A recent Forbes article discussed the recent raise in entrepreneurship in Latin America. The article goes on to describe what exactly makes up an entrepreneurial society: a growth in the tech industry, centralized focus on entrepreneurs, and government subsidies on small business initiatives. In this day and age, many countries crave these qualities. In Latin America, the whole startup industry is quite new and the private entrepreneurial development company, Endeavor Global is trying to change that around.
Endeavor Global is a company that has gathered successful entrepreneurs from all over Latin America to act as a support network for emerging startups in the country. Latin America’s biggest concerns regarding entrepreneurship are a lack of leadership and financing. Endeavor Global has been able to address both issues with their professional network and venture capital firm, Kaszek, which sprung up from the Endeavor Global network.
This initiative has increased the number of successful businesses aiming towards lower levels of income, which is what Latin America needs. Online use in Latin America is expected in increase by 50% in the next five years. Many of these successful companies coming out of the woodwork are online service companies that are focusing on providing services to the hard working, middle class. Thus, companies in online retail are starting to emerge so services are more easily accessible. International credit cards are still not going to be accessible in Latin America for a while, so there are multiple companies focusing on different online payment methods for the country.
Overtime, as the entrepreneurial bubble grows, more and more mentors will be joining Latin America’s professional network to guide the future startup businesses. What Latin America is more concerned with is financing. There are plenty of crowd-funding services that provide initial seed investment, but venture capital is still the main area of focus when it comes to financing in Latin America.
You can read more about the rising entrepreneurship industry in Latin America in the Forbes article here.