Waching daily Feb 27 2018

Good morning, my name is Gabriel Costa

from Resultados Digitais and today I'm here with Tallis Gomes,

founder of Easy Taxi and Singu

and chosen by MIT as one of the world's most innovative young people.

Welcome Tallis and thanks a lot.

Thank you for the invitation.

It's a pleasure being at the magic island again.

Cool. Tallis, let's start from the very beginning.

What motivated you to leave the country side of Minas Gerais,

to create a company that is one of the major

entrepreneurial success cases in Brazil?

Saying like that it sounds like a straight line.

-I left... -Very quick, right?

and the next day I was in 35 countries.

That is not true. I became an entrepreneur at 14,

my first company came out of necessity.

I talk about Easy, explain it in details, but I think here is not the place.

My second company

went bankrupt in 9 months.

I was in college. Them I left college

and opened my third company after college,

then I created Easy Taxi

when I was 24 years old, that was my fourth company.

So, it was a very sinuous path.

But my motivation was always to build something big.

I always had that big dream of...

I thought it was possible to do something different,

I've always been very interested in technology.

I wanted to do business with a social aspect

I just didn't know how to connect this with my desire to make money as well.

And with Easy Taxi I was able to put together

business and social aspect,

creating a direct impact on the society

making money as well.

So, I'd say I had a purpose and lots of resilience.

And how did you create Easy Taxi?

What were the major challenges in this path?

Challenges change depending on the company's moment.

At first the major challenge was to be ready

to really be an entrepreneur who can scale the business.

Because anyone can have an idea. I'm sure everybody

who is watching this has had a good idea before

and shared that with some friends,

but then, in the end of the day, they did not make it happen.

This is lack of training, many times lack of attitude as well,

but especially lack of qualification.

They don't know how to make the basic project, scientific,

of hypothesis validation, building a prototype

and then transform that prototype in a beta,

turn this beta into a main version.

It seems easy, but to do this, is quite hard.

So the big challenge at that moment is to get the idea out of the paper.

Then, when you do that,

The big challenge is to find a group of partners.

How to convince capable people

to become part of your partners group, to leave their jobs,

-leave their salaries. -To believe in a dream.

Exactly! To believe in a dream that probably

almost nobody else believes.

And when innovation is disruptive,

the idea tends to be horrible.

People say: there's no way this can happen.

That means it's a tough task to the founder,

to make a co-founder team.

An then to scale the business, Imagine Easy Taxi.

We got our first investment in September 2012.

Over a year after founding the company.

And one year after that we were in almost 20 countries.

So, to scale a business that fast brings a bunch of other challenges,

I talk about these challenges in the book Nada Easy.

I give details about the tools I used that helped me

overcome them. But more than that,

what are the main processes and learnings

I got from each phase of Easy Taxi's construction

so that people can get shortcuts

which I discovered along the way.

Cool. Let's go back a bit, you mentioned qualification,

which is the first step and many times a limiting factor

to the execution of ideas.

How did you prepare yourself?

I dropped out college...

-What was your major? -Marketing at ESPM.

And I dropped out and I built for myself

a grid of the subjects I should learn.

I should learn financial math,

I should learn economics, more specifically

micro and macro, I really wanted to know how to analyze an economic scenario,

I really wanted to be able to analyze reports

to better predict the economic scenario

so that I could make decisions

in the company based on that.

I wanted to know a bit about programming, so I learned Phyton.

I wanted to know a lot about management, a lot.

So, Harvard Business Review.

I may have read almost all papers they have.

Khan Academy, I learned lots of math in Khan Academy.

I learned programming in Khan Academy.

Udacity. There I studied management,

and economy.

So, I built my curriculum

and looked for these contents, learning constantly

and I got a lot from people as well, I'm a very curious guy.

I accessed a lot of people who had a lot to teach me

and with that, I learned a lot.

After you left Easy Taxi,

you created Singu. First, explain to us

what is Singu and what motivated you to create that company.

Singu is a meritocratic mechanism for social ascending.

I, as a libertarian, always say we must "walk the talk".

I always say there are ways that the private sector

can create a business, which encourages people

not to depend on the State. And how do we do that?

Giving people opportunities to grow.

You create a business that makes these people understand

through their own effort, that they can change their reality.

And Singu is just that. My mother is a hair dresser.

So, I know how this segment works.

This segment exploits professionals.

Beauty parlors get 70% of these professionals pay

and we wanted to turn that around, stay with 30% and give them 70%.

And allow this people to work every day if they so desire.

That is different than the market that closes on Sundays and Mondays.

They can start working very early in the morning

and go until late in the evening if the so desire.

And what encourage me to do that?

To change people's reality.

Sometimes we get people, single moms, from poor communities,

extremely poor, obviously, and change their reality

in metter of months. There are manicurists working with us

making R$ 6 thousand a month.

That changed these women's lives completely.

Singu was about that, you know?

I was proving my point, not just for myself,

but to society as well

creating a business that has a real value

to the modern woman who can't find time to go to the parlor,

who doesn't want to waste her weekend

and that woman who can get home at 9PM

and call a manicurist who will be at her home in 2 hours, you know?

You've sent to our group

some examples of manicurists who were able to buy a car.

There are many nice stories of people

ascending socially, which is your purpose, right?

This is the idea. We want that person,

this woman who works with us, or this men

working with us to work on their kids education

so that the poverty cycle in the family can end at that moment.

So that their kids can have a better education,

can eat better.

Can focus on what a teenager, a kid

should focus in order to develop.

We don't need the State for that. We don't need to rob poor people

through taxes and make these people's lives even worse, you know?

We need to do this via private sector,

giving these people opportunities.

Tallis, Easy has grown incredibly

and Singu is also growing in an unbelievable pace.

What is the role of a strong culture

in the growth of these two companies?

How do you not only create

but keep this culture when you start hiring more people

and the company grows?

Leadership is always responsible for carrying the culture.

Culture is a set of habits

founders start to create inside the company

and the first employees follow the founders,

absorb this set of habits and make that

something they carry inside the company.

To anyone who comes in, they pass this set of values.

It's important to say that because people think culture

is to say a bunch of cute things, write a cute text,

make a sign on the wall with mission, vision and values.

Nobody reads that, nobody cares for that.

Culture is a set of values, period.

Culture is what happens when you're not in the room,

when you are not in the company, period.

I always do what I did at Singu.

It's "walk the talk". So I say, for example,

our culture at Singu is to work hard,

never to deliver a ticket after the deadline.

I'm not going to have mine late,

otherwise, I open space for others to do the same.

I'm always the example.

I worry a lot about leaders.

How much they can "walk the talk".

Because this is the only way to keep a culture.

You can imagine Easy Taxi cases, for example.

35 different countries, 34 cultures that are different from mine,

giant geographical differences, since we are in 4 continents,

how do you keep the culture?

Then you see the second point: communication.

Things we think are obvious to people, are not

We need to communicate each detail,

massively.

Let's remember that in this company we do it this way.

We do things in this way.

And constantly communicate that.

Repeat, repeat, repeat to the leadership

so that they can do the same with employees.

That's the only way you can keep a culture

on what you believe no matter if it's growth or other values.

Cool.

To finish, you published a book

a few months ago, August or September, I think.

Tell us a bit about this book.

What is the idea, how did you get it

and more importantly, to who should read it.

I wrote in Nada Easy everything I'd like to have heard

when I started in business.

But I went a little further.

In the beginning I though: I think I'm going to write

to people starting a business.

Then, in the middle of the book I said: but I have to talk

to people scaling a business,

who is building a team, improving metrics.

And at the end, also because of a conversation with Eric,

Eric RD's CEO called me

and said: I'm scaling to other countries

and brought a bunch of doubts. We talked for one hour

and that talk became the last part of the book.

I said: I also need to write

about how I scaled this company to other countries,

what strong points made me scale,

what were the major learnings I got

with the developed company

in order to communicate the company's culture,

what did I learn at exit moment,

what should I have done before.

So, the book speaks with all kids of entrepreneur

and mainly with executives

who want to implement innovative processes in their businesses.

It's for these people.

It's all I'd like to have heard

in different phases as an entrepreneur.

It's important to say that the book

is the country's second best seller in the business segment.

So, I recommend it a lot to people starting businesses.

Many people ask me questions

that are answered in Nada Easy and I say: read Nada Easy, man.

Nada Easy is a quite honest book,

straight to the point, no beating around the bush.

It's exactly who I am.

Direct, clear e and simple.

I read it and I recommend it a lot. It's also polemic.

You forgot to mention this word.

-As usual, just like me. -Right!

Thank you very much, I'm very happy with this interview.

Thanks for the visit and I wish you success with Singu and your book.

It was a pleasure coming here. Thanks guys!