Every startup has a growth curve. It looks different for each company depending on many factors, and my guest on this episode says founders need to push their company through its growth curve as fast as possible.
Thomas Allier left his home in Paris, France to found a startup in Colombia. It’s not the normal path of a Latin American company but his decision paid off. His company – Viajala – is now the largest discount flights search engine in Latin America. You’ll enjoy this conversation.
Costa Rica, literally “Rich Coast” in Spanish, is a fitting name for a country with diverse geography which ranges from tropical rainforests to vast oceanscapes. Five million people call Costa Rica home, and the official language is Spanish. Costa Rica’s GDP is US$74.9 billion with 72% attributed to imports and exports like coffee, sugar, and fruit. The average wage for Costa Ricans is about CRC654,059 (Costa Rican Colón) or US$1,150 per month.
Costa Rica is a prime location for entrepreneurs because of its proximity to the United States and because of its many free trade agreements. Its largest foreign investments come from the United States, which led to a 2016 marked a trade surplus of US$1.6 billion between Costa Rica and the US.
In the past few years, large tech companies like Amazon have invested in the Costa Rican market. One of the strong qualities of Costa Ricans, locally known as “Ticos,” is their literacy rate of 97.8%, The country has placed education as a top priority, and English is common among the young population. (more…)
Codie Sanchez is not your ordinary financial expert. She started out as a journalist, writing about human trafficking and abuses going on just over the southern border of the U.S. That is, until she wrote her last story about the abandoned women of Mexico. That’s when she realized that she needed to be doing more than just writing about the issues in the world – she needed to do something about them.
You’ll hear how Codie used the opportunities afforded her as a U.S. citizen to learn all she can about the power structures of the world so that she can leverage them to make a difference.
Investing in Latin American startups is not the first thing that was on Santiago Zavala’s radar growing up. Even though he grew up in a home where his father was working in tech from the early days of the internet, Santiago wasn’t drawn to the finance side of business at that point. He was totally into programming. He’d have been the last person to anticipate what would happen in his life.
This conversation tells of the unexpected path of a man who’s become intricately involved in the VC scene for startups in Latin America. His involvement in his own Mexico-based startup accelerator and then transitioning into running 500 Startups in Mexico has given him a wealth of experience and insight into what it takes for a startup in Latin America to be successful. It’s an intriguing conversation you won’t want to miss.