ArpexCapital

Before I left for Brazil last week I set up the blog to post my tweets.  Looking at them yesterday, with a couple of days distance from the trip, I realized they didn’t fit on the blog so I deleted them.  The blog is meant to be an interesting look at venture capital in Brazil and I can’t post meaningful info when limited to 140 characters.  Posting random thoughts on, e.g., coffee,  doesn’t contribute to discussions on VC in Brazil.

Anyway, I’ll continue to play around with Twitter (tedrogers1) but it will be completely separate from the blog.

What an intense week. I expected to be blogging from Brazil but there was no time.  Just time for some ridiculous Twittering.  It was a productive week, though, with good meetings at

• Porto Digital (the IT tech park in Recife)
• ABDI and APEX agencies  in Brasilia
• Criatec seed fund, FINEP (innovation agency) and PUC-Genesis incubator in Rio
• CIETEC incubator at the University of Sao Paulo — the largest incubator by far in Brazil — and DGF Investmentos, a VC and PE firm in Sao Paulo.  

Tomorrow I have one more day of meetings in Minas Gerais, then head home tomorrow night.

More detail later.

Flew DC to Miami, connected, then stopped over in Salvador before arriving in Recife at 9:10am this morning.  Long trip.

I was bummed to check ESPN mobile and see that the Maryland Terps got blown out by Memphis.  Oh well, after tonight all but 16 teams and their fans will be bummed.  That’s sports.

My impressions of Recife: hot, tropical – we are definitely close to the equator.  The overall feel reminds me a lot of the Caribbean, much moreso than Rio and the other parts of Brazil that I have visited.  The city does remind me of Rio, however, in that it pushes right up to the water.  On the other hand, it lacks Rio’s lush mountains/rain forest to break up the lines of high-rises.  Also, the beaches are narrower.  Nice place, though, and I am not complaining — took a jog on the beach and had an agua de coco.  A little slice of heaven.

I am looking forward to seeing the old part of the city tomorrow.   Porto Digital, which I will be visiting, is now a tech park focused on software development.  To build it, they recaptured an colonial port through which the majority of Brazil’s sugar used to be shipped.  Should be “legal” (cool).

I installed a plug-in that turns my tweets into blog posts.  That’s why the titles of some recent posts look funny.  Not sure about this, we’ll see…