Tag: chile startup

Ep 3: Crossing Borders Nicolas Shea

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.

Today’s guest is Nicolas Shea, a Chilean entrepreneur, philanthropist and now a presidential candidate running for Chile’s presidency.

Nicolas has been a teacher, started nonprofits, worked in government and built businesses that have expanded across Latin America. He cofounded eclass, one of Latin America’s largest education companies, and was the cofounder of Start-Up Chile, an innovative program that gave foreign entrepreneurs visas and equity free grants to move to chile, kickstarting the Chilean entrepreneurial ecosystem. It’s also where I met Nicolas almost seven years ago.

After Start-Up Chile, he cofounded Cumplo, a peer to peer lending platform that helps businesses access credit more quickly and at better rates than the traditional banking system does. Cumplo has now helped 800+ businesses with more than $200M in loans.

Subsequently Nicolas took a step back from Cumplo to cofound Todos, a Chilean citizen powered political party, and is now currently running for Chile’s President.

So lets get started and 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 2013

Every since I started blogging, I’ve done a year end post summarizing what I’ve done in the past year. These posts are mostly for me, so that I can look back and remember what I did, what I was thinking and what was important to me each year. Previous versions (2000s2009,20102011, 2012).

I started and ended 2012 in nearly the same place: on a friend’s rooftop in Santiago, champagne in hand, surrounded by great people, watching a multitude of fireworks explode across Santiago’s expansive skyline. In between, the first part of 2013 continued on 2012’s theme: a time in flux. I started out preparing to become a professor for the first time. My business partner and friend Enrique Fernandez and I completely revamped our entrepreneurship class How to Build a Startup and began teaching at Universidad Católica in Santiago and Universidad Católica del Norte in Antofagasta.

Antofagasta was a real challenge, but it was extremely rewarding. While the two hour flight eight times in twelve weeks was challenging, the hardest part was teaching a class solo, 100% in spanish. I was really nervous my first class and could see from the looks on my students’ faces that they weren’t looking forward to a whole semester with my gringo spanish, but by the second class, I started getting better and by the final class, my spanish was much better and I wasn’t nervous at all.

I’m glad I got to practice in Antofagasta, because in August I taught another class completely in spanish to undergrads at Universidad de Desarrollo in Santiago. It was rewarding to see my students actually learn something each semester, see their self belief growing each week, and seem projects go from ideas to reality.

My blog continues to build traffic and I was featured in multiple international publications again this year on Startup Chile, Entrustet, Chilean Real Estate and the Madison entrepreneurial ecosystem. It was cool to see Google implement their deceased account option that we’d pushed for back in 2009. While I haven’t written as much as I would have liked, I read more in 2013 than I did in 2012.

I traveled back to Wisconsin in August to help organize the fourth annual Forward Technology Festival and was happy to see it keep growing. Matt, Bryan, Forrest and Preston have done an awesome job since I moved to Chile. Forrest continues to grow Capital Entrepreneurs and Madison’s entrepreneurial scene continues to get more national prominence.

While the first half of the year was a year still in flux, the second half was much more focused. After coming back from my trip home in August, I started Andes Property, a real estate investment company focused in Santiago and published The Expat’s Guide to Chile, a book about living, working and doing business in Chile, which has been consistently ranked in the top ten most popular books about Chile on Amazon. I also launched an ecommerce business, La Condoneria, that sells condoms online. It’s been fun to start to build a business from scratch again and to work with two great business partners. In November, I celebrated three years in Chile.

I also made it back to Wisconsin for my family’s Thanksgiving and my group of friends’ 9th annual Friendsgiving. It really was great to get back and see my family twice this year and it was amazing to see our group continue to grow with more engagements and our group’s first kid. I expect both trends to continue in 2014.

I explored more of South America, but didn’t travel as much as I would have liked. I made it to Chiloé and Uruguay, then visited Mendoza when my parents visited Chile for two weeks, and Pucón, Puerto Varas and Frutillar when my friend Polsky came to visit from the US. I’ve done a better job of taking advantage of going to the beach more in 2013 than in 2012, but plan to do it more in 2014.

I didn’t exercise as much as I would have liked, but continued to play squash and increased my soccer. On the sports side, I went to a Chile world cup qualifying match, some chilean club matches and watched the US qualify for the world cup. Overall, it was a year of transitioning into my next projects that I’ve since been able to sink my teeth into. I expect 2014 to be a very interesting one!

Favorite posts of 2013

What Entrepreneurship is Really Like

Your Internet Business Probably Isn’t A Startup

Privilege

Weonomics

How to Deal With A Smart Disruptive School Kid

My Talk From The Forward Technology Festival

How The Future Might Look

Seven Important Books

Siren Servers: Why are we ok with giving away our data?

How to Survive and Be Successful in a Siren Server World