Crossing Borders With Nathan Lustig

This podcast with Emilia Diaz, a Chilean entrepreneur who dropped out of university at age 21 to run the biotech startup Kaitek Labs, is one of my favorite podcasts so far. And it's one of the most necessary. In the US, we celebrate entrepreneurs who learn lessons from failure. I always knew that I'd be able to get a job if my startups didn't work. I still know it today. But in Latin America, people shun failure. And a large company might not see a failed startup on a resume as a plus. Not to mention the social costs of a failed startup in a region where personal pride influences many day to day decisions. So when Emilia Diaz's startup, Kaitek Labs, a one time high flying Chilean biotech startup failed, she was not only facing having to grieve for herself, her team and her investors, but also publicly. She could have stayed out of the spotlight, but she made the courageous decision that pushes ecosystems forward: writing a post-mortem on her personal blog. It's an inside look on what went wrong. what she lear

Pedro Pablo del Campo is a Chilean entrepreneur, and the newest addition to our Magma Partners team. Born in Punta Arenas, one of the most Southerly cities in the world, Pedro Pablo traveled the world in his youth since his father was in the Air Force and then a commercial pilot. From a young age, Pedro Pablo was eager to be involved in early-stage enterprises and has gone on to founding or joining early teams of several startups and nonprofits bridging the US and Latin America. In 2016, he joined the Techstars team in Austin as the Business Development Director for Latin America, a position they created just for him. Pedro Pablo has now brought his passion for supporting Latin American entrepreneurship to Magma, where he will be helping manage our portfolio and evaluating future investments for the fund. In this episode, we discuss Pedro’s non traditional career path, his start in the nonprofit world, how a cold email got him connected to the Techstars network, and what he thinks of the maturing Latin Americ

Not all global startups were founded in a Silicon Valley garage. OpenEnglish, an online platform for teaching English with over 500,000 students in 40 countries, started in a student apartment in Caracas, Venezuela in 2007. Open English started as in person English classes for Fortune 500 companies’ Latin American offices and morphed online so that it could reach a wider audience. While Andres Moreno understood the importance of speaking English for Latin Americans, he might not have guessed how far OpenEnglish would go. Today, Andres Moreno is the CEO of OpenEducation, the parent company of OpenEnglish, Next U, and OpenEnglish Jr. and has raised over US$125M in venture capital from investors in the US and Latin America. Check out this episode to learn about Andres’ childhood moving around Latin America following his dad’s career, how he got started teaching English, why he picked Miami as a base, and how he has supported Latin American entrepreneurship as an investor, entrepreneur, and mentor. “Once you know

After growing up in the Bay Area, Diego Caicedo left Popayán, a small town in Colombia, at age fifteen to go to university in Bogota, then dropped out two semesters before finishing his degree in engineering. Why? He had a plan to build a massive, vertically-integrated coffee company that bridged the US and his native Colombia. Three years later, a strong La Niña year wiped out the coffee industry and he was back at square one. Diego has never been one to give up after his first failure, though. In this episode, we talk about how he rebounded after closing his first business, how Diego became an entrepreneur in Chile’s mining industry, then how he realized the opportunities in Latin American Fintech and started Portal Finance to help small businesses get liquidity when they need it. Diego is a lifelong entrepreneur with a lot of lessons to share with people just getting started, so check out this episode of Crossing Borders to learn more about how Diego does business across Colombia, Chile, and the United Sta

How did a curious young web developer from Guatemala become one of the first Latin American entrepreneurs to enter YCombinator? Christian Van der Henst fell in love with the internet in the 90s when he realized he could use it as a tool to communicate with the whole world. He knew he wanted to share his knowledge with people and collaborate with a global tech community long before Latin America’s tech revolution even started. Christian is a lifelong entrepreneur, but he didn’t realize it until he was studying his Masters in Barcelona while running a massive online platform, Maestros del Web, a proto-Stack Exchange for Latin America, at night. He eventually put his passion for education into Platzi, alongside Colombian co-founder Freddy Vega, and helped grow the company to US$3M in yearly revenue in just four years. In this episode, Christian talks about how he transitioned from Maestros del Web to Mejorando.la (before they rebranded to Platzi), how Platzi became the first startup serving Latinos to enter YCom

Jack Fischl and Kyle Wiggins studied across the Charles River from each other in Boston, but they didn’t meet until they both became Peace Corps volunteers in Panama. Even then, they were placed in two communities that were a 14-hour bus ride apart. So how did they build a successful Latin American travel marketplace together? It started with a simple Wordpress site they created over several visits to their local internet cafes. After realizing their communities had no way of marketing the unique tours they were offering, and that local tour guides were being ripped off by large corporations, Jack and Kyle came up with Keteka. In this episode, Jack and Kyle explain what they learned from going through Start-Up Chile and the Booking.com Accelerator program, raising a funding round through Latin American angel investors on FounderList, and receiving investment from more traditional VCs like my firm Magma Partners. But it all started with the lessons they learned in the Peace Corps. Tapping into Panama’s tourism

Miguel Torres is an Ecuadorian entrepreneur who knew he wanted to start businesses when he saw needs that were unmet. After starting his entrepreneurial career in the food and drink industry and building the business to a successful exit, Miguel built out a daily deal site in Ecuador and other countries in Latin America. The daily deals business morphed into Escapes With You, a travel and experience daily deals business, where he ended up in the Start-Up Chile program. After building the business, he realized that he was shipping items to guests from the travel experience business and decided to build a new business to solve the last mile problem he was experiencing himself. Shippify is a shipping and logistics API that allows easy integration of delivery services into any E-commerce store and mobile app by adding a few lines of code. Miguel hopped on a plane to Brazil without knowing any Portuguese and built the business ever since, expanding across the region and raising money from investors in Latin Americ

One of my most popular blog posts is my ecommerce case study from when some friends and I started an ecommerce business in 2012. It gets hundreds of people viewing it each month and leads to lots of questions on twitter, linkedin and my blog. I covered how we decided to launch an ecommerce, how we picked a product and how we validated the idea without spending lots money out of pocket. My goal was to share how we see the market and how you can validate any business idea without spending months and thousands of dollars to do it. So what did we sell and what was the store called? We sold condoms on La Condonería. In this episode, we cover the original case study, along with changes since I wrote the original post in 2015 and Magma Partners view on ecommerce in the region. I hope you enjoy this style of episode of Crossing Borders. Please give me feedback in the comments or on social media on whether you did. If enough people like it, I can go through other industries that are popular in Latin America. Show Not

Launching your startup on a waterproof phone from a Colombian prison. It sounds like something out of a movie. But in this case, it's the true story of Criptext, an encrypted email service, founded by Panamanian entrepreneur Mayer Mizrachi. How did Mayer end up in a Colombian prison? What was it like? How did he continue working and keeping his team together? How did he raise money and even do an angel investment himself from his prison cell? We cover these questions and many more. In this podcast Mayer, tells his story in his own words. How he believes a $200k contract with the Panamanian government, political persecution and an unfortunate series of events led him to spend 5 months in a Colombian prison and the past two years stuck in Panama, unable to travel. Through it all, he's raised money and continues to build his business. We also talk about what he learned during his childhood overcoming a previously untreatable disease, studying in Europe and the US and of course encrypted email and what it's impor

Paraguay is often overshadowed by neighbors Brazil and Argentina in conversations about the Latin American startup ecosystem. Despite being one of the world’s largest hydroelectric energy producers, Paraguay has yet to emerge on the global or regional stage as a tech hub. However, Paulo Duarte, founder of Broterra, a Paraguayan superfood company that provides wages for more than 2500 families and has ambitions of selling on the US market, says that Paraguay has the potential to develop as a startup hub, especially in the food and agtech sectors. I sat down with Paulo for this episode of Crossing Borders, my first with an entrepreneur from Paraguay, to talk about launching and scaling a startup in Paraguay, the challenges and opportunities of doing business in his home country, and why Paulo is confident that Paraguay will eventually rise as a regional hub. The global market for superfoods is on the rise Paulo’s entrepreneurial journey started when he planted chia seeds on his family’s land in 2013. He worked

When Latin America shifted abruptly to mobile in the early 2010s, the online dating industry had to change with it. Luckily, Pedro Neira, the founder of Mi Media Manzana, now Latin America’s most-downloaded dating app, had enough experience from his three previous startups to know when to make changes. Mi Media Manzana now has over one million downloads and recently received an undisclosed investment from Axon Capital Partners. I sat down with Pedro Neira in this episode of Crossing Borders to hear about his journey founding four startups, what it’s like doing business in Peru, advice for raising capital in Latin America and Silicon Valley, and the future of Mi Media Manzana. Pedro didn’t realize he was an entrepreneur until his third startup A few of my previous guests on the show called themselves “accidental entrepreneurs” because they never realized their careers would lead them to innovate. Not so with Pedro. Instead of following his MBA classmates down the consulting track, he worked on a startup in Ba

According to Antonio Nunes, Latin American families spend up to four hours per week in the supermarket. When combined with crippling traffic and safety concerns in many Latin American cities, it becomes clear why delivering groceries in Latin America could be a highly lucrative business. Antonio Nunes noticed that opportunity while living in Bogota and sold everything to go on a mission to deliver Latin America’s groceries in under an hour. In this episode, I sat down with Portuguese entrepreneur, Antonio Nunes, to talk about why Latin America is growing so quickly, why last mile delivery is a better business in LatAm than in the US or Europe, and what he has learned in his journey doing business across borders. People who want to start companies want to change the world Antonio’s first entrepreneurial experience involved founding an NGO in Mozambique when he was 19-years-old. He was focused on making it possible for budding entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world to develop and test their ideas because he

The US healthcare market loses up to US$750B in fraud and inefficiencies every year. The insurance industry is famously bureaucratic and relies on antiquated technology to communicate with healthcare providers and patients. My guest today is Lauren Cascio, co-founder and COO of Abartys Health, a health insurance tech company that created a system that allows seamless data flow and communication between insurers, doctors and patients in Latin America and the United States. Lauren was selected by Walmart as one of Puerto Rico’s most promising business leaders, made the Caribbean’s 40 under 40 list, and was a finalist for the Forbes 30 under 30. Lauren is also proud to have delivered the winning pitch at SXSW's ReleaseIT competition in 2017 and Parallel 18 Accelerator's Investor Choice at the 2017 Demo Day. While Lauren didn’t originally set out to become an entrepreneur, she has always loved taking risks and learning from her mistakes. We talk about her decision to teach herself how to code and what she’s learn

Lisa Besserman escaped the New York winter in 2012 to work remotely from Buenos Aires, and never came back. She fell in love with the city’s entrepreneurial culture and began to build Startup Buenos Aires (SUBA), an organization that helps represent the startup, tech, and entrepreneurial community in Buenos Aires. With SUBA reaching its five-year anniversary this year, I sat down with Lisa Besserman to learn how Argentina’s startup ecosystem has grown and changed since she moved to Buenos Aires. In this episode, we talk about what it’s like doing business in Argentina, new opportunities for venture capital investment, the changes she’s seen in the ecosystem over the past five years, and where Argentina’s ecosystem is headed next. Technology is helping people work across borders Lisa is passionate about connecting Argentina’s tech talent to the world. Based on her own time as a remote worker in 2012, Lisa realized technology and the Internet make it possible to leverage resources from the global economy, and n

According to Pierpaolo Barbieri, Argentina is a country where young people would prefer to visit the dentist than to go to the bank. More than half of Argentina’s population is excluded from traditional financial institutions and few efforts have been made to help the middle class access services like savings and credit. My guest on the podcast today is Pierpaolo Barbieri, the founder and CEO of Uala, the first fully-mobile and free bank card for the Argentinean market, which is trying to bring financial inclusion to Latin America’s second largest economy. We talk about Uala’s efforts to serve the underbanked in Argentina, the financial environment in Latin America, Pierpaolo’s background studying in the US and the UK, and why he has decided to maintain Uala as a free service for all customers. Tackling Argentina’s financial landscape from a local perspective Argentina has a uniquely complicated banking environment with constantly changing regulations and a thriving black market in foreign exchange. This is a

Marcus Dantus launched his first tech startup in 1993, selling email addresses through a portal that he hosted on the domain Mexico.com. Born in Mexico City, Marcus studied Media Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, but his career quickly switched to technology when a friend introduced him to the Internet. Since then, Marcus never looked back. He founded a telecommunications company, acted as CEO of a medical device business, was on the founding team of Wayra Mexico, and finally developed and launched Startup Mexico, where he acts as CEO. In this episode, I sat down with Marcus to talk about how he got started in entrepreneurship in Mexico, what it was like to develop a cross-border startup in the early-2000s, how new technologies like blockchain will help LatAm, and what’s next for the Mexican entrepreneurship ecosystem. Selling email addresses on Mexico.com Marcus built his first website in 1993. He quickly realized there was a market in registering and selling generic domains in Spanish after

Jie Hao is a partner at Magma Partners who previously built and sold two companies before heading to Chile to look at investment opportunities in 2012. To make this podcast, I repurposed a segment of a conversation we had while I was in Shanghai for the launch of the partnership between Kr Space and Magma Partners to create the Sino-Latin American Accelerator. This conversation was a part of our doing business in Latin America course through 36Kr, China's version of TechCrunch, where we taught Chinese entrepreneurs and investors about the growing opportunities for investing in Latin America. In this short form episode of Crossing Borders, we talk about how Magma Partners got involved in China, why Chinese investment is important for Latin America, and how China and the US are looking at Latin America differently. From Magma Fund I to the Sino-Latin American Accelerator After working with us on Fund I, Jie tried to raise funds in China for Fund II, and was originally met with skepticism. We realized Chinese in

GroupRaise is an online platform that helps groups raise money for the causes they care about by eating at restaurants. I previously interviewed two of the other founders of GroupRaise, Devin Baptiste and Sean Park, in Episode 5 and Episode 31 of Crossing Borders, so please check out those podcasts if you are interested in learning more about GroupRaise. In this episode, I sat down with Kevin Valdez, one of the co-founders of GroupRaise to learn more about how he moved to the US from Guatemala in middle school, helped build the family business, and eventually joined Devin and Sean to found GroupRaise. From the Guatemalan countryside to Houston, Texas When Kevin Valdez was twelve years old, his family moved from a rural small town in Guatemala to a small town outside of Houston, Texas. At the time, Kevin spoke no English and his family of five shared a single room in his aunt’s house. However, Kevin is proud to come from a “family of entrepreneurs,” and it did not take long for his mom and aunt to begin buil

Through my Crossing Borders podcast, I’ve had the opportunity to interview dozens of Latin America’s most inspiring entrepreneurs. In this special episode, I decided to turn the tables to bring a former guest, GroupRaise CEO Devin Baptiste, back to the show to ask me about my first days as an entrepreneur, and how that eventually brought me to Chile. I sat down with Devin, a close colleague and friend, to delve into how ticket reselling, and helping people plan for their deaths, brought me to Latin America and put me on a path to help found Magma Partners. Don't worry, we'll be back to our regularly scheduled guests next week! Refereeing soccer games at age 12 was the first step to becoming an entrepreneur. Nathan Lustig made his first money as a twelve-year-old soccer referee back home in Wisconsin. As an independent contractor, he enjoyed planning a game schedule and being in control of his income, most of which he saved. Sports become a common theme in Nathan’s journey to becoming an entrepreneur, as he be

Movile is a global leader in mobile marketplaces with a dream to make life better for 1 billion people through marketplaces on their mobile devices. Movile is a remarkable story of innovation from Latin America, driven by people who are willing to take risks to learn and grow quickly. I sat down with the CEO and founder of Movile, Fabricio Bloisi, to talk about why he started Movile and how he and his team grew it to the largest mobile company in Brazil and Latin America. Movile focused on innovating and exploring advanced technologies In its early stage, Movile focused on text messages (SMS) and then enabled ringtone commerce in Brazil, as well as the development of the country’s first Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) search portal. In 2007, Bloisi focused on expansion. In 2008, and Movile built itself into the largest company in the Latin American mobile commerce industry through new products and mergers and acquisitions, establishing a presence in over ten countries with offices in Brazil, Argentina, Pe