Ep 2: Crossing Borders Adrian Fisher, PropertySimple

Category : Chile, Crossing Borders Podcast
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Welcome to Crossing Borders with Nathan Lustig, where I interview entrepreneurs doing startups across borders and the investors who support them, with a focus on companies that have some relationship to Latin American.

My guest for episode 2 is my friend Adrian Fisher, CEO and Founder of PropertySimple, a real estate technology company with offices in Santiago, Chile and the United States. I’ve known Adrian for about five years now and PropertySimple was our first investment at Magma Partners back in 2014.

Adrian and I cover his journey from Scottsdale, Arizona to Argentina, Chile and then back to the United States, during which he learned to program, built technology for some of the biggest companies in the world with a 30 person outsourcing team based in Mendoza, Argentina and transitioned from a services company into a product company.

In 2011, Adrian was part of Startup Chile‘s first round, where he and his team built multiple real estate technology businesses including a rental payments system, a mortgage originator and more.

We’ll also talk about Adrian’s experience launching a product in Latin America and then transitioning to the US market and the strategies he has used for building a successful technology business from Latin America that targets the US market.

PropertySimple just closed a financing round of $3M from US investors and is growing it’s team in Chile and the US while scaling sales in the United States. I really enjoyed this conversation, so let’s jump right in!

If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher and check out the first five episodes with other top entrepreneurs doing business in Latin America.

My first guest is David Lloyd, cofounder and CEO of The Intern Group, an education company that has helped more than 5000 students from more than 125 countries around the world find top internships abroad.
We’ll talk about how David left his job at a city of London investment bank to start The Intern Group, how he came up with the idea, started the ball rolling, and his journey to build The Intern Group into a global powerhouse with more than 30,000 applications for the Intern Group Program and more than 2,000 participants in 2016.
We’ll also cover the strategies his team uses to work globally from offices in 12 different countries around the world and some of the advantages of running a global business with operations in Latin America.
David and I first met back in 2011 on the soccer field in Santiago, Chile and have been great friends ever since. I really enjoyed our conversation and hope you will to.

If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher and check out the first five episodes with other top entrepreneurs doing business in Latin America.

TechCrunch: A New Era in Latin American Startup Investing

Category : Latin America Startups and Investing, Top
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I recently wrote a column in TechCrunch called A new era in Latin American startup investing where I talked about how things have changed since I first moved to Chile in 2010 as part of the pilot round of Startup Chile.

Some of the pioneering investors and entrepreneurs have started to be successful, paving the way for the next generation of startups. Other founders who tried and failed in the early 2010s have learned their lessons and are starting second rounds of companies. The ecosystem is much more developed, including startup specific attorneys and more experienced venture investors. From the link:

Startups in Latin America are using creative solutions to address not just local but also global problems. For investors outside the region, the prospect of working with these startups can appear attractive, yet complicated. Investing in early-stage startups in Latin America can present challenges; however, despite the challenges, time and time again I’ve found it can be well worth the effort.

When I first came to Santiago, Chile in 2010 as part of the pilot round of Start-Up Chile, there was hardly any talk of startups. Most people didn’t even know what startups were. Within nine months of returning to the U.S., the company I co-founded was acquired. So I decided to go back to Chile to look for more opportunities in this emerging market.

Over the next couple of years, I taught entrepreneurship in Chile, mentored local entrepreneurs and eventually started investing in Latin American companies myself. I’ve now invested in more than 30 early-stage companies in Latin America, and I firmly believe the time to help early-stage startups in Latin America has never been better. Here’s why.

Continue reading A New Era for Startup Investing In Latin America on TechCrunch.

Photo credit: Alessandro Pautasso

How To Work In Tech in Latin America

Category : Latin America Startups and Investing
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I wrote a guest post on VentureBeat called How to find a job in a Latin American Tech Hub aimed at highlighting the growing trend of US and European tech workers coming to Latin America to both start companies, but also to work for high potential startups like GroupRaise, PropertySimple, The Intern Group and more. I covered four main paths to working for tech companies in Latin America:

  1. Working remotely from a coworking space
  2. Working for an established Latin American company
  3. Working with a Latin American startup targeting Latin America
  4. Working with a Latin American startup targeting the US market

Each of these have their pros and cons, but all are great ways to get involved in the local tech scenes, travel the world and experience a new culture.

From the article:

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