Public school, and a computer at 13

I was born in 1976 in Alto da Riviera, in the Capão Redondo area of São Paulo. I grew up in a modest family, the son of a teacher and a pastry cook, and went to public school my whole life.

The turning point came early. At 13 I had the chance to study basic programming, and that changed everything. At 14 I started working as a junior programmer, and from then on I kept teaching myself.

That self-taught mindset later allowed me to pay for my own degree in Data Processing at Mackenzie and a graduate program in IT applied to business at FASP. Technology was more than a career: it was the tool of social mobility that changed my reality.

Fifteen years writing and maintaining systems

I started in 1990 as a programmer and instructor, teaching BASIC, DOS and Clipper while developing enrollment and billing systems. In the following years I worked in foreign exchange banking, manufacturing, Y2K bug fixes and network administration.

At TOTVS, between 2000 and 2003, I developed retail automation and education management modules, trained franchisees and implemented systems in Brazil and Puerto Rico. I finished that cycle as systems manager, in charge of team, budget and infrastructure.

In that period I was also responsible for a company’s firewall, and there I did something similar to red team and blue team on my own: I tried to break my own configuration to find out where an intruder would get in. That is where my reading of cybersecurity comes from to this day.

Eight letters, and a name that stuck

The commercial internet opened in Brazil in 1995. The following year I was already installing it for other people, because back then computers came with nothing ready: no modem card, no TCP/IP stack, no dialer, no browser. I set all of that up, configured networks and proxies, and then trained people to use it. It was a side job next to my main work, which was still software development.

In one of those training sessions, someone called me InterNey. I found it funny and did nothing with it. I did not go around introducing myself that way.

A few days later I went to sign up for a discussion forum. Forums, mailing lists and IRC channels at the time required usernames of exactly eight letters, and Edney has five. That is when it added up: InterNey has eight.

The side effect came on its own. I started taking part in forums, lists and groups as InterNey, and people who met me in the real world kept calling me that. It became my name in the market, the name of the company I founded, my username when social networks appeared, and today it is a registered trademark at INPI, Brazil’s trademark office.

The most popular blog in the country, three years in a row

I was one of the pioneers of the internet in Brazil, and InterNey.net was not a hobby: IDG recognized the blog as the most popular on the Brazilian internet for three years in a row, in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It was the blog that turned a username into a public name.

Back then I helped lay the foundations of what is now called influencer marketing and social media, long before those terms became fashionable.

Seven startups, and the pains of scaling each one

From 2006 on I took part in the creation of seven startups: five MarTechs, one EdTech and one HRTech. Among them are the first Brazilian agency specialized in social media, the country’s first ad network and its first marketplace integrator.

I have been on the front line of innovation, living the pains and the wins of scaling a digital business. That is where the difference comes from between talking about transformation and having gone through it.

I have taught since my first job

Teaching did not come later. My first job, in 1990, was already as a programmer and instructor, and I have taught throughout my career: in open courses, in team training and inside the companies where I worked.

What changed in 2009 was the setting. I joined FGV and began teaching in higher-education specialization programs, which is a different kind of classroom: a different audience, a different demand for method and a different responsibility for what is stated. I have stayed in that circuit ever since.

Today I split my time between the classroom, the stage and the boardroom table, with one foot permanently in what is being built abroad. I collaborate remotely with two German firms: I am a Global Mentor at Start2 Group, in Munich, supporting European startups entering Brazil and Latin America, and I work on Future Design projects for the consultancy STURM und DRANG, in Hamburg. Since 2015 I have also worked with the WordPress.com team at Automattic.