“What we need to do is always lean into the future” – Jeff Bezos first said that when being asked about The Washington Post, but he might as well had been talking about what the government of Chile has been doing for the past twenty years.
The spirit of the public policies that allowed Chile to successfully negotiate Free Trade Agreements with the United States, Mexico, China, Colombia and other 15 countries, and Economic Association Agreements with the European Union and Japan, is now fully dedicated to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. Regulations like the “Business in a day” law, and the creation of Start-up Chile are just two of the results of that spirit, but for their impact, they might as well be the only ones.
The “Business in a day” law allows the registration of companies and societies through an electronic registry with a simplified regime that allows, with greater simplicity to constitute, modify, transform, divide, merge, and dissolve companies. And as a result, in 2019 79% of the companies that were created did it through the portal.
Then we have Start-up Chile, a business accelerator created by the Government to attract a high level of entrepreneurship. Currently, it is the leading accelerator in Latin America, it has a spot in the global TOP 10 and has the largest and most diverse startup community in the world. Start-Up Chile changed the vision of entrepreneurship on a global level to a level that after its creation, around of 50 other countries created similar programs, and here is why:
Ten Years
1,960 supported ventures
15,000 new jobs
Accumulated sales of US $ 1.2 billion.
Public and private capital raised equivalent to 17.3 times what was invested.
And this is just the begging. There are also private institutions like Fundación Chile and Chile’s Entrepreneurs Asosiation (Asech), among others, which have helped to take Chile to where it is: one of the most important entrepreneurship ecosystems in the world, and the first one in Latin America, according to the last Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute (GEDI) report.
As a consequence, between 2014 and 2018, on average, early stage entrepreneurship has remained constant at around 25%. In 2019, this trend was accentuated by observing an 11% increase in the percentage of new entrepreneurs compared to the 2018 edition and even to the last five years.
This has allowed businesses like Cornershop, recently acquired by Uber Technologies Inc., or The Not Company, a plant-based food company that in March 2019 announced that it had raised USD 30 million from a group of investors that included Bezos Expeditions, and that has just raised USD 85 million in a new investment round.
Chile has been positioning itself as an entrepreneurial ecosystem with solid foundations and completely open to the world, with just one flaw: it still needs of finance support that encourages entrepreneurs to surf the innovation wave and make an impact… so it’s up to investors to take the chance and bet on one of the most solid entrepreneurship ecosystems of the world.
Comments