Startup Chile January 17th, Written by Andrew Nolan

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Today was another eventful day in the beautiful country of Chile. Before i get into my main blog topic, the company known as “Startup Chile,” i want to briefly mention something that happened at lunch before the presentation. I was eating with a few of my friends at a Chilean restaurant at the market, when we noticed a man playing the harp and it sounded beautiful. Naturally Helmuth and I went over and gave the man some pesos for his music and we had a brief conversation with him. This was impactful to me because it is very possible that our generation might not carry on the art of street music, and it is something that might only be around for 30 more years or so. Anyways, on to Startup Chile. Startup Chile is essentially a government funded company which helps entrepreneurs to start their own companies. They do this through training programs as well as offering a number of grants. They have a number of different programs available for hopeful entrepreneurs who wish to come to Chile to start their companies. These programs known as the S factory, a program for hopeful woman entrepreneurs, and SEED, for businesses that already have a developed concept, plan, and running website. Both these programs take in a number of startup companies and pay out a significant amount of money in grants. They deal with approximately 250 startup companies each year which is extremely impressive given they are a small company with a team consisting of only 24 members. Due to the fact that they are a public-run accelerator company, in return for their grants and services they do not make a profit nor do they receive any equity in these companies. They essentially provide these companies with free services in exchange for social impact from the startup companies. This is to ensure that Chile has a good business and entrepreneur environment. As part of the presentation there was also a founder of a startup company who gave a brief presentation on his company. He had completed the SEED program with Startup Chile and his company was Power Gym. This was very interesting to me because I belong to a number of gym in the United States and he described the differences between those gyms and the gyms that are in Chile. His goal is to avoid having people that do not pay or that pay late at gyms as well as doing a variety of other things with a new software program that he developed for the gyms to use. This software can monitor different machines as well as using a fingerprint for people to scan into the gyms.
“It was cool how they were giving women a chance to start their own company in a developing country”-Zach
“I wish i learned more about the nap pod”-Hannah
“I was surprised to see how much faith they had in new startup companies which they knew nothing about”-Jaden



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