From 7 Startup Weekends to 27: What São Paulo Taught Me About Building Startup Communities, and How We Took It to Portugal | Techstars

By Fernando Jardim, President of the 351 Portuguese Startup Association and International Personality of the Year 2026 (Unicorn Factory Lisboa)
Fernando Jardim started as a Techstars Startup Weekend organizer in São Paulo. Ten years later, he shares how a volunteer-run community grew the city’s startup scene, how he brought the same playbook to Portugal, and what he’d tell any community leader starting out.
I was born in the Techstars community. Not literally, but almost everything I have built in the last 10 years started at a Startup Weekend in São Paulo.
In 2016, São Paulo had talent, money and ambition, but it did not have a working startup community. The city ran only 7 Techstars Startup Weekends a year, and Brazil had no unicorns. Founders kept failing for the same reasons, and they failed alone.
A small group decided that made no sense. It was mostly Startup Weekend leaders and organisers, together with serial entrepreneurs, founders and investors. We did not wait for a government programme or an accelerator. We sat down and built a strategy together, from the ground up.
The method was simple: list what founders are missing, then fill each gap with something the community runs itself.
Everything was open source. If someone saw a gap and wanted to create something, they could. There was no formal constitution and no single owner. That community became 011, after São Paulo's area code.
By 2019, São Paulo went from 7 to 27 Startup Weekends a year. That number hides a lot of work. Every Startup Weekend is a small company for a few weeks: a volunteer team finds a venue, mentors, judges and sponsors, sells tickets and runs 54 hours of building. Going to 27 means dozens of teams doing that at once.
The community grew from a handful of people to more than 100 volunteers, and to more than 300 today.
Then something started to happen that we had hoped for. The founders who came to their first Startup Weekend or their first Silicon Drinkabout began to succeed. Some of them built scaleups. Brazil got its first unicorns: five in 2018, then five more in 2019.
The people who succeeded gave back. Founders who had grown started programmes for the next level of founders, and the successful ones ran programmes for early-stage founders too. That is the funnel: keep a big pipeline of founders coming in at the top, help them move up, and the ones who make it build the next layer for everyone behind them.
We saw the same pattern at São Paulo Tech Week, which grew to 300 events, many of them run by community leaders. Almost none of those leaders were known names five years earlier. They had come to a Startup Weekend or a Silicon Drinkabout, found the community, grew, and became the experts the ecosystem now relies on.
Today 011 connects more than 2,000 startups, 20+ innovation hubs, and many mentors and experts. Some members were so proud of it that they tattooed the 011 logo. For three years in a row, it was named the best entrepreneurship community in Brazil, ahead of programmes with large public budgets.
I moved to Lisbon in 2019, first to Beta-i and then to Lisbon City Council, bringing founders, investors and companies to the city. I started 351, the Portuguese Startup Association, as a one-person effort. Everything we did was built on what São Paulo taught us.
Today, 351 is Portugal's largest startup community, with more than 3,000 members. More than 100 volunteers have run its initiatives over the years. This week, Unicorn Factory Lisboa named me International Personality of the Year. I accepted it on behalf of those volunteers, because none of this is a one-person job.
Fernando Jardim is President of the 351 Portuguese Startup Association, co-founder of Founder Institute Portugal and a Techstars Community All-Star (2023). He started as a Startup Weekend organiser in São Paulo.
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