Why is there so much pressure? Well, we decided our DemoDay could use some salt and pepper, and we changed things. We innovated. We have tons of surprises for our 5th DemoDay.

For the very first time, the Start-Up Chile DemoDay will have judges and a winner. Up to this day, our DemoDays have matched great investors with talented startups, but we are now for the very first time changing the format: there will be judges, a Q&A session, scores and a winner. Said winner gets to travel to Silicon Valley for free and keep meeting with more investors, privately (isn´t that the whole point of a DemoDay, anyway?)

And about the judges: the panel mixes great influencers from Silicon Valley and LatAm with Chilean rockstar entrepreneurs. Make sure to learn more about them! Both Paul Singh, TA McCann and Nico Berman will delight the audience with a brief talk on DemoDay’s morning.

But there’s MORE! Our friends at Imagina Chile, RASU, Socialab and Asech will be offering workshops for the audience in the afternoon. One of the activities gathering most interest so far is a panel titled “Key tips to build a successful startup” which we hope benefits aspiring entrepreneurs in the audience.

The cherry of the cake? An awesome party to say goodbye to Start-Up Chile’s 5th DemoDay WHILE also closing our 8th application round! That’s right: our application deadline is set for June 27th, just like DemoDay! Make sure to invite your entrepreneurial friends to apply for a once in a lifetime opportunity!

JOIN US! June 27th, 9am, Sala Omnium, Santiago de Chile (Av Apoquindo 4900) SIGN UP HERE!

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En un año de elecciones pareciera que todo el mundo imagina un país que no existe, haciéndonos ver que falta mucho por hacer y que solo seres especiales o nombrados por algunos son los capaces de liderar estos cambios.

Hoy existe una invitación a imaginar, a soñar y a crear, donde los protagonistas son los ciudadanos, son ellos quienes desde las propias necesidades ven una nueva manera de hacerse parte de las soluciones que necesitan. Nosotros también nos unimos y plasmamos nuestro ideal para Chile, un país donde dejemos de lados nuestros prejuicios para proponer y hacer de este un país más justo.

Minka, es una marca de accesorios de mujer que nace del cuestionamiento de la formación del diseño en un país en vías de desarrollo, donde apuntar a un diseño exclusivo y elitista nos parecía un descriterio, frente a los múltiples problemas que afectan a nuestra sociedad.  Es así como con la convicción de que el diseño es un generador de empleos de calidad, desarrollamos un modelo de gestión inclusivo y solidario donde varios actores de la sociedad se unen para generar productos amigables con el medio ambiente y con contenido social.

Nuestros accesorios de mujer, son productos de una cadena solidaria, compuesta por empresas que donan sus desechos industriales, diseñadores que los utilizan como como materia prima y mujeres productoras que han sido capacitadas para generar productos de gran calidad. Es así como nos comprometemos a entregar un objeto que además de tener impacto positivo ambientalmente, pone en valor el trabajo hecho a mano y personifica a las productoras muchas veces olvidadas.

Hoy te invitamos no solo a Imaginar, sino también a crear soluciones que nazcan de la experiencia, las vivencias personales y las ideas iniciales, esas que se olvidan por subestimar su impacto o su tamaño, son esas ideas las que generan los cambios, esas ideas que mutan, que cambian y se transforman. Esas ideas, que empiezan imaginando, que continúan creando, para terminar transformando.

Minka, es la raíz de la palabra quechua Minga, que significa trabajo comunitario con un fin social. Hoy estamos en una #MingaParaMinka y necesitamos tu ayuda. Vota ACA y ayúdanos a seguir haciendo #CosasQueImportan

]]> http://startupchile.org/imaginar-para-transformar/feed/ 0 http://startupchile.org/have-you-always-been-an-entrepreneur-my-first-biz-story/ http://startupchile.org/have-you-always-been-an-entrepreneur-my-first-biz-story/#comments Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:09:13 +0000 maite http://startupchile.org/?p=19953 Supper Lull Menguesha is working on an educational app curator called edamigo. His goal is to help teachers find valuable educational app’s easily by matching apps to the classroom instruction. When he is not busy on that, he interviews other entrepreneurs so they share how did they get started. The goal of  ”My First Biz Story” is to share the first entrepreneurial experiences and stories of entrepreneurs from all over the world. There will be a new story every week, make sure to follow the project! 

t!

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You should definitely sign up to their meetup group! http://www.meetup.com/SantiagoHealth/

WHEN? Thursday, June 20, 2013 6:30 PM

WHERE? Centro Movistar Innova (CMI) (Providencia 229, Santiago)

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With more than 11 million users since it launched (2008), Evernote is a great story of startup success. Those trying to raise funds might want to keep in mind that on November, 2012, Evernote raised more than 80 million. Cumulative Financing for Evernote is beyond $200 million. It offers both free and premium accounts, and has rapidly expanded in Latin America recently.

WHEN? Friday, June 21, 2013, 10:00 AM

WHERE? Centro Movistar Innova (CMI) (Providencia 229)

SIGN UP HERE

The Next Web published an interesting piece on immigration and innovation hubs. Start-Up Chile believes talent knows no flags: we have welcomed entrepreneurs from more than 50 countries. Read the piece HERE and apply until June 27th!

The Pie News is also publishing about the crossroads between entrepreneurship and immigration. We only have to say: look at people’s talent, not their passports! Read the piece, here! 

Thinker Thing is printing objects directly from your mind! and that caught the BBCs attention. Read about Thinker Thing, here!

ContentForest is “Your Source for Awesome Writers” says Killer Startups! 

ComparaBien is nurturing the local press with their great studies on the economy and the different opportunities people can take an advantage of. Read them on El Mercurio!

Entrepreneurs Nathan Lustig and Enrique Fernández lead “DePe” (De Emprendedores Para Emprendedores), an amazing initiative that is taking place in the north of Chile. DePe is a 3 month class on entrepreneurship, “We built the crash course on entrepreneurship we wish we had when we started out” says founder Nathan Lustig to Pulso Social.  DePe had its DemoDay this week, congrats!

3 years ago, Start-Up Chile began organizing meetups. At the time, it was a rare thing to do in Chile: people were not used to them, and just a few would join. Now, there are about 4 meetups every week in Santiago, some of them can have up to 100 attendants. Start-Up Chile decided it was time to innovate: welcome to our Open Coffees! Lets gather and network before the workday begins! Qué Pasa magazine is talking about it! 

Felipe del Sol, founder at  Admetricks, is sharing his Start-Up Chile experience at FayerWayer!

Simon Schuetz and his Kickstarter campaing to “put the awesome back in maps” got featured on Slate magazine! and Good! Make sure to help Simon and get some awesome customized maps in the process

Suppers behind TOHL are having the time of their lives! They got featured on Bloomberg and got accepted as Echoing Green fellows! Watch them on TV below and learn more about their awesome innovation with pipelines.

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We would like to announce that TOHL’s CEO, Benjamin Cohen, was selected for the prestigious Echoing Green Fellowship in New York, joining a 25 year legacy of visionaries who are changing the world for the better. Meet the incredible class of fellows here.  Only 28 fellows out of 2,872 applicants were selected. This fellowship includes seed funding, a health insurance stipend, a professional development stipend, and access to a network of 500 fellows and other organizations.

TOHL has made some serious progress in the last few months.  TOHL’s permanent Chilean operations are starting to roll, as they have an installation coming up at a location that is 1.5 hours outside of Santiago in the municipality of San José de Maipo.  They recently signed the contract on this project, and it will begin in the coming weeks.  Discovery Channel will be present to shoot the installation and cover TOHL’s innovations on an episode of Daily Planet that is nationally syndicated in more than 120 countries.  We will provide more information about this when it is released later this year.

Additionally, TOHL is working with ONEMI, the emergency response branch of Chile’s national government, in order to further develop TOHL’s solutions for emergency response. TOHL recently met with the National Director of ONEMI, and they have decided to move forward in collaboration.

TOHL is also competing in GOOD’s Start Something That Matters Competition for a chance to win $50,000 USD and support from TOM’s founder, Blake Mycoskie.  Please help TOHL by submitting your vote, through clicking this link, clicking vote, and validating your vote through Facebook.

TOHL now gets to join Start-Up Chile alumni Edrizio de la Cruz and Juan Maldonado, who are impacting the world with Regalii and also are Echoing Green fellows.

CONGRATS!

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From learning from top women CEOs and seeing Google’s famous corporate culture first-hand, to spotting Mark Zuckerberg at a bar and working closely with a co-founder of a leading company in Silicon Valley (Weili Dai and her team at Marvell), my experiences over the last month were more incredible than I could imagine. My thanks go to the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, Vital Voices, the US State Department and Marvell.

As Sheryl Sandberg says in her book Lean In, if you ask a girl what they want to be when they grow up, when they do become women, they continue to think about this dream. I believe she is right. In my case, my childhood dream was to become a manager of an important company - my future company, which I would create. This dream defined me as a person.

I’ve loved tech since I was young, and made it my career. Today, I’m the co-founder of AdviseMeTech, along with Carolina Bañales. It’s no surprise that one of my biggest aspirations – a dream shared by many engineers in our country – was getting to know Silicon Valley, where the biggest technologies are created, and to someday take our company there.

My company is based in Uruguay, a small country in South America with less than 3.4 million people. We’re known for having more cattle than people, for our lovely beaches, and for sharing a border with Argentina and Brazil. What many people don’t know about Uruguay is that we have a booming tech industry. We have cutting edge IT infrastructure. The state gives tax incentives to IT companies, and we have the largest per capita software exportation in Latin America. Uruguay is a small, emerging country that is creating its own path for innovation and technology, and we have the will to learn, innovate, and invest in this industry even further.

Despite these opportunities, Silicon Valley and Uruguay are much further away than a flight to California. Uruguay lacks connections with Silicon Valley’s financial resources such as venture capital funds, and there’s little communication or networking between companies in Silicon Valley and those in Uruguay – even though we’re often working to develop the same products or services. There is a gap between our worlds, and we in Uruguay often see Silicon Valley as an untouchable symbol of innovation. It’s bridging this gap that motivates me to work harder and build my own network with this community.

During the Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership, I started doing just that. Here are a few of my key takeaways:

Have confidence in your ideas and take a risk on them. During our discussion with Dina Powell, President of the Goldman Sachs Foundation, she said, “no big miracles are achieved with just a small risk.” It’s this energy, competitiveness, risk-taking, and out-of-the-box thinking that make entrepreneurs successful.

In Silicon Valley, people are driven by the dream of being successful. My ideas about ambition, dreams, and measures of success have changed. As Alyse Nelson, President & CEO of Vital Voices told us, “Leadership isn’t just about success, it’s about significance.” Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley don’t dream about just multimillion dollar companies, but multibillion dollar ones, and it’s this ambition that leads them to become global innovators.

Build networks. The environment in Silicon Valley – filled with hacker groups, tech events, women’s event, and mentoring between young professionals and students – feeds the creation of new businesses and the growth and development of existing ones. New companies are creating possibilities and leadership opportunities to develop young staff. As Beth Brooke, Global Vice Chair for Public Policy at Ernst & Young said, “The more people you help, the more your power is enhanced.” Now I want to inspire others to take risks and believe in their dreams.

I’ve brought back to Uruguay these lessons from Silicon Valley, and I think this is just the start of a great journey. I look forward to building a better future for our company, my country, the world and society.

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Only 10 days after announcing our 7th generation, we begin a new application process seeking to select and fund 100 awesome startups. The lucky ones will get USD 40k (equity free) in funding + a one-year work visa + access to an awesome coworking space filled with entrepreneurs from more than 50 countries! Together, we will keep revolutionizing the Chilean entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Starting today, you’ll be able to check out the requirements and details related to our 8th application process. You’ll be able to submit your application only between June 10th and June 27th, when our 5th Demo Day takes place. Make sure to check our Apply section, Terms & Conditions (Español, English),  Frequently Asked Questions, and a Sample Application Form.

If you have applied to Start-Up Chile in the past, you already know what our application process looks like. We hope you can use the judges’ feedback to your advantage and submit an amazing application. If that’s your story, don’t hesitate any longer and jump on over to our application platform!

If you have never applied to Start-Up Chile, we have great news for you. Today, the SUPBoat departs in order to meet entrepreneurs around the world. The SUPBoat will visit dozens of cities in order to answer all your questions directly. Meet Start-Up Chile alumni and learn about the Start-Up Chile experience from those who know the program better than anyone. Get all your questions answered and then, apply! Check out our meetups schedule via meetup.com Get on the SUPBoat, apply to Start-Up Chile!

SUPBoat is stopping at Brussels, Belgium; Bucharest, Romania; Nicosia, Cyprus; Lima, Peru; Belo Horizonte, Brazil; New York, USA; Toronto, Canada; Paris, France; London, UK (2 meetups! One HERE and one HERE)  Santiago, Chile; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Leipzig, Germany.

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Supper Simon Schuetz began his kickstarter campaign to put the awesome back in maps, and El Mercurio noticed what a creative project this is and featured him. Read the piece here and make sure to spread the word!

Great Facebook speakers came over last week to host “Mobile Dev Con”, a conference on mobile development organized entirely by suppers. It was a great event, and LUN interviewed Luz Caballero. Its a really fun piece, make sure to check it out here.

Ajay Pal Singh and Second Light got featured on Tech Cocktail! Josefina Correa, founder at Let’s Jock, is getting press love from El País online!

El País, the biggest and most influential newspaper in Spanish in the world, published a piece about Start-Up Chile. It welcomes everyone to the “Chilecon Valley”. Now that our 8th application process is open, we hope the piece inspires lots of folks to apply from Spain! Read it, here.

The Gigabot, the large 3D printer by RE:3D got featured on FayerWayer. There’s video!

Start-Up Chile got featured on Young Entrepreneur! The piece explains how is Start-Up Chile designed to support global entrepreneurs with funding, visa, and office space, while they help us transform Chilean’s mindsets so they jump and join the entrepreneurial revolution. Read the piece, here!

Start-Up Brazil launched and it didn´t go unnoticed for the Brazilean press. We are getting lots of inquiries about Start-Up Chile, Start-Up Brazil, and how could be collaborate. Go to page 93 on this issue of issuu.com and read about “The battle for startups” that isn’t a real battle, but more of a bunch of gladiators convincing local authorities around LatAm that they should make startups a priority.

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