Search Results for: crossing borders

Advice from Venture Capitalists to Latin American Founders, Ep 100

Over the years, we’ve had the chance to interview some of the best venture capital investors in Latin America on the Crossing Borders podcast. With that in mind, we decided to launch an Investor Remix Series, where we go back to previous episodes to highlight the stories of some of the region’s most interesting and successful investors. For the first episode in the series, we feature six investors giving advice to founders from Latin America.

(more…)

Advice from 11 Magma Entrepreneurs from 7 countries, Ep 99

At Magma Partners, we work with people who share our values, whether they’re the founders we invest in or the mentors and investors we bring on to our team. We hope to create lifelong relationships with the people we support. 

For this episode, we’re featuring eleven Magma entrepreneurs –some are members of our portfolio, and others are from our team– who have appeared on previous episodes of the Crossing Borders podcast to share their advice to founders from Latin America on how to get started. 

(more…)

Simon Chamorro, Valiu: Revolutionizing the Venezuelan Remittance Economy, Ep 98

80% of Venezuelans today depend on remittances to survive. Almost seven million people have left the country since the protests against the Maduro government started, creating a massive diaspora, almost all of whom send money home to family members trapped in the country. 

Simon Chamorro was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, so he has seen this problem firsthand. He co-founded Valiu to make it easier to transfer money from Colombia to Venezuela by streamlining remittances using cryptocurrency.

In this episode of Crossing Borders, Simon explains how Valiu is using cryptocurrency to solve real-life problems, and how it has the potential to combat inflation in economies across Latin America. Now living in Colombia, Simon also discusses the important lessons he has learned working with four startups in the Colombian ecosystem, his own experience in starting a company, and where Valiu is headed next.

Check out this episode of Crossing Borders to learn more about the current situation in Venezuela and how Valiu is helping streamline the remittance economy from across the Colombian border.

(more…)

Michael Sidgmore, Broadhaven Ventures: Investing in LatAm’s Fintech Ecosystem, Ep 97

When Michael Sidgmore thinks about investing, he thinks about making the biggest impact possible in people’s lives. His passion for economic development and financial inclusion has led him to build a career as a fintech investor and entrepreneur focused on financial infrastructure, wealth management, and financial inclusion. Today, he is a Partner and cofounder of Broadhaven Ventures, a Silicon Valley, New York and Chicago based fintech venture capital firm that has invested in 5 startups in Latin America.

Broadhaven Ventures invests globally in early-stage fintech startups but largely focuses on Latin America and the US. The fund was built out of a market leading fintech investment bank called Broadhaven Capital Partners to start to invest directly into some of the best companies they were seeing on the investment banking side of the business. 

In this episode, I sit down with Michael in Mexico City to talk about his background in soccer, then in tech banking, and how an NGO inspired him to kickstart his investing career. We discuss what led him to do venture capital in Latin America, and also cover some of the biggest trends in Latin American fintechs and how these compare to Asia and the US.

(more…)