Tag: nathan lustig

Ep 5: Crossing Borders Devin Baptiste, GroupRaise

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 America.

My guest today is Devin Baptiste, cofounder and CEO of GroupRaise, a company with more than 50 employees in 3 offices in Houston, Texas, Santiago, Chile and the Philippines. GroupRaise is a platform that allows groups of 15-50+ to book events in more than 6000 restaurants across the united states. These restaurants then donate 10-20% of their bill to the organization or charity of the group’s choice. As Devin puts it, it’s the tastiest way to change the world. Not to mention the most cost effective customer acquisition strategy a restaurant can have.

Devin and I talk about his journey that took him from Houston to Taiwan, Korea, Hawaii, Chile, Germany and back to Houston again, how he thinks about scaling businesses from Latin America to the US, how he raised his recent fundraising round from Techstars Ventures, Kapor Capital and Magma Partners, how he looks at being a minority founder and what its like to run an international business while married with two young kids.

Devin is one of the most interesting people I’ve met in the past few years and I feel lucky to be able to work closely with him on his journey to building a world class business. We had a few sound issues, as Devin was in a target in a thunderstorm and then in his car when we recorded our conversation, but please don’t let my recording issues get in the way of learning everything you can from Devin. Let’s 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.

Ep 2: Crossing Borders Adrian Fisher, PropertySimple

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.

My guest for episode 2 is my friend Adrian Fisher, CEO and Founder of PropertySimple, a real estate technology company with offices in Santiago, Chile and the United States. I’ve known Adrian for about five years now and PropertySimple was our first investment at Magma Partners back in 2014.

Adrian and I cover his journey from Scottsdale, Arizona to Argentina, Chile and then back to the United States, during which he learned to program, built technology for some of the biggest companies in the world with a 30 person outsourcing team based in Mendoza, Argentina and transitioned from a services company into a product company.

In 2011, Adrian was part of Startup Chile‘s first round, where he and his team built multiple real estate technology businesses including a rental payments system, a mortgage originator and more.

We’ll also talk about Adrian’s experience launching a product in Latin America and then transitioning to the US market and the strategies he has used for building a successful technology business from Latin America that targets the US market.

PropertySimple just closed a financing round of $3M from US investors and is growing it’s team in Chile and the US while scaling sales in the United States. I really enjoyed this conversation, so let’s 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.

Raising US VC Money from Latin America

Note: A version of this article originally appeared in Inc with the title How to Raise Venture Capital if You’re Outside the United States.

Over the past three years, I’ve been working with 30+ companies that have their bases across Latin America build their businesses. Many of these companies are really US companies that just happen to have a tech and sales team in Latin America and want to raise capital in the US. Others are Latin America B2B companies that would love to raise money in the US, but have found hard sledding.

When I first got started, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find investors to follow in on our companies and our strategies were all wrong. In 2015, I got on a plane to California with Adrian Fisher, the founder of PropertySimple, to take his company to the US market. He’d build an amazing product, similar to Zillow, but in Chile, and 1000+ real estate agents using his product and millions of people using PropiedadFacil to find properties. (more…)

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