What he said.
Chile is an excellent place to test/bootstrap an idea. The $40K USD Start-Up Chile money makes it nearly risk free. This is the only promise of the program. Any other expectations are misplaced.
However, the reimbursement process is awful, does make for a considerable distraction from "real work," and should just be eliminated entirely.
Amen! Although the blogger also misses the most important benefit Startup Chile offers teams that are serious about fund-raising. Any fundable business coming out of the program is going to raise capital on much better terms than it would have been able to get previously. Those savings can easily amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It's always a risk that a company might fail to demonstrate enough growth or traction to attract further investment before its cash runs out, but that happens with every kind of outside investment. And the issue is with the business as it then exists, not with Startup Chile for funding an earlier version of it.
Re:Start-Up Chile is OK. Nothing more.
by theycallmemorty on Thursday June 28, 2012 @03:41PM
(#4173519)
Don't you have to promise to hire people to get the $40K?
Re:Start-Up Chile is OK. Nothing more.
by peterjancelis on Thursday June 28, 2012 @04:33PM
(#4173762)
No, in the pilot round you got RVA points for hiring locals but they dropped that in later rounds so it is not even explicitly encouraged right now.
And even if you are experienced doing startups it's still awesome to visit another culture and see how things work in another place. Maybe you won't like it that much, but at least you experienced it.
What Startup Chile isn't good at is creating companies that need VC funding or Silicon Valley connections. If your startup needs these things then don't look for it in Chile or anywhere else... because you won't find it here or anywhere else.