How Prosus CEO Builds Winning Tech Culture | Fabricio Bloisi

**Fabricio Bloisi** (0:00)
If you are an American, it's so easy to raise more money, and you have many people making bets and taking risks. But if you look to Brazil or Europe or Africa, you don't have a lot of capital and this capability of learning fast and hiring and moving faster.

**Henrique Dubugras** (0:14)
This week, we have Brazil's 2025 person of the year, Fabricio Bloisi. He led one of Latin America's most valuable tech startups, iFood, and is now the CEO of Prosus, the global tech group behind some of the biggest internet businesses outside the US.

**Fabricio Bloisi** (0:28)
As a tech company, we run culture, management model, and innovation globally. So we select people, we train them, we put all of them together, we share every week what's happening in all the world with all the leaders, tell all the other leaders of the companies around the world what is working, and share that. Great companies in Brazil or even in Europe, they don't have the ecosystem that like Google, or Microsoft, or Meta have here in the US.

**Henrique Dubugras** (0:52)
Prosus builds and scales tech platforms everywhere, technology is growing fast. The next wave of tech leadership isn't about copying the US, but about building systems that work everywhere.

**Fabricio Bloisi** (1:01)
I think the Americans sometimes underestimate what is happening outside. The Chinese are not copying, they are innovating to operate a big business with thousands of people and millions of orders per month. They have to be super good to do that.

**Henrique Dubugras** (1:13)
I'm Henrique Dubugras, and welcome to HD in HD.
This episode is brought to you by Brex, a brand I'm proud to have co-founded and one that's shaped by the same journey many of you are on. Brex has everything startups and fast-growing companies need to make every dollar count, from modern corporate cards, banking and treasury, to accounting automation, travel and expenses. Over 25,000 companies, including DoorDash, Scale AI and Anthropic spend smarter using Brex. Fabricio, thank you so much for doing this, man.

**Fabricio Bloisi** (1:44)
Hello, big pleasure to be here with you.

**Henrique Dubugras** (1:47)
Really appreciate it. I was actually trying to remember the first time we met, and I think it was actually one of Veronica's dinners.

**Fabricio Bloisi** (1:54)
Exactly. I think Veronica's dinner, Veronica connected us many years ago.

**Henrique Dubugras** (1:59)
Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And I remember because iFood was just, I guess, kind of starting out, and I remember asking about it. It's like, oh yeah, it's like one of these seven businesses that we do, and it came from this like, all their mobile company, you know, like, and I was like, oh wow, this guy can do a lot, you know, this is like a real serial entrepreneur.

**Fabricio Bloisi** (2:20)
Yes. Now I'm doing like 120 So that time was just 10

**Henrique Dubugras** (2:24)
So it was easy. But maybe, maybe take us a little bit of the story, right? Like, how did it all start out?

**Fabricio Bloisi** (2:30)
Yeah, actually, I'm the founder of a company called Movile. So I'm from Bahia in Brazil. I traveled to some power study, computer science, and created this company just when I graduated called Movile. And we were doing mobile content, so services in mobile phones.

**Henrique Dubugras** (2:45)
How did that start? How did you have that idea? Like, was it your first job after college?

**Fabricio Bloisi** (2:49)
Yes. I never worked in another company that was not the Movile and everything we did before. And in Bahia, I was always passionate about Bill Gates' story and how he created Microsoft and Computers and Computer Science. I'm a programmer since I was eight years old. So I always had this dream of I'm going to create a very big global tech company. Since I was 14, 15

**Henrique Dubugras** (3:17)
Wow.

**Fabricio Bloisi** (3:18)
Then I moved to São Paulo to study Computer Science. I created my company. But the idea was not specifically mobile content. I started iterating and having ideas. I said, I'm going to create a very big company.
I think one year after everything started on mobile. But by that time, it was SMS and WAPT, this kind of thing.

**Henrique Dubugras** (3:39)
So give us some context of what was the technology? What year is this? What was the technology going on at the time?

**Fabricio Bloisi** (3:44)
It was around 2000 Mobile by that time, it was sending text message and receiving a ringtone, or participating in a chat, or a dating app, or receiving news in your mobile phone, text news.

**Henrique Dubugras** (3:57)
For those who are younger, maybe explain why that happened. What was the, how were phones back then, and what were people liking these things?