Roberto Fermino, of Brazil, is one of the millions of students around the world participating in Global Entrepreneurship Week Nov. 15-21. He is an entrepreneur in e-commerce and helps coordinate entrepreneurship activities at the Universidade de São Paulo (www.usp.br). (He also wishes he had 30-hour days to finish his engineering degree.) You can follow Roberto on twitter @RobertoFermino.

This blog is part of a series of young entrepreneurs profiled on the New Enterprise blog at America.gov

As many enterpreneurs, I have failed in new projects more than I have triumphed. But as in the stock market logic, I learned to set the stop-loss limits wisely and liquidate the maximized earnings. The comparison ends here, because in entrepreneurship you can play with building the future, not limiting yourself to observe some numbers in an electronic panel.

It’s toward the future that entrepreneurship moves me, creating a scenario for a better tomorrow. In this context, I am in love with new projects that I have been helping to build at “my” University, Universidade de São Paulo (USP). The aim is to identify and support many activities throughout the University, creating a group to promote enterpreneurship.

There are many years of work ahead of us, as there are almost 100,000 students in seven cities, eleven campuses and dozens of facilities. Harvard, for instance, has one fifth of the students USP has. On our campuses, as at Harvard, there are real enterpreneurs — fantastic, committed people, working on amazing projects. I hope to help their projects succeed.

We solved part of this problem with an online platform for crowdsourcing. At this platform people can share ideas and projects, and it brings entrepreneurs separated by physical barriers closer. Junior Enterprises and local Entrepreneurship Clubs have also been successful in organizing different events and spreading the entrepreneurial culture.

I believe we are on the right path and I intend to keep playing with building the future, helping to strengthen these projects and always accepting new challenges. Furthermore, I’d like to conclude by sharing a piece of advice that changed my way of seeing things: “Help build something important, do volunteer work and your rewards will go beyond what money can buy.”

• University of Sao Paulo (English and Portuguese)
• USP social network for new businesses (Portuguese)

tags: profile