Beyond the Maquiladora: A Look at Mexico’s Startup Scene

I was in the tech sector in Mexico around 2007-2011. This article seems quite accurate to me. I even fact-checked the official motto of Monterrey, and yeah, it is "el labor templa el espíritu".[1] Quite an obscure fact! I asked my regio coworker, and he had no idea what it was. And yeah, the stereotype in Mexico is that regios are all businessmen, ranchers, conservative, and stingy.[2] Kind of like their neighbours the Texans. :-)

Anyway, the thing that struck out to me as a Mexican at the time is that all of the actual "business" was coming from somewhere else. You can read in the article how Guadalajara is a city where a lot of foreign companies host some offices. When I was looking for jobs, by far the most common kind of thing was some local recruiting agency looking for outsourced workers to complement US or sometimes European companies.[3] This bothered me a little because it seemed like the long tail of the colonialism that plagues Mexico's history.

This is not to say that there are no purely local startups, who are trying to sell locally. Some of the startups mentioned in the article like Métros Cúbicos were already bought by 2011. I myself had a brief stint at a startup that was doing some very interesting machine learning in 2011. My heart wasn't in it and I failed the trial period. But I did get to see that it had several local clients, including a major nation-wide cineplex chain. They were also working at the time in growing their business into the US, and looking at their website, it looks like they are succeeding.

I had the privilege to work with some very smart hackers, I must say. One of my first jobs was with a company whose local office largely consisted of a band of buddies that knew each other since university and boasted amongst its ranks kernel hackers. The company was actually Spanish (Spaniard), but the Mexican office was quite sizable. Like probably most other countries, the vast majority of tech in Mexico is based on turnkey, replaceable Java-style software developers, but there do exist pockets of great innovation.

Ultimately I left Mexico to work at the actual company that I was being outsourced to. Not because I was facing any kind of hardship -- on the contrary, my outsourced salary in the end was quite generous in Mexican terms -- but because I wanted to be where the action was. But if the action is now back in Mexico, I am considering moving back.

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[1] http://portal.monterrey.gob.mx/tu_ciudad/historia.html

[2] An example of an old Mexican sketch comedy show parodying this stereotype:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNI5KLLTfLM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NbJ18S80ig#t=284

[3] You can see an example of this attitude in Agave Lab, one of the companies mentioned in the article:

http://www.agavelab.com/why-mexico.html

I love Guadalajara -- one of my favorite cities to do business in, though it's not really a tourist-friendly city, unless you want to day-trip to Tequila or the Primavera Forest. I agree that it feels like it's ready to go big, kind of like Shenzhen in the '90s, and the tech community is rapidly expanding (though, I was told, government meddling with the higher education system and student obsession with finance has severely restricted the number of Mexican computer scientists). There are some great nearshore development firms in addition to the local startup scene, which have the advantage of being in the same timezone as US firms.

Unfortunately, the ambient level of violence and corruption in Mexico is still too high to support a vibrant commercial scene, but the locals aren't letting that slow them down.

For anyone who might be visiting there, I recommend staying at the Fiesta Americana Grand Guadalajara Country Club, and dinner at La Tequila on Avenida Mexico -- you can't miss the flights of hyperlocal tequilas, and appetizers of escamoles and saltamontes.

The US gets the wrong impression of Mexico from the immigration to the USA. That immigration is disproportionately undereducated, rural farmers. A thriving middle class has tended stay in Mexico. And we are starting to see the economic results, if the governmen doesnt blow it as usual.

> The US gets the wrong impression of Mexico from the immigration to the USA. That immigration is disproportionately undereducated, rural farmers.A thriving middle class has tended stay in Mexico.

Actually, lots of Mexicans have complained about the enormous brain drain of the Mexican middle class into the USA; while undereducated rural farmers may be disproportionately represented in illegal immigration from the US to Mexico, legal immigration (which is, even considering the not-inconsiderable expenses that often associated with illegal immigration, in practice as I understand it more resource intensive) from the US to Mexico (and some of the illegal immigration, as well) is educated professionals, especially those with family in the US, moving here because the pay they can get even taking a big step down in prestige compared to the positions they are qualified for in Mexico is enough to not only live better in the US even accounting for the higher cost of living, but also provide surplus after that to improve quality of life for a lot of their family living in Mexico (plus, give more of their family the opportunity to eventually legally immigrate to the US, through family-based immigration visas.)

The uneducated, rural farmers get more attention in US media coverage of immigration, perhaps because they are overrepresented among illegal immigrants (which is usually the focus of media coverage), and perhaps because they are better fodder for emotional images (both those seeking to provoke sympathy for the poor and those seeking to provoke fear of the unwashed masses).