Martín Escobari

The way it really worked is I called my Brazilian friends and I said, can you find a very smart, very attractive Brazilian PhD master somewhere in the Boston area?

And I have someone that will pay her to talk to me.

So I'm still married 25 years later.

The founders of 3G, the original three founders, are incredible people whom I worked with in the beginning of my career.

I once wrote a book.

This is 2003.

The company I had co-founded was going through trouble.

I took some time off, and I wanted to answer the question of how does one make money in countries with so much turbulence?

Brazil in the 90s and in the first decade of the century was incredibly turbulent.

Crisis after crisis after crisis.

Very hard to make, to create wealth, to build companies.

It's like navigating through the fog.

You move very slowly and there's things that can come at you from different ways.

I partner with this professor, this mentor of mine from Harvard College.

He was teaching at Harvard Business School, Don Sol.

And what we did was a paired company analysis.

Look at 10 very successful companies in Brazil that had made tremendous wealth creation in the crazy 90s.

But look at their actions in contrast to 10 much less successful companies during the same period of time.

And the test was, these were pairs of companies that looked similar in size and value at the beginning of the 90s.

But by the end of the 90s, one was at least 5x more valuable than the other.