Nathan Lustig

Ep 54 Andres Moreno: Helping Latin America Learn English Through OpenEnglish

Category : Crossing Borders Podcast, Venezuela
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Not all global startups were founded in a Silicon Valley garage. OpenEnglish, an online platform for teaching English with over 500,000 students in 40 countries, started in a student apartment in Caracas, Venezuela in 2007. Open English started as in person English classes for Fortune 500 companies’ Latin American offices and morphed online so that it could reach a wider audience. While Andres Moreno understood the importance of speaking English for Latin Americans, he might not have guessed how far OpenEnglish would go.

Today, Andres Moreno is the CEO of OpenEducation, the parent company of OpenEnglish, Next U, and OpenEnglish Jr. and has raised over US$125M in venture capital from investors in the US and Latin America. Check out this episode to learn about Andres’ childhood moving around Latin America following his dad’s career, how he got started teaching English, why he picked Miami as a base, and how he has supported Latin American entrepreneurship as an investor, entrepreneur, and mentor.

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Ep 53 Diego Caicedo: Streamlining Small Business Finance in Latin America with Portal Finance

Category : Chile, Colombia, Crossing Borders Podcast
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Note: Portal Finance recently closed a $200M deal with one of Latin America’s largest investment banks, BTG Pactual, to provide financing to small and medium businesses across Latin America. They were also winners of Magma Partners’ Latin America wide Fintech competition in 2016.

After growing up in the Bay Area, Diego Caicedo left Popayán, a small town in Colombia, at age fifteen to go to university in Bogota, then dropped out two semesters before finishing his degree in engineering. Why? He had a plan to build a massive, vertically-integrated coffee company that bridged the US and his native Colombia. Three years later, a strong La Niña year wiped out the coffee industry and he was back at square one.

Diego has never been one to give up after his first failure, though. In this episode, we talk about how he rebounded after closing his first business, how Diego became an entrepreneur in Chile’s mining industry, then how he realized the opportunities in Latin American fintech and started Portal Finance to help small businesses get liquidity when they need it. Diego is a lifelong entrepreneur with a lot of lessons to share with people just getting started, so check out this episode of Crossing Borders to learn more about how Diego does business across Colombia, Chile, and the United States.

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Ep 52 Christian Van der Henst: Helping Latin America Learn with Platzi

Category : Crossing Borders Podcast, Guatemala
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How did a curious young web developer from Guatemala become one of the first Latin American entrepreneurs to enter YCombinator? Christian Van der Henst fell in love with the internet in the 90s when he realized he could use it as a tool to communicate with the whole world. He knew he wanted to share his knowledge with people and collaborate with a global tech community long before Latin America’s tech revolution even started.

Christian is a lifelong entrepreneur, but he didn’t realize it until he was studying his Masters in Barcelona while running a massive online platform, Maestros del Web, a proto-Stack Exchange for Latin America, at night. He eventually put his passion for education into Platzi, alongside Colombian co-founder Freddy Vega, and helped grow the company to US$3M in yearly revenue in just four years. In this episode, Christian talks about how he transitioned from Maestros del Web to Mejorando.la (before they rebranded to Platzi), how Platzi became the first startup serving Latinos to enter YCombinator, and why entrepreneurship is so important in Latin America right now.

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Ep 51 Kyle Wiggins & Jack Fischl: Taking Tourists off the Beaten Path with Keteka

Category : Chile, Crossing Borders Podcast, Panama
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Jack Fischl and Kyle Wiggins studied across the Charles River from each other in Boston, but they didn’t meet until they both became Peace Corps volunteers in Panama. Even then, they were placed in two communities that were a 14-hour bus ride apart. So how did they build a successful Latin American travel marketplace together? It started with a simple WordPress site they created over several visits to their local internet cafes.

After realizing their communities had no way of marketing the unique tours they were offering, and that local tour guides were being ripped off by large corporations, Jack and Kyle came up with Keteka. In this episode, Jack and Kyle explain what they learned from going through Start-Up Chile and the Booking.com Accelerator program, raising a funding round through Latin American angel investors on FounderList, and receiving investment from more traditional VCs like my firm Magma Partners. But it all started with the lessons they learned in the Peace Corps.

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