JOSÉ ANTÔNIO SÉ

MANAGER FOR TRAVEL AND LOGISTICAL SUPPORT

I was born in Brazil but I studied cinema in San Diego, California. After completing the course I returned to my hometown, São Paulo where I worked for 10 years with the prestigious acting coach Fátima Toledo. I worked on film preparation and also gave acting classes at the Fátima Toledo studio.

 With a desire to explore new horizons, in 2013, I left for Sydney, Australia. There I worked as an acting coach and gave acting workshops. To get around the city I chose to go by bike. I bought a city bike, but it didn’t take long for me to invest in a mountain bike and start doing trails. It was then that I returned to my old passion for bikes. In the early 90s I had already participated in mountain biking competitions in Brazil, but I ended up stopping competing because at that time I was already thinking about studying cinema in the USA.

 In 2014, on a trip to New Zealand, I tried an electric mountain bike for the first time. I was so surprised by the experience that as soon as I returned to Sydney I bought my first eMTB. I made the purchase at a store called Sydney Electric Bikes, one of the only stores exclusively focused on electric bikes. I ended up making friends with the owner and, also went on several trips with him around the region. Later I went to help him in his store because it was already growing very quickly. I worked at the store doing a little bit of everything, from mechanic to salesman and whilst I was there I began thinking about radically changing my professional life.

 Then, in 2016, I moved to Portugal where my father had lived for 16 years and where I normally visited him every two years. However, I was very anxious to get to know my grandparents’ homeland more deeply. At that time I was already thinking of working definitively with bikes and, mainly, electric bikes. I founded EMT Bikes and worked for 2 years as a partner and the electric branch of a bicycle touring company in the Lisbon region.

In the meantime, I was part of a group that rode exclusively on eMTBs. That was when I met João Pedro from Bike in Portugal. It was very clear from our first conversation that our vision and ideas were aligned. We maintained our friendship and the idea of one day carrying out a project together. And at the end of 2019 I officially joined the Bike in Portugal team.