There has never been more written about Brazil, and I have never met so many people arriving with the wrong picture of it.
The reports are mostly fine. The trouble is that a report answers the question somebody asked when they commissioned it, and by the time you read it the market has moved. This country does not hold still for a PDF.
The other trouble is that the people who know things do not write them down. The person who knows which of three retailers will integrate a partner this year, or which regulator is about to change her mind, or which founder is about to lose his co-founder, is not publishing. She mentioned it at lunch. If you were not at the lunch you are reading something that was out of date before it was printed.
So the intelligence that decides outcomes travels through relationships, and it travels in one direction: toward people who have shown they can be told things. That is why I treat discretion as the method and not as good manners. Repeat one thing you should not have and the supply stops, and nobody tells you it stopped. You just start hearing the official version of everything, and you may not notice for a year.
At Atomico we kept an office in São Paulo when most foreign funds flew people in for a week. Finding deals was never the point of the office; that was a distant second. The point was to be close enough to the market, and to the companies we had backed, that we knew what they needed before they wrote the email. A map drawn in London is a map. A map drawn on the Faria Lima and corrected every week by people who owe you a straight answer is something else.
If you are buying intelligence about this region, three questions are worth asking.
Ask who the source would call to check it. If the answer is a database, you have bought a report. If the answer is a name, you have bought the beginning of something.
Ask when the source was last wrong, and how they found out. Intelligence that has never been corrected has never been used.
Ask what it would cost the source to tell you the uncomfortable version. People paid by the introduction or by the deal have a reason to tell you the market is ready. People who will still be here in ten years have a reason to tell you the truth, because they will have to look at you again.
I use numbers all day. The numbers will tell you that São Paulo would be the twenty-sixth largest economy in the world if it were a country. They will not tell you which four people in it matter for your problem this year, or that two of them stopped speaking in March. For that there is no document. There is someone who knows, and the question is whether they will tell you.