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On (Startup) Chile

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Re: On (Startup) Chile

#51

Post by billswift »

andrewcooke wrote: post #13

from my own experience (as an englishman living in chile) i tend to look to "social differences" to help understand conflicts like this. one of the main themes in the link is (imho) anger at a lack of trust - the need to justify each expense, and to follow somewhat arbitrary rules, even after winning the grant. and that (again, imho) reflects a difference in culture between americans and chileans. in support of this…

>real possibility of change

Maybe, but I doubt it. The problem is that Latin American societies, and to a lesser extent Southern European countries, are fundamentally lower trust societies than northern European ones, and especially the Anglo-sphere. While there is possibility of change, it will be a slow, hard process. (For a historical example of the difference, compare the development of Japan, a high trust society, with that of China, which is lower trust.)

Re: On (Startup) Chile

#52

Post by billswift »

rabble wrote: post #24

I've not done business in Chile, but i have in Uruguay, which ranks about the same in terms of various transparency / economic freedom / gdp per capita as Chile. Everything he complains about is just the reality of living and working in latin america. Chile markets itself as being different, but it's not so different. Getting stuff done is hard, getting investment is hard, doing business is hard. There are lots of ru…

>It's just a part of the game.

The problem is that for nerds, the game is making stuff. The "doing business" part is what we have to go through in order to keep making stuff. And, as long as it is harder in Chile and other parts of Latin America, they will never come close to catching up to Europe, much less the US.

Re: On (Startup) Chile

#53

Post by freebird_uk »

amix wrote: post #14

I was in same group as Herval and he is a good guy. This said, I have a huge problem with this general mentality and I think a lot of today's entrepreneurs are spoiled brats that don't have their perspectives right. I have had an awesome experience in Chile and it has been one of my best decisions I have made. I have met my girlfriend here, I have scaled my business a lot, I have learned to surf, I have met amazing p…

Can't comment on Chile one way or another, but great story amix. Lots of respect for your Dad. Think doing a start up is hard? Try doing it in a new language you learn at age 40. Awesome.

Re: On (Startup) Chile

#54

Post by Sherlock »

herval wrote: post #33
nirvana wrote: post #29

We're preparing to move to Chile in February to start as part of the next class. I see a couple of these blog posts along the lines of "well my 6 months are up, I'm outta here!". That seems like such a tragedy to me. I've been to Chile before, Santiago is a wonderful city. We had only a few weeks in the country, but in that time we saw a little of the area and even went to Easter Island (which is part of Chile.) Ther…

Excellent ideas, although it would never stick with a government... (I proposed that myself ;)) Santiago is a GREAT city indeed (one of the best in latam), although a bit expensive (specially if u eat out a lot!)

According to my experience, in Santiago the food and general bills are pricier and housing is cheaper compared with the rest of latam (Colombia, Argentina, Peru). The most expensive city here is Sao Paulo, by far.

Re: On (Startup) Chile

#55

Post by mguimaraes »

herval wrote: post #34
mguimaraes wrote: post #22

I came from the same country as Herval (Brazil) and I am flying to Chile on the 4th of January. Myself and my partner are working hard on bootstrapping our 2nd company for the last 1 1/2 year. We are very fortunate to have landed big contracts in Brazil this year. We will keep a commercial operation in Brazil. I can point out wonderful reasons to do business in Brazil: - Very large market, 200M people - Booming consu…

For brazilians in specific, there's a big plus for being on SUP: being "international" automatically doubles your perceived value in our dear xenophile country. Although sny incubator would do the trick - even having a friend in Palo Alto and use his home address as "headquarters" The ironic truth... ;)

Xenophile for sure! ;-) . Anyway I am thankful that you and others are shouting aloud your thoughts. Perhaps the program improves and people adjust their perspectives as a result.

Re: On (Startup) Chile

#56

Post by GFischer »

rabble wrote: post #24

I've not done business in Chile, but i have in Uruguay, which ranks about the same in terms of various transparency / economic freedom / gdp per capita as Chile. Everything he complains about is just the reality of living and working in latin america. Chile markets itself as being different, but it's not so different. Getting stuff done is hard, getting investment is hard, doing business is hard. There are lots of ru…

Here in Uruguay we have a local-only, lower-scale program sponsored by the governmental agency ANII (Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación):

http://www.anii.org.uy/web/convocatorias/apoyo-j-venes-empre...

It's a similar system (government reimburses 80% of the expenses), and with the same problems from what I've heard.

Re: On (Startup) Chile

#58

Post by fedemart »

amix wrote: post #14

I was in same group as Herval and he is a good guy. This said, I have a huge problem with this general mentality and I think a lot of today's entrepreneurs are spoiled brats that don't have their perspectives right. I have had an awesome experience in Chile and it has been one of my best decisions I have made. I have met my girlfriend here, I have scaled my business a lot, I have learned to surf, I have met amazing p…

Fully agree with Amir.

Getting 40k free money is reason enough to love the program and tolerate any bureaucracy. I mean, thanks to SUP Chile I could avoid spending lots of time looking for angels. In fact, I found the angel willing to invest almost the exact date I was accepted in SUP Chile, but thanks to SUP Chile I could avoid giving away equity and retain control at such an early stage.

So, I can't understand the complaints about bureaucracy or simple requests to spend time telling other people how is it to be an entrepreneur.

Yes, there is bureacracy and yes, sometimes you don't want to spend any time doing anything besides making progress in your project (I can understand the guy not wanting to go out of his appartment mentioned below) But c'mon... what's to not like about this deal. It's amazing, and I can't wait to be succesful and give back in any way I can regardless of the "RVA points", and prove that the SUP Chile way (trusting a team of hungry entrepreneurs and enabling them early) is one of the best ways in which a govermnent can estimulate entrepreneurship.

Re: On (Startup) Chile

#59

Post by herval »

fedemart wrote: post #58
amix wrote: post #14

I was in same group as Herval and he is a good guy. This said, I have a huge problem with this general mentality and I think a lot of today's entrepreneurs are spoiled brats that don't have their perspectives right. I have had an awesome experience in Chile and it has been one of my best decisions I have made. I have met my girlfriend here, I have scaled my business a lot, I have learned to surf, I have met amazing p…

Fully agree with Amir. Getting 40k free money is reason enough to love the program and tolerate any bureaucracy. I mean, thanks to SUP Chile I could avoid spending lots of time looking for angels. In fact, I found the angel willing to invest almost the exact date I was accepted in SUP Chile, but thanks to SUP Chile I could avoid giving away equity and retain control at such an early stage. So, I can't understand the…

Complacency made Latam what it is today. I'm sure SUP would love everyone to think that way: less hassle for them, no benefit for anyone (except for those who learn how to "make things happen" - aka "steal"), which (coincidently) had zero issues with the reimbursement process

Re: On (Startup) Chile

#60

Post by SkiAlta »

Stop driving in the rear view mirror. I applaud Startup Chile for their efforts, but I think this whole conversation focuses on the wrong questions. One of the biggest challenges with Startup Chile or other similar program is that without a common language or framework around early-stage value creation milestones, the fallback mechanism is to measure how entrepreneurs spend money. This is like driving in the rearview mirror and the approach hasn't historically achieved optimal results. Is it possible that the reason we aren't achieving higher hit rates on startups is that we are measuring the wrong things?

If we look at the "startup industry" as an industry, we should ask ourselves some tough questions like... What other industry in the world has an 80% to 90% failure rate? And why is such a high failure rate acceptable?

I don't fault Startup Chile for their program and think we should all be working to push these startup conversations forward. To improve the odds of a positive outcome, here are the questions I would ask if I ran such a program. "How much more effective would these programs be if the focus was on agreed to customer-centric value creation milestones and then capital was deployed based on achieving these milestones? What if the entrepreneur or startups were measured on building products that 1) nail the customer's pain, 2) nail the minimum feature set to satisfy the customer demand, 3) nail the business model or go-to-market strategy? etc...

In addition to reimbursing for expenses, an effective startup program could tranche additional seed capital based on how the startup achieved early success and nailed early value-creation milestones. Give high-potential entrepreneurs a little bit of guaranteed runway is great. In addition, provide them follow-on financing in the form of tranched performance payments based on successful execution.

Doing this would require an agreed to framework. Here's a link to a recent conversation thread on one possible way to achieve this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3406330

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