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While i respect your decision, I'm not really sure why you didn't stay in Mexico, I think your article needs more details about what type of Help you got from t

by mrpollo 15y ago

While i respect your decision, I'm not really sure why you didn't stay in Mexico, I think your article needs more details about what type of Help you got from the Mexican Gov., and what was the difference in Chile what did they offer?, My big question would be, is it a totally different Market as you would expected to be? if so, what did you had to change on your business strategy?

armandososa 15y ago
Chile gives an entrepreneur $40k to fund an internet company and stay there for 6 months. Mexico taxes you twice because you have an internet company. Oh, and they will use those taxes to fund a stupid war.
j_camarena 15y ago
Hello; Thanks for your comment. To get an easy read on this reply i would divide it in main for topics: - Why didn't stay and more details about it. - Difference within Chile. - Totally different market. - Changes in business strategy. ## if you are truly interested on those topics please subscribe the blog, I'm planning to cover all of this topics on future posts. ## -> Why didn't stay and more details about it. <- This one in particular will be published soon, actually i'm just finishing the draft and maybe will be public in 2 days or something. Try to subscribe, you can be sure that i will post open recommendations, opinions and reasons why i stooped paying Taxes in Mexico .. i hope someone in the government can read it. -> Difference within Chile <-- I think its matter of philosophy .. almost all the country's will try to "get a piece of the pay", what Chile is doing here to have a clear vision to mitigate the "brain-drain" effect bringing some hope to local people. Its always good to have a guy in his 20's who did it big like your neighbor. Mexico in the other hand is focusing his self in giving "easy loans" with high interest rate to young people. This sounds like "hey, let me screw you a little, in a couple of years you will broke like 80% of the business but i will have my payback or get your home".. they are just doing it wrong.. very wrong. -> Totally different market. <-- Yes, it us a huge unknown market for us .. but we are going to keep our Mexico operations in a virtual way .. just they will be not paying to a Mexican company; Instead payment will be sent to an international company (i don't know where yet). Doing this they cant charge Taxes but we sure can attend clients in Mexico (and all latin-america) from any country in the world (Borders are so 90's). -> Change in business strategy. <- Well .. to be honest I'm a Mechanical Engineer... within my career i didn't learn anything about programming, html or css.. i just focused myself in Energy efficiency, heath transfer and entropy .. but the web was always my hobie. When graduated (2008) all the world was "in crisis" and there where no lots of Jobs .. but the web was making billions so i used my web knowledge to start something else and using as a pivot in the future.. by now the pivot is going great!. What im planning here is to have a customer-base within all latinamerica instead of just Mexico. I will also diversify to three or web apps. ### If you liked please subscribe, I'm planning to cover all this topics on my future posts ###.
- cesarsalazar12 15y ago
  As a partner of Mexican.VC (http://mexican.vc http://mexican.vc), a (pre)seed fund that invests in Mexican online startups, I can assure that the your vision of how Mexico works is quite incomplete. There's well enough funding in Mexico for early stage companies. You can find angels (Angel Ventures Mexico, Mex.VC), seed funds (Mexican.VC, Wayra, StartupFactory), early stage VCs (Alta Ventures, Ignia, Fondo Emprendedor CONACYT-NAFIN) and public grants (Prosoftware, Fondo PYME, AVANCE). I'm not saying Chile is not a great country (I love Chileans), but IMHO your reasons to leave Mexico are fundamentally flawed.
  - j_camarena 15y ago
    Thanks for the comment.. i knew about some of the programs you mentioned there .. http://mexican.vc http://mexican.vc got my attention in particular. I did research when started the company but a lot of doors where closed at that time and my options where to take a Loan or leave a part of the company to the seed funders. I think gov should do something like Startup chile where they offer "free money" to start a wildfire in entrepreneur attitude. *please add me to my twitter @j_camarena, will be cool to keep contact :)
  - eduardoflores 15y ago
    I wouldn't say "fundamentally flawed". A bit simplistic, maybe, but totally understandable. Government funds are - let's say, shady - and private funds are usually who-knows-who and pretty inaccessible. I'm not saying that it's impossible but I certainly understand Julio: as good entrepreneur, he's taking the pragmatic route. Kudos for that.
    - j_camarena 15y ago
      Thanks Eduardo
checoivan 15y ago
From Mexico myself as well. The whole ordeal is by far more complicated than in the US, except for visas. Starting is already hard enough by itself, so adding on top a thick layer of hoops to jump and bypass in Mexico isn't the best of things. The market is different, the talent pool is vastly different than sillicon valley. There's a big focus in custom enterprise applications and consulting among CS workers and grads, very little product focus. There's a mindset gap where the majority of people believe starting, and doing something without getting squashed by El Goog or government is impossible. Convincing people that things "can be done" is an uphill battle. Incubators are more of the generalist type.I applied and spent some time on my university incubator ("Tec") and found that the focus was in manufacturing, trading, and finance business. There was very little knowledge of tech startups. Accounting/Hr/taxes are pretty draconian as well.
clsdaniel 15y ago
Another Mexican giving its point of view here: On human resources, the culture here is a job culture, you finish your career, you get into a company, work 30-35 years and retire, that's what the community expects of you. Starting a company is awkward, working in something without payment or having immediate profits is a waste of time or foolish. But that is changing with the crisis, everything goes now. Getting people can be a bit difficult, most candidates I have interviewed had little experience (if at all), with free software technologies we use and demonstrated little will to learn (education tends to be centered on specific technologies), most don't work well unsupervised, thus our remote working experiment failed, they don't use modern development tools such as version control, bug tracking and project management software, etc. That is a generalization, of course there is brilliant people here too, but way more difficult to find, hopefully if a startup community concentrates in a place the skillful workforce will also concentrate there. Government paperwork has always been abundant, complicated and time sink. Taxes are not well leveled, either you are of low class (you have a small shop "changarro/tiendita") and pay a low tax, or you are middle class, a professional, you do consulting and give out receipts, your tax is relatively low and simple (you may require an accountant to make sure you don't fall into an obscure tax law and have problems), or finally you are the rich class, you are a corporation, you pay high federal taxes, state taxes, enterprise taxes (IETU), and retain value added tax (IVA, the equivalent of sale tax or VAT), only this bracket you will be able to give out invoices (invoices are centrally controlled by the government), which is a requirement when your clients are companies. Most startups (incorporated) and companies will fall in the top bracket, even if you don't make millions, in other countries you are most likely to pay taxes based on your yearly income. Financing is thought, the problem is government financing which is very prone to corruption, which means all those stimulus mostly go to friends, family and the corporate backers of those in the government (some politicians promise those stimulus to their backers beforehand in campaigns). Finally, lets not get started with crime and violence, I live in a very peaceful part of the country but I have still received 2 or 3 calls arguing that they have a family member kidnapped, asking for money, a friend of mine even got a visit of an extortionist asking for "piso" money. I can understand well why Julio is leaving, I was tempted too to apply to Startup Chile and start a new, but Mexico also has its key areas that are unexploited on technology and will be great business in the near future.

by mrpollo 15y ago

armandososa 15y ago

Chile gives an entrepreneur $40k to fund an internet company and stay there for 6 months. Mexico taxes you twice because you have an internet company. Oh, and they will use those taxes to fund a stupid war.

j_camarena 15y ago

Hello; Thanks for your comment. To get an easy read on this reply i would divide it in main for topics: - Why didn't stay and more details about it. - Difference within Chile. - Totally different market. - Changes in business strategy. ## if you are truly interested on those topics please subscribe the blog, I'm planning to cover all of this topics on future posts. ## -> Why didn't stay and more details about it. <- This one in particular will be published soon, actually i'm just finishing the draft and maybe will be public in 2 days or something. Try to subscribe, you can be sure that i will post open recommendations, opinions and reasons why i stooped paying Taxes in Mexico .. i hope someone in the government can read it. -> Difference within Chile <-- I think its matter of philosophy .. almost all the country's will try to "get a piece of the pay", what Chile is doing here to have a clear vision to mitigate the "brain-drain" effect bringing some hope to local people. Its always good to have a guy in his 20's who did it big like your neighbor. Mexico in the other hand is focusing his self in giving "easy loans" with high interest rate to young people. This sounds like "hey, let me screw you a little, in a couple of years you will broke like 80% of the business but i will have my payback or get your home".. they are just doing it wrong.. very wrong. -> Totally different market. <-- Yes, it us a huge unknown market for us .. but we are going to keep our Mexico operations in a virtual way .. just they will be not paying to a Mexican company; Instead payment will be sent to an international company (i don't know where yet). Doing this they cant charge Taxes but we sure can attend clients in Mexico (and all latin-america) from any country in the world (Borders are so 90's). -> Change in business strategy. <- Well .. to be honest I'm a Mechanical Engineer... within my career i didn't learn anything about programming, html or css.. i just focused myself in Energy efficiency, heath transfer and entropy .. but the web was always my hobie. When graduated (2008) all the world was "in crisis" and there where no lots of Jobs .. but the web was making billions so i used my web knowledge to start something else and using as a pivot in the future.. by now the pivot is going great!. What im planning here is to have a customer-base within all latinamerica instead of just Mexico. I will also diversify to three or web apps. ### If you liked please subscribe, I'm planning to cover all this topics on my future posts ###.

cesarsalazar12 15y ago
As a partner of Mexican.VC (http://mexican.vc http://mexican.vc), a (pre)seed fund that invests in Mexican online startups, I can assure that the your vision of how Mexico works is quite incomplete. There's well enough funding in Mexico for early stage companies. You can find angels (Angel Ventures Mexico, Mex.VC), seed funds (Mexican.VC, Wayra, StartupFactory), early stage VCs (Alta Ventures, Ignia, Fondo Emprendedor CONACYT-NAFIN) and public grants (Prosoftware, Fondo PYME, AVANCE). I'm not saying Chile is not a great country (I love Chileans), but IMHO your reasons to leave Mexico are fundamentally flawed.
- j_camarena 15y ago
  Thanks for the comment.. i knew about some of the programs you mentioned there .. http://mexican.vc http://mexican.vc got my attention in particular. I did research when started the company but a lot of doors where closed at that time and my options where to take a Loan or leave a part of the company to the seed funders. I think gov should do something like Startup chile where they offer "free money" to start a wildfire in entrepreneur attitude. *please add me to my twitter @j_camarena, will be cool to keep contact :)
- eduardoflores 15y ago
  I wouldn't say "fundamentally flawed". A bit simplistic, maybe, but totally understandable. Government funds are - let's say, shady - and private funds are usually who-knows-who and pretty inaccessible. I'm not saying that it's impossible but I certainly understand Julio: as good entrepreneur, he's taking the pragmatic route. Kudos for that.
  - j_camarena 15y ago
    Thanks Eduardo

checoivan 15y ago

From Mexico myself as well. The whole ordeal is by far more complicated than in the US, except for visas. Starting is already hard enough by itself, so adding on top a thick layer of hoops to jump and bypass in Mexico isn't the best of things. The market is different, the talent pool is vastly different than sillicon valley. There's a big focus in custom enterprise applications and consulting among CS workers and grads, very little product focus. There's a mindset gap where the majority of people believe starting, and doing something without getting squashed by El Goog or government is impossible. Convincing people that things "can be done" is an uphill battle. Incubators are more of the generalist type.I applied and spent some time on my university incubator ("Tec") and found that the focus was in manufacturing, trading, and finance business. There was very little knowledge of tech startups. Accounting/Hr/taxes are pretty draconian as well.

clsdaniel 15y ago

Another Mexican giving its point of view here: On human resources, the culture here is a job culture, you finish your career, you get into a company, work 30-35 years and retire, that's what the community expects of you. Starting a company is awkward, working in something without payment or having immediate profits is a waste of time or foolish. But that is changing with the crisis, everything goes now. Getting people can be a bit difficult, most candidates I have interviewed had little experience (if at all), with free software technologies we use and demonstrated little will to learn (education tends to be centered on specific technologies), most don't work well unsupervised, thus our remote working experiment failed, they don't use modern development tools such as version control, bug tracking and project management software, etc. That is a generalization, of course there is brilliant people here too, but way more difficult to find, hopefully if a startup community concentrates in a place the skillful workforce will also concentrate there. Government paperwork has always been abundant, complicated and time sink. Taxes are not well leveled, either you are of low class (you have a small shop "changarro/tiendita") and pay a low tax, or you are middle class, a professional, you do consulting and give out receipts, your tax is relatively low and simple (you may require an accountant to make sure you don't fall into an obscure tax law and have problems), or finally you are the rich class, you are a corporation, you pay high federal taxes, state taxes, enterprise taxes (IETU), and retain value added tax (IVA, the equivalent of sale tax or VAT), only this bracket you will be able to give out invoices (invoices are centrally controlled by the government), which is a requirement when your clients are companies. Most startups (incorporated) and companies will fall in the top bracket, even if you don't make millions, in other countries you are most likely to pay taxes based on your yearly income. Financing is thought, the problem is government financing which is very prone to corruption, which means all those stimulus mostly go to friends, family and the corporate backers of those in the government (some politicians promise those stimulus to their backers beforehand in campaigns). Finally, lets not get started with crime and violence, I live in a very peaceful part of the country but I have still received 2 or 3 calls arguing that they have a family member kidnapped, asking for money, a friend of mine even got a visit of an extortionist asking for "piso" money. I can understand well why Julio is leaving, I was tempted too to apply to Startup Chile and start a new, but Mexico also has its key areas that are unexploited on technology and will be great business in the near future.