Dianne Buckner has reported on entrepreneurs for two decades. She hosts Dragons' Den on CBC Television and is part of the business news team at CBC News Network.
The temperature in Chile on the day I’m writing this (in grey, chilly Toronto) is a delightful 27 degrees, sunny, with scattered clouds. But the weather report that’s even more appealing is about the climate for entrepreneurs.
“We can fast-track the visa process,” says Jean Boudeguer, executive director of Start Up Chile, a program that’s attracting early stage business-people from all over the world.
“Participants can open a bank account within first week, and with all the information created by past participants, they can figure out where to live, where to buy, what to do — everything — very quickly. Within [the] first week you’re ready to go.”
Oh yes, and the government-sponsored program will hand over $40,000 US too, to help you set up your business, no strings attached. You just have to stay in the country for six months.
Start Up Chile is the brainchild of Nicolas Shea, the innovation and entrepreneurship advisor to the Chilean minister of economy. As the story goes, he was in California’s Silicon Valley in February of 2010, working with his own venture, eClass, when he got the call from the Minister.
Canadian entrepreneur Pete Field is taking advantage of the Start Up Chile Program. (Pete Field) Chile is isolated both geographically and in the way people think, according to some observers, and its culture of innovation has been described as “weak”.
The minister wanted Shea’s help to change that.
The Start Up program is the result. And Canadians have been signing up. For this most recent third round of participants, eight were approved. “I was looking to get out of Whistler into a more technology-centric environment,” says Pete Field, a 38 year old entrepreneur who grew up in Ontario.
Field’s venture is called Kitchon, and as the name suggests, will be focused on cooking. “I love to cook and I dislike following recipes although I know I’ll make a better meal when I follow a recipe. Recipes aren’t written for the way that we cook, and with the iPad there’s an opportunity to improve the kitchen experience for people.”
Don’t bother visiting the site yet though – a closed test site goes up next month, and Field hopes to launch Kitchon in late April.
But being in Chile is speeding up his progress, he says.
“A big part of it for me is that I come into the office every day and I’m surrounded by really smart people who are at the same stage of developing their business as I am,” he explain. “We’re constantly talking about what’s going to work. And we’re all really familiar with each other businesses.”
But doesn’t any incubator offer that advantage?
Yes the weather is less hospitable in Canada at this time of year, but there are incubators here, not to mention the U.S., that wouldn’t require a trip to a faraway, Spanish-speaking country.
Field is quick to point out that the language of the Start Up Chile program is English. And he’s not a fan of one aspect of incubators.
“My biggest concern was that most incubators will take a percentage of your company in order to be in the program,” says Field. “In Chile they were asking for nothing, plus they were giving. And I’d never been in a developing country before. It was a chance to do something completely different. Toronto didn’t have that appeal.”
All this talk of Silicon Valley and incubators could give you the impression Start Up Chile is all about tech. Not so.
“We have many different industries in the program,” says executive director Jean Boudeguer. “Some are working with renewable energy, through sun or wind. Also Chile is well known because of its mining industry so some of them are trying to work on something there. We have three or four working with Biotech. It all depends on the stage of your company, not the industry.”
'In Chile they were asking for nothing, plus they were giving'—Entrepreneur Pete Field
This was the point at which I found myself wondering what Chile gets out of this. Are participants contractually obligated to set up their companies there, and to hire Chileans? The answer wasn’t what I expected.
To hear Boudeguer tell it, what Chile wants back from its international visitors is two things: to share their entrepreneurial energy, and to build relationships.
“We see personal relationships, not just business relationships. They are going to last forever,” says Boudeguer, pointing out that with Latin America’s economic clout growing, it’s a market where many entrepreneurs may want to have connections in the future.
“We encourage participants to be very active in entrepreneur society, to participate in lectures at universities, mentor other entrepreneurs, create events to connect with the local community.”
Pete Field is into that in a big way. He’s even accepted a key role as an organizer of one of the ‘tribes’ – people in various industries such as technology, finance, or education grouped together for meetings.
Another Canadian participant, University of Waterloo graduate Andrew Cross, says he and his three partners are less enthusiastic about the networking aspect.
“We work out of our own apartment a lot more,” says Cross, a 23 year old originally from Burlington. “I still head over to the co-working space once a week to bounce ideas around, and to stay connected. But at the end of the day we’re here to make the company the greatest it can be, and that takes priority.”
Cross is also developing an on-line venture, Goose Chase Adventures, a mobile “adventure platform inspired by scavenger hunts,” to quote the website. He’s using his 40K to buy new computers and phones, and to make a promotional video for the website.
Nearby Waterloo has a great start-up culture — so again, why go to Chile?
“We were excited about the idea of getting beyond that and getting connected with entrepreneurs from all over the world,” explains Cross. “Plus, South America is going to be a pretty big market, we wanted to see that first hand before it gets saturated.”
The Start Up Chile website boasts that the program “has gained impressive international recognition, having been published in Forbes, The Economist, BusinessWeek, and TechCrunch (among many others) and has inspired spinoffs around the world such as Startup America, Britain, Greece, and Italy.”
Should Canada be emulating the program? That’s the subject of next week’s column.
Businesses in Canada planned to spend $15.6 billion on industrial research and development in 2011. That is five per cent higher than the $14.9 billion they planned to spend in 2010. iStock