After a stint in Silicon Valley, entrepreneur Bel Pesce is teaching Brazilians to embrace innovation one download at a time
+ READ ARTICLEOn the second floor of a nondescript office building in the center of São Paulo is a circular, glass-walled classroom lined with yellow armchairs. If the aesthetic and layout are reminiscent of Silicon Valley, that’s entirely intentional. Welcome to FazINOVA, a private business school founded in 2013 by 26-year-old entrepreneur Bel Pesce, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who is trying to inject dotcom, can-do energy into the Brazilian economy.
FazINOVA — or DoINNOVATE, in English — is as much a start-up as a college and is intended to act as an example to its students, many of whom come from an emergent lower middle class into which millions of poor Brazilians have migrated over the last decade. They are now trying to tap into Brazil’s growing entrepreneurial sector and so far, nearly 70,000 students have taken the for-profit school’s free online classes. Almost 2,000 more have paid to attend six-month-long courses at FazINOVA’s premises in São Paulo.