Nathan Lustig

Ep 50 Miguel Torres: Modernizing Last Mile Shipping in Latin America with Shippify

Category : Crossing Borders Podcast, Ecuador
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Miguel Torres is an Ecuadorian entrepreneur who knew he wanted to start businesses when he saw needs that were unmet. After starting his entrepreneurial career in the food and drink industry and building the business to a successful exit, Miguel built out a daily deal site in Ecuador and other countries in Latin America.

The daily deals business morphed into Escapes With You, a travel and experience daily deals business, where he ended up in the Start-Up Chile program. After building the business, he realized that he was shipping items to guests from the travel experience business and decided to build a new business to solve the last mile problem he was experiencing himself.

Shippify is a shipping and logistics API that allows easy integration of delivery services into any E-commerce store and mobile app by adding a few lines of code.

Miguel hopped on a plane to Brazil without knowing any Portuguese and built the business ever since, expanding across the region and raising money from investors in Latin America, the US and the Middle East.

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Magma Partners First Half 2018 Update

Category : Magma Partners
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Since we closed our second fund in January to invest in fintech/insurancetech companies in Latin America and US companies with Latin American tech and sales teams, the entrepreneurs we support have been busy. And so have we. Here’s a roundup of some of the most interesting things that have happened in the first half of 2018.

New Investments

We’ve invested in 8 companies out of Magma II since January. Here are three that are public. We’ll be announcing more of our investments in the next month.

CryptoMarket – CryptoMarket is a Chilean fintech company that operates cryptocurrency exchanges in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Europe, with plans to open Mexico and Colombia this year. Magma coinvested with Consensys, the fund created by the cofounder of Ethereum in a $600k round.

BrainHi – Puerto Rico based Brainhi helps doctors and dentists book more appointments using chat bots. They’re the first Puerto Rican company to be accepted into YCombinator. I met them during a visit to Parallel18 in Q1.

Workep – Medellin and San Francisco based Workep is a project management tool built onto of G-Suite. I’ve know Carlos Eduardo Alvarez since meeting him at a BBQ in 2015 in Medellin and have been following since then. We reconnected at Parallel18 this year and invested recently.

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Ep 49: A Case Study of Ecommerce Opportunities in Chile and Latin America

Category : Chile, Crossing Borders Podcast
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One of my most popular blog posts is my ecommerce case study from when some friends and I started an ecommerce business in 2012. It gets hundreds of people viewing it each month and leads to lots of questions on twitter, linkedin and my blog.

I covered how we decided to launch an ecommerce, how we picked a product and how we validated the idea without spending lots money out of pocket. My goal was to share how we see the market and how you can validate any business idea without spending months and thousands of dollars to do it.

So what did we sell and what was the store called? We sold condoms on La Condonería.

In this episode, we cover the original case study, along with changes since I wrote the original post in 2015 and Magma Partners view on ecommerce in the region.

I hope you enjoy this style of episode of Crossing Borders. Please give me feedback in the comments or on social media on whether you did. If enough people like it, I can go through other industries that are popular in Latin America.

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Ep 48: How Mayer Mizrachi Launched Criptext From a Colombian Prison

Category : Crossing Borders Podcast, Panama
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Launching your startup on a waterproof phone from a Colombian prison. It sounds like something out of a movie. But in this case, it’s the true story of Criptext, an encrypted email service, founded by Panamanian entrepreneur Mayer Mizrachi.

How did Mayer end up in a Colombian prison? What was it like? How did he continue working and keeping his team together? How did he raise money and even do an angel investment himself from his prison cell? We cover these questions and many more.

In this podcast Mayer, tells his story in his own words. How he believes a $200k contract with the Panamanian government, political persecution and an unfortunate series of events led him to spend 5 months in a Colombian prison and the past two years stuck in Panama, unable to travel. Through it all, he’s raised money and continues to build his business. We also talk about what he learned during his childhood overcoming a previously untreatable disease, studying in Europe and the US and of course encrypted email and what it’s important.

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