Paloma Lecheta | Brazil's First Free City
“If you’re ruthless about figuring it out, people will support you. And it’s a matter of execution, right? So are we going to be the crazy or are we going to be the visionaries? It all comes down to executing and getting it done… and it being okay if it fails.”
Episode 181
Paloma Lecheta is a Brazilian entrepreneur and co-founder of Founder Haus, a hub for what she calls healthy entrepreneurship in Jurerê Internacional, a private neighbourhood on the island of Florianópolis. After accelerating around 1,800 startups across Brazil, she is now part of a small group of founders trying to do for Brazil what Próspera is doing for Honduras — turn a quietly functioning private development into a formally recognised Free City.
Timothy Allen sits down with Paloma at Próspera in Honduras for a conversation about the 45-year-old Brazilian neighbourhood that has been running its own water, sewage, security and urban planning since 1980, the visionary banker who built it from raw beach scrub, and the new generation of founders now trying to give it the legal autonomy to match. The result is a story of a Free City that already exists, mostly hiding in plain sight, and the people quietly trying to formalise it before the rest of the world notices.
Key topics covered
- The story of Péricles de Freitas Druck, the Brazilian banker who built a private city in 1980 with no reference points, 45 years before the charter cities movement existed
- Why philanthropy often fails to solve the problems it claims to, and why business may be the better tool
- Healthy entrepreneurship: why founder burnout is a business problem, not just a personal one
- How Jurerê Internacional privatised water, sewage, security and urban planning while staying within Brazilian law
- The brain drain problem: 1,200 millionaires left Brazil last year, and why most of them didn’t want to
- Floripa 10, the proposed Digital Economic Zone that would give Jurerê formal regulatory autonomy
- Ipê City, Brazil’s first pop-up city, and how Founder Haus, Peerbase and Tools for the Commons are stacking experiments on top of each other
- Why the difference between crazy and visionary is execution
Enjoy the conversation.