James WynneJournal #1
After much preparation, the day has arrived where I’m finally in Sao Paulo. This is the beginning of seventh week of my internship and I have spent the first six weeks doing research and performing interviews in New York City as I was preparing a presentation that I will give for a startup media/marketing company based here in Brazil. The last 24 hours have been fairly eventful, as I, like many business school students, tend to leave the details for the last minute. My last meeting to prepare for the trip actually occurred several hours before my flight left at 9:30 a.m. at a rooftop bar in Manhattan. A friend who is an alumnus of the MBA program at Sloan/MIT was able to connect me to several of his fellow former students who had worked with the same start-up a year before. They had all come to New York for a friend’s birthday which happened to be the day before I was leaving. Sitting at one of the bottle service tables past midnight on a rainy Saturday, I tried to take a few notes as they told me about their experience in Brazil the year before. In many ways, this was the interview that was the most helpful as I thought of all the many things I still had to pack before I left the next day. They told me of a company that was seeking to revolutionize media and marketing in Brazil and of an entrepreneur named Arnold (pronounced “Arnolj”) who had risen from a humble background to become a successful businessman. They encouraged me to embrace my time in Brazil and to pay attention to the stark contrasts between the haves and have-nots of this rapidly developing country. Finally, they told me that all of the employees of this company, called SubWay Link, were like a family. Everyone felt fortunate to work there and they all shared the vision of a better, more prosperous future for all of Brazil.
Upon my arrival at the airport I was met by one of the SubWay Link workers, a very nice guy named Milton whose English was about as limited as my Portuguese. As we tried to make conversation, the words that we both tended to know were the names of the many multinational brands on the billboards we passed. Brazil is the shining star of South America and one of the most promising markets in the world. As such, there has been an influx of consumer goods targeted at the wealthy even as there are many in the country without access to basic necessities such as clean running water, health care, and education. As we drove through the freeways of Sao Paulo, the financial capital of Brazil and the most prosperous city in South America, the separation between rich and poor was palpable. Luxury cars with leather interiors and custom stereos mixed with old junkers in the stifling traffic of the city. Venders selling cell phone car chargers and football team flags walked in some lanes while others were choked with the ever-present motorcycles that weaved between cars. On the side of the road where the towering billboards rose out of the ground to advertise electronics and vacation homes, small fires were scattered about where the poor were burning trash for heat. I was excited to be in Brazil but, even on my first day, the challenges in the country were obvious.
