I participated in round 1.5, arrived in July 2011 and stayed in Chile until the end of March. If you have the right expectations you can make Start-Up Chile a f

I participated in round 1.5, arrived in July 2011 and stayed in Chile until the end of March. If you have the right expectations you can make Start-Up Chile a fantastic experience. The biggest mistake I and others made was to compare it in any way to accelerators like Y Combinator or TechStars. Unless you have well in excess of $10K in the bank (credit doesn't count) expect to be constantly stressed about cash flow. Don't expect to have any of the $10K that you bring left at the end of the 6 months, you won't get 90% of everything you spend reimbursed. Don't expect to have any pressure or external deadlines from Start-Up Chile to actually ship anything. Don't expect to find mentors that can help you with all too common startup killers like co-founder disputes. Don't expect to be impressed by the quality of all your peer teams and startups. Don't expect to be impressed with Santiago as a city or the food, culture and natural beauty in the surrounding area. The best bits of Chile are well outside the central part of the country. Don't expect to find a technical cofounder or a development team in Chile. Do expect constant change, mixed messages, a little chaos and inflexibility on things that seem trivial to you. Startup Chile is run by a team of good people with great intensions that are probably the most entrepreneurial people in government. However they are not entrepreneurs, they are a government department with lots of rules and regulation that is effectively run by committee. Sadly they don't have the leadership or the power to make Startup Chile as good as it could be. Start-Up Chile would be much more effective if a startup veteran were given $40MM to turn Chile into a startup hub by investing it in 1000 startups independently of government, but that was probably felt too much for the electorate to stomach. With those expectations set hopefully you can come to Chile and focus on building something awesome and creating a strong support network for yourself rather than wasting any time being frustrated by imperfections in the programme. I've been quite negative in this post to provide some balance to all the positive press which you've already read. Overall I'm grateful for the experience and I have recommended it to my friends, some of which are now in Chile. There is also no doubt in my mind that Start-Up Chile is doing great things for the country and I think more developing world countries should replicate the approach.