Lean Chile: And the global rise of the local entrepreneurship ecosystem!

As co-founder boy worked on-site today covering the 2012 Chile Private Equity and Venture Capital Forum hosted by Latin American Venture Capital Association and I was catching up on the tons of emails we have received over recent days from near and far, I couldn’t help but stop and take the time to thank our beloved Chileno entrepreneur and startup community.

The AndesBeat is getting a little stronger and spreading a little farther and a little faster, infinite thanks to you!! CHILE – Not only do you crush all the cultural myths when you support us, you also make us so happy and proud….you really do!!!

While you do not have the critical mass of perhaps a Mexico, Argentina or Brazil, you have to look at it this way, Chile is a like a ‘Lean Country‘, jejeje. You have more agility and flexibility and can adapt to change faster.

The actions you takethe thoughts and ideas you share, and the more you share your story and new updates, makes us feel that everyone is beginning to understand, it is not enough to bang the drum just one time.

In order to continuously attract foreign investment, foreign media and foreign talent to help internationalize the work of Chile, we (meaning media, investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, advocates and more) have to keep filling the global pipeline with all things new and hot in Chile. Continue reading

Let’s get this party started: Beer with Shoni and Carlos launches tomorrow!

Shoni and Carlos would like to thank our die-hard AndesBeat community (all 48 of them, wink, wink), who have been huge evangelists in terms of getting the word out about our work and referring us steady streams of new contacts, organizations, potential clients and projects. But at the same time, while we would love to meet everyone, we simply can’t.

In person meetings take too much time. And meeting (local people) by Skype and phone, while more convenient, seems so impersonal.

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AndesBeat to host Yale University journalism delegation in Santiago, Chile

AndesBeat will host new world change-makers under the radar of old world knowledge at an upcoming event in Santiago, Chile which will showcase the emerging startup and entrepreneurship scene in Chile.

Santiago, Chile – AndesBeat, Latin America’s first English language media publication dedicated to ‘covering the uncovered’ stories in Latin America’s emerging startup scene, announced today that in their inaugural event they will host a group of students from the Globalist (the quarterly international global affairs publication of Yale University).

Many local organizations were surprised to learn that AndesBeat inaugural event was not a ‘startup themed’ event. However, directly in line with their cultural game-changing mission, the event serves as a critical foundation in terms of integrating Latin America’s media ecosystem into trends in the international media. The event will leverage the rising media talent from a prestigious 300+ year institution of higher learning along with the timely theme of stimulating and promoting a culture of entrepreneurship within a sub-developed country. AndesBeat is working hard at a grassroots level to increase the amount of coverage Latin American startups receives from local and international media. By making these stories more ‘accessible and approachable’ to the media, they also seek to educate the everyday citizen in Latin America about the entrepreneurship and startup world.

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Co-Founders Life: Staying out of jail with your partner in crime!

Recently I told my co-founder I knew he was ‘the one’, but it wasn’t because he fit the profile of someone I would consider marrying, but because I had come to the realization that I would be willing to do something illegal for him – not that he asked me, but the thought randomly crossed my mind of just how far would I go for him?!

Then I started thinking about the irony of people who always advise that you choose a business partner based on someone you would want to marry. The crazy thing is that between the ages of 25-39 is when 60% of all divorces happen (in the U.S) – which is also around the same time that people are active in launching a business or getting connected to the startup life! Continue reading

Meet AndesMade Advisor: Louis Lautman

AndesBeat is proud to announce Louis Lautman as our next confirmed mentor. He will be working with our international advisory team for our forthcoming AndesMade immersion based initiative to support Chilean startup founders and tech entrepreneurs rapid prototype and quickly get ideas into the marketplace with their bootstrapping mode on.

(You can follow our running list with newly named mentors here!)

As one of the fastest ways to emerge from bootstrapping mode is to be able to sell, sell, sell, we decided to bring on an accomplished and fearless cold-caller (since his teenage years) who got his real taste of cold-calling by knocking doors on the streets of New York City in his early 20’s where he made over 10,000 cold calls in person and on the telephone!

After personally connecting with him back in 2009 before he released his film and seeing the path and tremendous growth he has made personally and professionally over the past few years, Carlos and I are extremely ecstatic to have his support, enthusiasm, expertise and magic sales touch here in Latin America!

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AndesBeat X Games: Startup Gladiators Inquire Within

Today Sir Richard Branson arrived in Chile (Bienvenido)!

So we decided to publish this post, that was actually inspired by his blog post Life Begins at 60 (a video of him kitesurfing in Necker Island). This along with an email from one of our AndesBeat fans who really dug the concept of how at AndesBeat we are promoting entrepreneurship and the startup life like an “extreme sport”, accelerated our motivation to share why:

AndesBeat is on a serious mission to become the

Sports Illustrated for Latin American entrepreneurship.

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Meet AndesMade Advisor: Mike Michalowicz

AndesBeat is proud to announce Mike Michalowicz (pronounced mi-cal-O-wits) as the next confirmed mentor for AndesMade. (You can follow our running list with  previous named mentors here!)

Mike will be working with our international advisory team for our forthcoming AndesMade immersion based initiative to support Chilean startup founders and tech entrepreneurs with rapid prototyping and quickly getting their ideas into the marketplace with their bootstrapping mode on.

Being that we are going to be bootstrapping (sin shoelaces), we had to flip through our ‘Golden Rolodex’ and find at least one accomplished bootstrapper for our advisory team.

Enter Mike Michalowicz aka ‘The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur’ who started his first business at the age of 24. With no experience, no contacts and no savings he systematically bootstrapped a multi-million dollar business. Then he did it again. And again. He sold his first company to private investors and sold his second company to a Fortune 500.

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Meet AndesMade Advisor: Hannu Krosing

AndesBeat is uber excited to announce Hannu Krosing as the 2nd mentor of our forthcoming AndesMade immersion based initiative to support Chilean startup founders and tech entrepreneurs rapid prototype and quickly get ideas into the marketplace with their bootstrapping mode on. (You can follow our running list with  newly named mentors here!)

Since we have been told time and time again its going to be a little difficult to support our ‘utopian’ dreams of building our community of soon to be ‘bleeding edge’ hackers and startup thought leaders from a bunch of ‘failed and rejected’ Chilean startup projects, we thought we would get a 2nd opinion just to be sure…

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Meet AndesMade Advisor: Alicia Castillo Holley

AndesBeat is extremely excited and proud to announce Alicia Castillo Holley as our first advisor and mentor for our upcoming AndesMade immersion based initiative to help startup founders and tech entrepreneurs in their bootstrapping process in Chile. (You can follow our running list with  newly named mentors here!)

As we are working in the areas of entrepreneurship and innovation in Chile, we believed that it was very important to have a person (or a few) on our advisory network who were EXTREMELY well versed on the intricate web of organizations, people and programs in Chile.

So we dug deep. Like really deep.

And we found the incredible and lovely Ms. Alicia Castillo Holley founder of the Wealthing Group way down under, in Australia, 9 companies and 5 successful exits later.

She is indeed a national treasure (by way of Venezuela). Continue reading

AndesBeat Set to Announce International Advisory Board ¿Eres AndesMade?

In our efforts to develop a unified entrepreneur & startup ecosystem in Chile and ultimately LatAm, Carlos (AndesBeat co-founder) and I realize that collective intelligence and access to networks especially across borders are essential, and hence AndesMade was born.

Unfortunately, the reality is ‘traditional networks’ and ‘mentors’ are often poorly leveraged, on many levels, ranging from at what time in the process they need to be connected with the mentee(s) to how they use their time. Continue reading