StartSe - a thirty-real course from a living room in Minas, and the missions to Silicon Valley

It began as the smallest possible product. In 2015, in the interior of Minas Gerais, Junior Borneli and Joao Evaristo sold a two-hour online course called Startup de A a Z for thirty reais, taught from Borneli's living room to entrepreneurs who wanted to understand what a startup was. The plan was a digital-education company. What happened instead is the interesting part: four former partners of XP Investimentos - Pedro Englert, Marcelo Maisonnave, Eduardo Glitz and Mauricio Benvenutti - bought in with 800,000 reais, Englert became chief executive, and the product turned into something the founders had not planned: the mission.

A mission is a week in Silicon Valley, later also in China and Israel, spent not in a classroom but in visits to accelerators, incubators and technology companies, sold to Brazilian executives and business owners as an immersion in what the company called the new economy. From August 2016 it became the core of the business, with events for individual industries around it. Monthly revenue went from 80,000 to 500,000 reais in the first stretch; in 2019 the company spent five million reais on a five-hundred-square-metre campus in Palo Alto with a classroom for a hundred and an artificial-intelligence laboratory, and opened branches in Sao Paulo and Shanghai. The chief executive's stated premise was that traditional education had become obsolete, and that the question had moved from where you studied to how you keep developing.

The pandemic stopped the travel that the model depended on, and the company's own account of that year is a mea culpa and a turn back toward the online courses it had started with, translated into four languages and distributed through partners abroad, the first a Portuguese business school. Borneli took the chief executive's chair back in July 2020.

The reason it belongs beside the vendor training centres is the contrast. An authorised training centre sells a manufacturer's curriculum, delivered by an instructor the manufacturer has certified, to people who need to operate the product. StartSe sold proximity: a week in the place where the products are made, to people who wanted to understand the culture that made them. The first kind of training tells you how a thing works. The second tells you what it is like where the thing came from - and for a Brazilian executive in 2017 that was, at the price, the scarcer commodity.

The company did not stay independent. Alura's own account records that in 2020 and 2022 StartSe joined Alura, FIAP and PM3 in what the group calls the largest technology-education ecosystem in Latin America, which took the name Grupo Alun in 2025. The living-room course, the missions and the Palo Alto campus now sit inside the same group as Brazil's largest online technology school and one of its technology universities; the Alura entry has the rest of that story.