Fabio Akita wants Brazilian businesses to fail. Really.
The Ruby on Rails evangelist and apostle of agile management also thinks that while nine out of 10 Brazilian startups will probably fail, this is good for business overall. The quicker flaws are exposed, the sooner people can go about fixing them. “Having no problems is a problem,” Akita said. “You can’t improve if you assume you are not making mistakes.”
On a blissful evening in the depths of *cough* winter, we met at a lively cafe on Paulista Ave, to discuss the language and lifestyle of Ruby on Rails programming, as well as what barriers must be broken for Brazilian companies to take their place on the world stage. Besides the typical culprit, stifling bureaucracy and its attendant cronyism, inefficiency and top-down management, Akita said Brazilians have been programmed not to take risks. In spite of the pitfalls, entrepreneurs just think differently. “If they are entrepreneurs, they will try anything to make their dreams come true,” said Akita.
Fabio Akita is the author of the first book on Rails created for a Brazilian audience and a product manager at Locaweb – the largest web hosting company in Brazil, with the mission to make Rails ubiquitous in the Latin American open source community, according to his profile on Working With Rails.