Brazil is far from being a country lacking in talent, but it lacks the right environment. Just look at where highly qualified Brazilians manage to reach their full potential: almost always outside its borders. Scientists, entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators who thrive, lead, and create global impact abroad are the same ones who, here, face enough barriers to never get anywhere.
This phenomenon is often called "brain drain," but the term greatly softens the reality. Brazil not only loses talent, but it also forcefully sends them far away. It pushes them away through legal uncertainty, high interest rates, regulatory instability, punitive bureaucracy, and a culture that distrusts success.
Risk is penalized, ambition is almost always confused with arrogance, and mistakes are treated as moral failings and become memes. In this environment, innovation becomes an act of resistance (not to say madness), not progress. This problem is not just institutional, it's cultural.
Recently, a television presenter stated that the mere nomination of a Brazilian film for an Oscar should already be considered a national victory. The phrase seems harmless, but it reveals a deep-seated and peculiar narrow-mindedness.
In real competitions, there are no consolation prizes. You either win, or you don't. Treating "almost" as a triumph is accepting, beforehand, that winning isn't for us. Who said so?
Concrete examples help to illuminate the diagnosis. Brex, founded by Brazilians, has become a billion-dollar business operated entirely outside the country.
Similarly, Luana Lopes Lara, an entrepreneur who left Brazil to study abroad, built a company overseas valued at approximately US$11 billion. In fact, she became the world's youngest self-made billionaire, proving that yes, we are very powerful.
In both cases, the talent was born here. The business, the environment, and the scale came from elsewhere.
Nubank might be an exception, but it also confirms the rule. Founded in Brazil, the digital bank only managed to grow at a global speed and scale with international capital, governance, and standards from its first investment rounds, led by foreign funds. In other words, even when a business is born here, the decisive impetus usually comes from abroad. I could write for hours about dozens of other cases.
This whole scenario is curious, as it presents a revealing contrast with idolized figures like Ayrton Senna.
Senna didn't compete to "get there." He competed to win. Brazil idolizes him, but rarely replicates the same level of expectation. It admires the exceptional individual, but maintains a system and a culture that stifle those who want to follow the same path.
The national lag in innovation stems not from a lack of human capital, but from an inability to transform it into impact.
As long as the country insists on a system that stifles initiative and distrusts merit, it will continue to watch its best talents achieve abroad what they were never allowed to attempt at home.
* Rubens Mendrone is the founder and CEO of LINDA Lifetech, a Canadian company with operations in Brazil that uses artificial intelligence for the early diagnosis of breast cancer, and was named the best healthtech company in the G20.
