Two years ago my friend Diego introduced me to Francisco the head of one of Chile’s family offices. Francisco told us that he wanted to invest in startups and high growth small businesses not only because he thought Chile needed a fully private early stage startup fund to help entrepreneurs be successful, but also to potentially change how Chilean investors look at startups by showing them the way forward.
After working together for about six months, Francisco, Diego and I announced our first two investments, officially launching Magma Partners, a US$5M early stage investment fund powered 100% by capital from the three of us.
Our original plan was to invest in 4-6 companies per year, but we were inundated with qualified companies that needed capital, monitorship, connections and feedback from people who’d done it before. We received over 150 applications (more…)
I’m currently living in Santiago, Chile, focused on Magma Partners, a seed stage investment firm that I run. I split my time 75% in Chile and 25% in the US and Europe. Since we started Magma 18 months ago, we’ve invested in 18 companies and many of them are starting to find success.
We focus on business to business companies that service the Latin American market and companies that can use cost arbitrage to have their tech team in Chile, but attack the US and European markets.
I also run Andes Property, a property business based in Chile. We purchase and manage property in Latin America for us and our investors. We also help foreigners purchase property across Latin America.
In November, I’ll have lived in Chile for 5 years and am starting to spend more time in the US and Europe. I write a few articles per month on my blog, mostly about entrepreneurship in Latin America, politics and my personal observations on the world and am currently reading everything I can find about artificial intelligence.
In 18 months since starting Magma, we’ve invested in 18 companies. The biggest predictor of success so far is very simple: does the entrepreneur value doing the dirty work and is he or she willing and able to identify it and then do it.
Paul Graham calls it doing things that don’t scale. Sam Altman’s How to Startup class 8 is devoted to it. Successful entrepreneurs and VCs all have different names for it. But at the end of the day, it’s the same idea: the stuff that takes you from 0 to 1 and then 1 to 2 gets you on the path to validating your business and start to scale it without building software and business processes. (I wrote a blog post about doing the dirty work in an commerce company here.) (more…)
I’ve been listening to Tim Ferriss’ podcasts lately and am really enjoying them. Highly recommended. He ends many of his interviews by asking his guests a list of short answer questions, one of which is some variation of “what advice would you give to your 10 years younger self.”
Most people give one or two answers, but others expand and give in depth answers. As I was wandering around Buenos Aires last week listening to Ferriss’ interview with Naval Ravikant, I started to think about what I would tell my 20 year old self. I stopped for some ice cream and started to write my list. After thinking some more, I came up with 20 things I’d tell my 20 year old self. I think there’s four really important things, then 16 more. Here’s what I’d tell my 20 year old self. (more…)
