I’m Moving to Chile: How and Why
Somewhere during 2010 I decided I wanted to take some time off from school. I either wanted to travel or raise capital and start a new company. After the Fall 2010 semester, I would be finished with 60 hours of ‘basics’ and would be ready to transfer to a new school. So before I landed at a new school, I decided to take off 1 semester plus the summer. The plan was to transfer to a school in California after the break.
Around this time I heard about a program by the Chilean government called Start-Up Chile. They were bringing in 24 new companies from around the world as part of a beta group. The participants receive $40,000 and a 1 year visa to come and build their companies. What was interesting is they weren’t taking any equity for the money. Instead, the program was an incentive to attract outside entrepreneurs working on innovative companies to come and build their businesses in Chile. The way I understand it is Chilean entrepreneurs do not take very many risks. Most of their companies aren’t very innovative either. They mainly focus on imports and exports. By attracting outside entrepreneurs working on innovative projects, their hope is to make Chile the ‘Silicon Valley of South America’.
With the success of the beta group, Start-Up Chile would open applications in February of this year to bring in an additional 100 companies. By this time I had already formed the new company (Obsorb, Inc… more on that in a future post) and raised some cash for it from an angel investor. One of my mentors, Shonika Proctor, had moved to Chile a few months back to work with some of the university entrepreneurship programs over there. I kept hearing all sorts of awesome things about the country from her and others.
On February 15th, they opened up the applications and I applied with my new company, Obsorb. After a long wait, yesterday I got an email with an acceptance letter. I’m beyond excited. Things are going to start moving incredibly fast. I haven’t picked an exact date yet, but I will be moving there around the end of May or the beginning of June (About a month out). I have to be there for a minimum of 6 months so I won’t be back until at least December, although I can come and go as I please.
Now its time to get everything ready. Unfortunately for me, I thought taking French in high school was a better idea than taking spanish. Luckily a lot of the college graduates there all speak english, so we’ll still be able to hire and communicate with a team.
PS: Consider this an open invite to any friends that want to come down and visit. I plan to rent an apartment with at least 2 bedrooms.
Chile is 2,700 miles long and an average of 109 miles wide. It has the Andes Mountains on the east and Pacific Ocean on the west. Needless to say its a beautiful country.
