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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An Overview of the Insurtech Industry in Latin America

Category : Latin America Startups and Investing
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The insurtech industry worldwide received over US$2.3B in investment in 2017, a 36% increase from the year before. From 2014 to 2017, the Latin American share of the insurtech market grew from 1% to 7.6%, and the number of insurtech startups increased by 114% in 2017. This uptick is logical as insurance plays a vital role in stabilizing emerging economies and minimizing risk.

Latin America is underinsured, despite steadily growing incomes over the past two decades. Currently, insurance penetration, calculated as the ratio between insurance premiums written and GDP, hovers between 2-4% across the region compared to 6.2% globally and 7.3% in the US, the world leader, in 2015. Latin America still lags behind the rest of the world in insurance coverage.

As Latin America’s most developed economy, Chile is also the most developed insurance market in Latin America. Earthquake insurance is required for all mortgages and after Chile’s 2010 earthquake, a group of mostly international insurers paid out claims that reached around 4% of Chile’s GDP.

Compared to the rest of the region, Chile has a relatively open and well-regulated insurance industry. While Brazil has become a top player in insurtech, the insurance industry in Brazil is mired in complex regulations. Still, growing middle classes across Latin America have yet to invest heavily in comprehensive insurance policies for a host of reasons.

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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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