team that won the L’Oréal Brandstorm, a worldwide innovation competition, in 2017. In fact, he met one of his main investors and mentors, Paulo Veras, from the 99 transport app, during a tour around Insper.
The institution also runs the Paulo Cunha Innovation Hub, whose aim is to contribute to the development of innovative solutions that solve real problems of organizations and society and which has recently started a new management cycle. The activities of the hub are structured around three pillars: Hub.i9 (a channel that gathers web series, articles, videos and podcasts on the topic of innovation and entrepreneurship); innovation developed with partners and the Center for Entrepreneurship (CEMP).
CEMP has a fixed structure that can attend to a program of resident businesses — last December, 33 initiatives were brought to the site. They can access the Innovation Hub space, the FabLab, the Agile Development labs, the UX, supercomputers and games, as well as the Usability Experience Room.
It is through the resident program that companies from students or former students without a fixed workplace or in the early stages of business development can work in the space offered by the Innovation Hub and other school facilities and laboratories. That’s how it happened with Conta Simples, for example.
Insper also oversees the Insper Angels, a network of angel investors composed of and managed by former students, with a focus on advancing Brazilian entrepreneurship, while trying to connect exceptional entrepreneurs with engaged investors. The network has over 450 angel investors, whose contributions go from financial capital to the development of entrepreneurs via networking and targeted mentoring.
The startups launched by Insper alumni that have received investments in 2022 were the following:
Evino, wine e-commerce, by Ari Gorenstein (MBA Finance student in 2014);
Dolado, management platform for small and medium-sized retailers, by Khalil Yassine (who completed the Engineering program in 2019);
Vittude, online therapy platform, by Tatiana Pimenta, MBA student in 2014;
E-Moving, e-bike subscription platform, by Gabriel Cury Arcon, upper-level student of Administration;
Salú, health startup, by André Boff, student of Administration;
Talura, international freight marketplace, by Arthur Kwang (who completed the Mechatronics Engineering program in 2019);
QI Tech, technology company focused on financial services, by Marcelo Bentivoglio, who graduated in Economics in 2012; and
3778, startup expert in health technology, by Guilherme Salgado, former Executive MBA student.
Others that also raised funds, though without disclosing values, are B.O.B., the cosmetics company owned by Andreia Quércia, former student of Administration, and Greentable, the healthy food platform owned by Pedro Semeoni, also a former upper-level student of Administration.
Additionally, Alexandre Liuzzi, upper-level student of Economics who graduated in 2005, sold his company Remessa Online for BRL 1.2 billion — an operation regarded as a business round by Distrito Dataminer, the data intelligence arm of the innovation platform Distrito.
“With the increasing number of undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as the infrastructure available to develop students determined to be entrepreneurs, we can expect an even greater increase in the number of successful startups launched by Insper students”, concludes Kallás.
