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Here’s the new Geração de Valor video.
Today’s program will be slightly different
I am here next to Bel Pesce Mattos,
a Brazilian girl who is doing very well in Silicon Valley, California.
She’s an electrical engineering major, come on, help me out here…
Computing science, business, a little bit of everything.
– Math, too. – Economics.
No more, no less than from the MIT, the world’s most important institute of technology.
And today’s Geração de Valor will be about the story of Isabel,
who is doing great in the United States. So tell me.
First of all, thanks a lot for inviting me.
I think it’s an interesting story to share with you all. I only met Flavio yesterday,
I’ve always watched the Geração de Valor channel, always liked it a lot.
You’re a GV, then?
Totally GV, that’s me.
I learned he was in Buenos Aires, I was going to Buenos Aires too,
I sent him a message, overnight, let’s have some coffee together, shall we?
And it’s become this video. So thanks for having me, it’s an honor to be here with you.
Like I said, when did you graduate, Isabel?
Last year, actually.
You graduated in 2010?
2010. But halfway through the year, not in the beginning.
And you are twenty…
Twenty-three, twenty-three years old.
Tell me a little about you family, Isabel, what’s it like?
Is it a rich family, a middle class family?
I have a wonderful family, a middle class family, nothing extreme,
typical middle class family that is always struggling to give their children the best,
but not in terms of material stuff, that’s hard to do nowadays. But they do everything they can.
I have wonderful parents; the only thing we never had a shortage of at home is love.
And I have a younger sister who is my best friend.
And where did you go to school? What was it like in elementary school?
High school? Did you go to an American school?
– No, no. – International school?
I didn’t even know there was such a thing.
I went to a local school called Anglo Latino,
in Aclimação, I studied eight years there.
As I liked math a lot, I got a scholarship at Etapa,
a very good school in São Paulo, and I said,
“Great. I can study at Etapa. So I went to Etapa and that’s where I went to high school”.
Right. And you also mentioned before that your goal was to get into ITA,
Instituto Tecnológico da Aeronáutica.
If you don’t know what it is, it’s one of the best institutes of technology, especially airplanes,
and a lot of students who graduated from ITA have gone on to work for NASA,
a lot of them, it’s renowned internationally. So you set your mind on getting into ITA.
I dreamed of becoming a pilot, but that would be hard for me
because I don’t have the very best vision of the world,
so that wouldn’t work out very well.
But I said, “I like engineering, I like technology, I like numbers,
so building planes is a great option, too!”
It’s related to everything you like.
It’s nice, it’s a challenge, it’s something I’m going to learn a lot about in a great school,
so I set my mind on preparing myself for ITA.
But something changed and suddenly you learn about MIT.
Yeah, it’s very interesting, because I actually thought that an American school
was something for American citizens only, not for me.
– An American university. – An American university, exactly.
I didn’t think you could leave a Brazilian school after all this.
And you had no idea how much it would cost you either.
No, no. That was a surprise, too.
Because in Brazil you try to get into a public university, there are excellent public universities,
whereas over there they have this notion that some of their best schools are very expensive.
And how did you manage to get in?
You mentioned earlier that that year’s application season was through already.
Tell me how it happened, because that’s a very important story to me.
It was funny, because when I heard about this interview thing and this IT,
I actually missed it, the final process,
I actually had to turn in my application on the first of January, 2006.
And there was this friend of mine who had also gone to Etapa and he was applying,
he had done the interview and I asked him, “Who did you talk to?
I need that guy’s number, his address”.
So he gave me the guy’s address and I said, “You know what?
I’m going to show up at the interviewer’s place”. He lived in São Paulo.
You went to the interviewer’splace?
Didn’t he call the police or something?
And you don’t even know what the interview’s going to be like,
because we don’t have interviews here in Brazil to get into college, so I thought,
“But what is this interview?” I didn’t know. But there was no time to try to find out,
because I was out of time, out of time.
So what did I do? I got a cardboard box
that was bigger than me, I was seventeen at the time.
You were seventeen back then.
Seventeen, yeah.
That was in December, 2005.
I put everything I had ever produced in my life in that cardboard box.
So the guy opened the door and then what?
So he opened the door, and I had sent him an email
to try to explain my situation to him, but there wasn’t time so I was on my way.
I said, “I’m applying for MIT, I’m very interested in the school,
but I am a little behind on the whole process.
So he looked at me and explained:
“Look, it’s a little complicated, because this year we have already interviewed
a number of people from São Paulo, 35 people, I think,
very well-prepared people, of course, because they had made it this far.
– They had been pre-approved. – Extremely well-prepared, that’s for sure.
He said, “You need to write a report to be sent to MIT”.
I had written the reports, but I was a little behind, right?
But then he saw the box, right? So he asked me, “What is this?”
So I said, “Man, I placed my whole life in here, I’ve brought everything because I wanted you to,
you can ask me anything you want to,
I want to prove to you that I deserve this opportunity and that I am going to do my best
and that I am going to change the world after I get into MIT”.
In other words, when he realized you weren’t there to rob him, he asked you in,
– let me see what you’ve got in that box. – He even said, he was very cute, he even said,
“My God, you’re just like my wife, she keeps all these things,
how do you still have all that?”
And I literally got into his house, he sat at a table,
I took the box and emptied it on the table and said,
“Ask me whatever you want to, it’s all there”.
And that was how it started, it was a great talk.
Let’s take a break now, Isabel.
We’re running low on light, aren’t we? The sunset is practically over.
– Buenos Aires sunset. – Buenos Aires sunset.
So we’ll take a break and we’ll be right back somewhere where the light’s better.
Hold on.
Well, we’re back now, the light’s a little better so we can continue to talk to Isabel Pesce Mattos.
And I cannot help but talk about Isabel’s profile.
It’s clear we’re talking to an extremely intelligent person.
As a matter of fact, there are lots of intelligent people in the world, a lot of brilliant people, right?
Some people are actually born with a gift, some paint,
some sing, some people, they are simply a little more intelligent.
But it’s clear that by listening to Isabel,
you realize we’re not only talking about mathematical intelligence
or logical intelligence,
we’re also talking about someone who’s very determined, someone who learned about MIT,
got to know how it worked, but had missed her deadline,
check out how many obstacles she had to overcome. Most people would have given up.
The interview, she knocked on the guy’s door.
How many people would have thought,
“I don’t want to bother him, I’m going to knock on his door, he’s going to tell me no”?
I mean, there was a chance he wouldn’t even answer the door,
but that didn’t stop her. There was a risk her initiative would be misunderstood,
she could be turned down, he could be rude, he could be impolite to her, right?
She took her chances. Why? She wanted it, she had a goal and she went there.
She overcame all the adversities there and managed to gain his trust.
And besides, her competence played a major role, her results,
the grades she had gotten, her educational background.
That is the kind of profile of a person who wants to achieve something,
I cannot help saying that, Isabel, because…
Flávio is embarrassing me here…
Behind an intelligent girl, we have here a person who struggled
to get what she wanted.
– Let’s move on to the next chapter? – Sure, now that you’ve made me so uncomfortable.
Now you’re uncomfortable? Let’s move on to the next chapter.
Somebody on Facebook asked me,
José Vicente from Facebook, a GV as well, a colleague of mine,
he asked me how someone who has gone to MIT,
who has studied technology, will ever be interested in entrepreneurism,
which demands a lot from human relations. How did that shift happen?
Very interesting question. MIT actually also encourages entrepreneurism.
I’m not sure what the number is, but a high percentage
of the American GDP actually comes from companies that were started by MIT alumni.
Of course they encourage business a lot more, but I’ve always loved people,
that’s why I was taking so many courses, because I couldn’t make up my mind.
So you took business and economics.
I did, I did. I got a business degree because I really loved it, you know?
It’s not unusual, here on Facebook,
for us to talk about what you produce with knowledge, which is, in fact, the main objective.
Knowledge is the means, right? What you do with your knowledge is the goal,
which is what will give you a sense of achievement and even results, right?
So what motivated you back then
was the desire to put things to work, but you couldn’t work for Google,
which is a good place to work.
It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s a wonderfun company,
but as I wandered in the campus, a wonderful campus,
I saw all that and everyone was saying, “Man, I want to work here”.
I saw that and I said, “I want to start a business just like this one”.
Whenever I saw a big enterprise, my mind would go,
imagine how nice it is when Sergey and Larry,
the founders of Google, walk by and see what they’ve accomplished.
I didn’t think it would be great to work there, I thought it would be great to do that.
With that in mind, I was living this double existence,
programming in the morning and in the afternoon,
and in the evening, in every entrepreneurism event I attended,
I ran into a lot of people that were starting out in the company
and my heart decided,
“Bel, this isn’t going to work out. You won’t last a year here because you want to start your own thing”.
So I ended up meeting some folks who had left Google a year before
to start a video company called Wuala,
a company where only twenty people were working at the time.
And what did you do in that company?
It started really small, I had a team that consisted of two engineers in the beginning.
My team, in a really nice company. I saw it go from twenty to 200 employees.
My teams, I ended up with two teams, you know? There were a lot more engineers.
How many people did you end up coordinating there?
Look, I think when I left I had two teams, about twenty people.
You were coordinating a huge team, in Silicon Valley, the way you wanted to,
all you had to do was go back to MIT for three months, get your Master’s Degree,
so why did you leave it all behind?
– I listened to my heart. – Well, did you leave it all behind?
Left it all behind.
– Here’s a question: did you leave it all behind? – Left it all behind.
Do you understand this? She left her Master’s, left her job.
Have you ever been called crazy?
Yeah, I have. I want to make something clear: what is calculated risk
and what is listening to your heart?
I think I had it made, it was all going well, it was wonderful.
Wuala is great, they got a lot of investments, you know?
Forty-four million in investments, great clients,
all of ESPN’s properties, the sports channel,
all the online videos you see on ESPN is our technology,
so, wow, I just left them and I still call it ours, Wuala.
So, great company, very cool culture, the founders had come from Google, from Stanford,
they wanted to come up with the next Google, great company.
But it wasn’t my company, right? I wanted to start my company.
I think something that’s interesting is that it was growing, developing.
I was learning a lot about processes, which is extremely relevant,
but I wanted to learn how to start from scratch,
that’s what I wanted now.
So other opportunities came up and I listened to my heart.
– And you’re on your current project? – I’m on my current project.
But how did this current project come to be?
We’ll talk about this current project that Isabel is working on.
You’re the co-founder of this company, right? In Palo Alto.
Palo Alto, right.
Headquarter in Palo Alto and offices in Buenos Aires.
There are offices in Buenos Aires for our engineers in Buenos Aires.
So a month and a half ago you started as a partner in this company.
It’s called Lemon,
L-E-M-O-N, I’m advertising, right? Lemon.com, you can check us out.
What we’ve got so far, it’s so young, less than two months old,
we’ve got a telephone app,
which you can use to photograph a receipt.
So, imagine, you go out to dinner, you have your receipt,
instead of keeping it and filling up your wallet…
You make it digital.
You photograph that, so we make it all digital.
So you use a telephone app, take a picture,
we make it digital and available in the cloud.
So you can look up the old ones, classify them, you’re spending money.
So you get organized and control your personal finances.
And there’s much more. This is just the beginning, there are lots of plans, you know?
But take a look at our website,
we’ve got lots of plans, we’re planning to release a new service next week.
Isabel is a determined individual, fighting for her dreams.
She had a supporting family, but not a family that could pay for her dream.
She struggled, worked hard, and did her best,
achieving a lot more than a regular MIT student,
getting to be where she is now.
Now we know, right, Isabel? You will be put to the test on everything you’ve studied.
– This is the moment of truth. – This is the moment of truth.
And this is only the beginning, right? There’s a lot more.
Academic life is the means and now this is your turn.
I am sure if you stay humble, if you preserve this attitude, you are going to go far,
and don’t forget to tell us here on GV.
You can do more, you can be more, and that’s why GV is here.
The Geração deValor project is here to bring you stories like this
and share knowledge with you so you’ll make it happen.
Don’t let it become a passing thing, this isn’t self-help,
this isn’t some cute word to get you excited, that is not actually worth very much.
But if you find inspiration in stories of people who made it, and Isabel
is a 23-year-old Brazilian girl, here in Buenos Aires, who lives in California,
visiting her company’s offices in Buenos Aires,
a project that she is working on.
So if she can, my friend, so can you.
That’s for sure.
– See you next time, everyone. Bye bye. – Bye, everyone, thank you.�