I am starting a company in Chile

I am happy to announce that I will be participate in Start-Up Chile this June. I am thrilled to have such an opportunity. In this post I'll cover why I think this is an amazing opportunity and why you should participate in future programs if you are an entrepreneur.

What is my startup?

I have chosen to participate with Wedoist — which until now has mostly been a side-project that I have worked on in my spare time. Wedoist is out and you can try it out — this said, it's only a very small fraction of what's to come. But even this minimal release of Wedoist is growing, has thousands of users and is already profitable, so I have high hopes for the future.

My ambition?

My first startup Plurk.com is a top 1000 site in the world, has millions of users and over the years we got copied by Microsoft and recently Baidu (China's Google). Given this record I aim even higher with my new venture and I want to invest a lot of time into something that has a very positive impact on the world. Generally, I want to change how people collaborate and improve productivity and communication for the better.

Why Start-Up Chile?

Here are my main reasons why I have chosen to participate in Start-Up Chile and not in one of the many bootstrap programs in Europe and US:

• the program is backed by the Chilean government and seems to be very professionally run.
• each startup receives $40.000 USD subsidy (no equity). This is a huge deal for me as you usually have to give a lot of equity in seed rounds for relative small amounts of capital. With this program you don't give away any equity, which should make most founders happy ;-)
• Chile has one of the best economies in Latin America and one of the fastest growing economies in the world — which means they must be doing something right and I want to explore their society and culture more.
• I can connect with some of the best entrepreneurs and hackers — not just Chilean, but from around the world since this is a global program.
• I love to travel and I love to do startups so being in Latin America while working on a startup sounds like quite a deal!

What does Chile get out of this?

Now you may be wondering what does Chile get out of this? As I see it, having a strong startup community is vital for any country so investing in fostering a startup community by attracting world-class entrepreneurs seems like a great investment.

The program will fund about 300 startups in 2011 — which costs about $12 million USD. This kind of cost is peanuts on a country scale and is the only negative thing about the program.

For Chile the positive parts of this program are following (as I see it):

• most of the money invested will be spent in Chile
• there is a chance that some of these startups will be successful with the upside that these startups might keep operating in Chile, hire Chilean people and pay Chilean taxes
• there's a very high chance that Chilean people will get inspired and get connections to world-class entrepreneurs and to other talented people these entrepreneurs bring aboard

They have a video covering their main objectives:

The beautiful Chile

I will end this post with some stunning photos of Chile.

Remember that you can apply for Start-Up Chile at startupchile.org — the next round begins in July!

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Yesterday's clarity is today's stupidity.
The universe has light and dark, entrust oneself to change.
One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of Heaven.