Reverse side of Startup Chile + video interview
My name is Maxim, I am the founder of the SmartProgress goal achievement service . In this article I will talk about the reverse side of StartUp Chile and my experience of participating in it.
Startup Chile is a program from the government of Chile to attract innovative projects. In 2015, our project won a grand in the amount of $ 33,000.
Call for new 16th generation Startup Chile is in full swing. And while thousands of teams around the world are trying to prepare the perfect application for this grant, I would like to tell you about the pitfalls that I faced in the 12th generation.
')
At first, and at second glance - Startup Chile looks like a magical opportunity for a startup: they give money, do not require a share in return, the opportunity to loudly declare themselves in the media, the opportunity to enter a foreign market, accelerator program, mentoring support, the opportunity to visit Latin America and much more. Also, all this makes sweet countless positive impressions of people who have passed Startup Chile. But there is practically no information on the Internet about the problems that you will encounter if you decide to fly to Chile, so I would like to highlight this aspect a little.
Under the terms of the program, you will receive the first half of the grant only 3 weeks after the start of the program. This means that you will pay for the flight, accommodation, all legal procedures yourself for yourself and members of your team, and it will cost you a lot.
When I flew to Chile, 1 ticket from Moscow to Santiago cost me 75 tons. Rub. But, since I lived in Thailand, the flight reached me at 100 tr. Do not forget to multiply by the number of people who fly with you.
Upon arrival, you will have to live in the hotel for about a week until you find accommodation for a long time, something decent starts from 2.5 tr. for 1 day. = 17.5 tr. Apartment rental, from 35 TR per month. Plus 1 month deposit, plus a 50% commission to a realtor. Total long-term lease = 87.5 tr. And together with the hotel = 105 tr. Of course, there are opportunities for savings: on arrival, stay at the hostel, and stay for long periods in the check-in room. For example, on arrival I lived in a rental room for about a week (about 1 ton. Rubles / day). But I was looking for an apartment for a long time, because I was expecting my wife's arrival.
Once you have decided on housing, you will need to go through all the circles of bureaucracy in Startup Chile. Most of the expenses, of course, will not be significant, but about one point I will still mention - insurance. Startup Chile necessarily requires that you insure your responsibility to them, in case you get a grant and decide to fall on all four sides. In this case, the insurance company will return the grant to the Government of Chile, and you will already deal with it yourself. The cost of insurance in the 12th generation was about 30 tr.
So it turns out that you need to have a total of 210 tr. only for one person to fly from Moscow, stay for a week in a hotel and rent a small apartment in a very good area for 1 month and get a registration in Chile to receive a grant.
Three weeks pass, and it would be time to get a grant, but it was not there. Delays in Startup Chile - this is the norm, and be prepared for the fact that you still have a month to live without money, and therefore pay the rent, utilities, the Internet. For all payments on the apartment, except for the rent, I had about 8t.r. per month. Personally, I was transferred the first half of the grant more than a month after the promised date. The funny thing is that after a couple of weeks, I already had to report on where I spent the money.
So, before receiving the grant, you need to have at least 253 tons of rubles. And these are only basic payments, excluding food, entertainment, etc.
When applying for a grant, Startup Chile declared a grant of $ 40,000. For many years it was like this, but here the global financial crisis began again and the currencies of the resource countries began to depreciate. The economy of Chile rests on the mining industry - copper and other metals. And by the time I arrived in Chile, the grant had already reached $ 35,000. After all, as it turned out, it was not paid in US dollars, but in Chilean pesos and the program’s management did not intend to index the exchange difference. By the end of the program, the grant was already $ 32,000. But the site still proudly featured a figure of $ 40,000. Later, of course, they updated the information and indicated that the grant amounts to 20 million Chilean pesos, indicating the approximate cost in US dollars = $ 30,000. Although today this figure is no longer relevant, and 20 mil. clp is already $ 28,000
Nothing is free and for the money you have to work. The main task of Startup Chile is to raise the entrepreneurial spirit in the country (RVA - Return Value Agenda). For this, they actually need startups, and the grant is a bait for them.
To account for the first half of the grant and get the second, you need to earn a certain amount of RVA balls, which are given for workshops, lectures for local students, mentoring of local entrepreneurs. At the lectures you have to talk about your business experience, learn how to create IT projects, find clients, program or other topics that can be attributed to entrepreneurship and start-up creation. It is these balls, and not the development of your project, that the StartupChile administration will be more interested in.
Although Startup Chile and organizes a certain number of events, but still very little. Get ready for what you have to do absolutely everything yourself - to approve the topic of your speech with the leadership of Startup Chile, find a place to hold your speech, find students or entrepreneurs as listeners. Accrued bonuses depend on the number of students and the duration of the lecture. When conducting 1 hour lecture for an audience of less than 100 people, you need to hold 8 such lectures to recruit the required number of points. Considering the fact that in Chile there is a very small percentage of people who speak English, this is not an easy task. It looks like this: you go to all city universities and are looking for a teacher who understands English, and as a preacher, you offer to tell a little about business for his students. It all looks all very sad and not cool. You feel that you work for a tick, and not for the sake of some real exchange of experience.
I have already mentioned the high level of bureaucracy in the first paragraph in passing, but I would like to further emphasize this. Startup Chile will require strict compliance with the conditions and deadlines in everything - the arrival of Chile, the preparation of presentations, reports, recruitment of the required number of points, almost under the fear of public burning at the square, but at the same time delaying the payment of the grant for a month - the other, not counting something awful. The second part of the grant was paid to me almost 2 months after the planned date, after I wrote a complaint to everyone I could write. As a result, instead of the planned 6 months, it took me 8 months to spend in Chile. Therefore, be prepared that you will have to fight with the bureaucratic machine for a long time and hard.
I would also like to highlight one pitfall, which is hidden here. Here you have listed the first half of the grant, which you need to spend quickly, because you will very soon have to report on your spending, in the end you paint your budget so that you would spend all the money by a certain date - the date of receipt of the next part of the grant. Hire new developers, people in the team to increase the pace of work. Spend all the money, report on spending, and wait in the near future to receive the second part of the grant, but face the reality - the money is not transferred. And you don’t know when you’ll get them exactly, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a month, or even 2. Your supervisor constantly apologizes and feeds you with breakfast for several weeks, after which he just starts to ignore you. As a result, you are sitting without money, with an increased staff who need to pay salaries and they are damned if you have any problems, they honestly do their job and expect to receive their salaries on time. This is a very big stress, with which you have to somehow cope, unless, of course, you are not an irresponsible nihilist, who can easily throw his employees for money. Otherwise, you are waiting for long sleepless nights in thought about what to do next and where to get money urgently. Thank you Startup Chile for my first gray hair.
Consider also the fact that at least Startup Chile gives you a grant of 20 million pesso, you will have to report for 22.22 million pess. Those. The grant implies your co-financing in the amount of 10% of the grant size.
Another stumbling block from all this is that with this mode of spending money, you begin to spend them less productively than we would like. You will not be able to stretch the money. You need to spend and spend them in a short time.
Startup Chile with each new generation tightens the screws. A couple of years ago, participants in the accelerator reported on their activities simply by talking with their supervisor, telling where they spent the money, where they lectured. In the 12th, everything was already pretty tough.
The financial report should have been presented in the form of a table with a list of all expenses. And each payment had to be accompanied by a pile of additional papers.
If this is an employee’s salary payment, it was necessary to submit:
the original of the contract with the employee, which clearly states that he will perform, in what time, how much will receive money and to what account
bank statement, which reflects the transaction from your account, to the employee’s account;
copy of the employee's passport.
The contract must be original, signed by the employee and sent to you by mail, wherever the employee is. For each type of waste there is a list of requirements that must be provided as evidence. Preparation of one such report takes about a week and the output is a huge pile of papers. For each half of the grant, you need to separately report. If the inspectors do not like at least something, they exclude waste from the report and require a corrected report to be submitted within 48 hours.
During the lecture for the RVA, you will need to rewrite all of your listeners - first name, last name, passport details, email. And also to take a few photos or videos of the lecture process as a confirmation of the fact of the lecture passing. After the Startup Chile has provided this data, the administration will send listeners an email with confirmation that they were in this lecture with a questionnaire on how interesting the lecture was and what they learned.
And I have not yet talked about the weekly morning platoon - mandatory meetings, in small groups of 10 people, at which we discuss supposedly important issues. As well as the mailstone (milestone), where we discuss the development path of your project with the curator. In addition, there are also public pitches, where you need to tell about the rest of the startups about your project and what you managed to do during the Startup Chile. For me personally, all this was completely uninteresting and a burden, since I had a clear work plan, I knew exactly what I needed to do, but only the time for the project was much less. In order to keep up with your work schedule, you will probably have to significantly increase your workload. It was somehow interesting to me and I calculated how much time I spent on Startup Chile and it turned out about 2 months. Those. for 2 months, I only dealt with Startup Chile, not with my own project.
Be prepared that your personal expenses in Chile will increase significantly, since Chile is a rather expensive country, and Santiago is an expensive city, even in comparison with Moscow. I already wrote about apartments, but the products are more expensive. For example, a kilogram of beef costs about 750 rubles, 5 liters of drinking water costs 150 rubles. Entertainment is even more expensive. 1 day to go snowboarding in the suburbs of Santiago, my wife and I managed 10 TR This is for the rental of 2 boards with mounts, 2 Skype pass, a snack on the mountain and the road 1 time. Before Chile, my wife and I lived in Thailand and our personal expenses in Chile increased by about 2 times.
Summarizing all the above, be ready to give up to half of the grant for flights, accommodation, increased personal expenses and inefficient use. Devote up to a third of your time to work on Startup Chile, significantly increase your workload so that you don’t get out of the project schedule at the end, get a big dose of stress due to fighting bureaucracy and fulfilling all program conditions.
Is it worth it? Let everyone answer this question for himself. For me, it was worth it. Everything was not as rosy as it seemed initially, but the enormous experience gained during the program, I would even say the test, outweighs all these disadvantages. For many projects, these tests are fatal, I saw how people, after completing the accelerator, closed their projects themselves, deducted someone from the Startup Chile manual. This is some kind of your stress test and the viability of your project. If you pass Startup Chile, return home and at the same time continue to work on your project - you are ready to transform from a startup to businessmen.
And finally, my video interview.
Prehistory
Startup Chile is a program from the government of Chile to attract innovative projects. In 2015, our project won a grand in the amount of $ 33,000.
Call for new 16th generation Startup Chile is in full swing. And while thousands of teams around the world are trying to prepare the perfect application for this grant, I would like to tell you about the pitfalls that I faced in the 12th generation.
')
At first, and at second glance - Startup Chile looks like a magical opportunity for a startup: they give money, do not require a share in return, the opportunity to loudly declare themselves in the media, the opportunity to enter a foreign market, accelerator program, mentoring support, the opportunity to visit Latin America and much more. Also, all this makes sweet countless positive impressions of people who have passed Startup Chile. But there is practically no information on the Internet about the problems that you will encounter if you decide to fly to Chile, so I would like to highlight this aspect a little.
1) You will receive money only in Chile ... or you may not receive it.
Under the terms of the program, you will receive the first half of the grant only 3 weeks after the start of the program. This means that you will pay for the flight, accommodation, all legal procedures yourself for yourself and members of your team, and it will cost you a lot.
When I flew to Chile, 1 ticket from Moscow to Santiago cost me 75 tons. Rub. But, since I lived in Thailand, the flight reached me at 100 tr. Do not forget to multiply by the number of people who fly with you.
Upon arrival, you will have to live in the hotel for about a week until you find accommodation for a long time, something decent starts from 2.5 tr. for 1 day. = 17.5 tr. Apartment rental, from 35 TR per month. Plus 1 month deposit, plus a 50% commission to a realtor. Total long-term lease = 87.5 tr. And together with the hotel = 105 tr. Of course, there are opportunities for savings: on arrival, stay at the hostel, and stay for long periods in the check-in room. For example, on arrival I lived in a rental room for about a week (about 1 ton. Rubles / day). But I was looking for an apartment for a long time, because I was expecting my wife's arrival.
Once you have decided on housing, you will need to go through all the circles of bureaucracy in Startup Chile. Most of the expenses, of course, will not be significant, but about one point I will still mention - insurance. Startup Chile necessarily requires that you insure your responsibility to them, in case you get a grant and decide to fall on all four sides. In this case, the insurance company will return the grant to the Government of Chile, and you will already deal with it yourself. The cost of insurance in the 12th generation was about 30 tr.
So it turns out that you need to have a total of 210 tr. only for one person to fly from Moscow, stay for a week in a hotel and rent a small apartment in a very good area for 1 month and get a registration in Chile to receive a grant.
Three weeks pass, and it would be time to get a grant, but it was not there. Delays in Startup Chile - this is the norm, and be prepared for the fact that you still have a month to live without money, and therefore pay the rent, utilities, the Internet. For all payments on the apartment, except for the rent, I had about 8t.r. per month. Personally, I was transferred the first half of the grant more than a month after the promised date. The funny thing is that after a couple of weeks, I already had to report on where I spent the money.
So, before receiving the grant, you need to have at least 253 tons of rubles. And these are only basic payments, excluding food, entertainment, etc.
2) Grant is melting by leaps and bounds
When applying for a grant, Startup Chile declared a grant of $ 40,000. For many years it was like this, but here the global financial crisis began again and the currencies of the resource countries began to depreciate. The economy of Chile rests on the mining industry - copper and other metals. And by the time I arrived in Chile, the grant had already reached $ 35,000. After all, as it turned out, it was not paid in US dollars, but in Chilean pesos and the program’s management did not intend to index the exchange difference. By the end of the program, the grant was already $ 32,000. But the site still proudly featured a figure of $ 40,000. Later, of course, they updated the information and indicated that the grant amounts to 20 million Chilean pesos, indicating the approximate cost in US dollars = $ 30,000. Although today this figure is no longer relevant, and 20 mil. clp is already $ 28,000
3) Free Cheese
Nothing is free and for the money you have to work. The main task of Startup Chile is to raise the entrepreneurial spirit in the country (RVA - Return Value Agenda). For this, they actually need startups, and the grant is a bait for them.
To account for the first half of the grant and get the second, you need to earn a certain amount of RVA balls, which are given for workshops, lectures for local students, mentoring of local entrepreneurs. At the lectures you have to talk about your business experience, learn how to create IT projects, find clients, program or other topics that can be attributed to entrepreneurship and start-up creation. It is these balls, and not the development of your project, that the StartupChile administration will be more interested in.
Although Startup Chile and organizes a certain number of events, but still very little. Get ready for what you have to do absolutely everything yourself - to approve the topic of your speech with the leadership of Startup Chile, find a place to hold your speech, find students or entrepreneurs as listeners. Accrued bonuses depend on the number of students and the duration of the lecture. When conducting 1 hour lecture for an audience of less than 100 people, you need to hold 8 such lectures to recruit the required number of points. Considering the fact that in Chile there is a very small percentage of people who speak English, this is not an easy task. It looks like this: you go to all city universities and are looking for a teacher who understands English, and as a preacher, you offer to tell a little about business for his students. It all looks all very sad and not cool. You feel that you work for a tick, and not for the sake of some real exchange of experience.
4) Where is my money?
I have already mentioned the high level of bureaucracy in the first paragraph in passing, but I would like to further emphasize this. Startup Chile will require strict compliance with the conditions and deadlines in everything - the arrival of Chile, the preparation of presentations, reports, recruitment of the required number of points, almost under the fear of public burning at the square, but at the same time delaying the payment of the grant for a month - the other, not counting something awful. The second part of the grant was paid to me almost 2 months after the planned date, after I wrote a complaint to everyone I could write. As a result, instead of the planned 6 months, it took me 8 months to spend in Chile. Therefore, be prepared that you will have to fight with the bureaucratic machine for a long time and hard.
I would also like to highlight one pitfall, which is hidden here. Here you have listed the first half of the grant, which you need to spend quickly, because you will very soon have to report on your spending, in the end you paint your budget so that you would spend all the money by a certain date - the date of receipt of the next part of the grant. Hire new developers, people in the team to increase the pace of work. Spend all the money, report on spending, and wait in the near future to receive the second part of the grant, but face the reality - the money is not transferred. And you don’t know when you’ll get them exactly, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a month, or even 2. Your supervisor constantly apologizes and feeds you with breakfast for several weeks, after which he just starts to ignore you. As a result, you are sitting without money, with an increased staff who need to pay salaries and they are damned if you have any problems, they honestly do their job and expect to receive their salaries on time. This is a very big stress, with which you have to somehow cope, unless, of course, you are not an irresponsible nihilist, who can easily throw his employees for money. Otherwise, you are waiting for long sleepless nights in thought about what to do next and where to get money urgently. Thank you Startup Chile for my first gray hair.
Consider also the fact that at least Startup Chile gives you a grant of 20 million pesso, you will have to report for 22.22 million pess. Those. The grant implies your co-financing in the amount of 10% of the grant size.
Another stumbling block from all this is that with this mode of spending money, you begin to spend them less productively than we would like. You will not be able to stretch the money. You need to spend and spend them in a short time.
5) Verification Verification for Verification
Startup Chile with each new generation tightens the screws. A couple of years ago, participants in the accelerator reported on their activities simply by talking with their supervisor, telling where they spent the money, where they lectured. In the 12th, everything was already pretty tough.
The financial report should have been presented in the form of a table with a list of all expenses. And each payment had to be accompanied by a pile of additional papers.
If this is an employee’s salary payment, it was necessary to submit:
the original of the contract with the employee, which clearly states that he will perform, in what time, how much will receive money and to what account
bank statement, which reflects the transaction from your account, to the employee’s account;
copy of the employee's passport.
The contract must be original, signed by the employee and sent to you by mail, wherever the employee is. For each type of waste there is a list of requirements that must be provided as evidence. Preparation of one such report takes about a week and the output is a huge pile of papers. For each half of the grant, you need to separately report. If the inspectors do not like at least something, they exclude waste from the report and require a corrected report to be submitted within 48 hours.
During the lecture for the RVA, you will need to rewrite all of your listeners - first name, last name, passport details, email. And also to take a few photos or videos of the lecture process as a confirmation of the fact of the lecture passing. After the Startup Chile has provided this data, the administration will send listeners an email with confirmation that they were in this lecture with a questionnaire on how interesting the lecture was and what they learned.
6) A big waste of time for all nonsense
And I have not yet talked about the weekly morning platoon - mandatory meetings, in small groups of 10 people, at which we discuss supposedly important issues. As well as the mailstone (milestone), where we discuss the development path of your project with the curator. In addition, there are also public pitches, where you need to tell about the rest of the startups about your project and what you managed to do during the Startup Chile. For me personally, all this was completely uninteresting and a burden, since I had a clear work plan, I knew exactly what I needed to do, but only the time for the project was much less. In order to keep up with your work schedule, you will probably have to significantly increase your workload. It was somehow interesting to me and I calculated how much time I spent on Startup Chile and it turned out about 2 months. Those. for 2 months, I only dealt with Startup Chile, not with my own project.
7) Santiago is an expensive city
Be prepared that your personal expenses in Chile will increase significantly, since Chile is a rather expensive country, and Santiago is an expensive city, even in comparison with Moscow. I already wrote about apartments, but the products are more expensive. For example, a kilogram of beef costs about 750 rubles, 5 liters of drinking water costs 150 rubles. Entertainment is even more expensive. 1 day to go snowboarding in the suburbs of Santiago, my wife and I managed 10 TR This is for the rental of 2 boards with mounts, 2 Skype pass, a snack on the mountain and the road 1 time. Before Chile, my wife and I lived in Thailand and our personal expenses in Chile increased by about 2 times.
Results
Summarizing all the above, be ready to give up to half of the grant for flights, accommodation, increased personal expenses and inefficient use. Devote up to a third of your time to work on Startup Chile, significantly increase your workload so that you don’t get out of the project schedule at the end, get a big dose of stress due to fighting bureaucracy and fulfilling all program conditions.
Is it worth it? Let everyone answer this question for himself. For me, it was worth it. Everything was not as rosy as it seemed initially, but the enormous experience gained during the program, I would even say the test, outweighs all these disadvantages. For many projects, these tests are fatal, I saw how people, after completing the accelerator, closed their projects themselves, deducted someone from the Startup Chile manual. This is some kind of your stress test and the viability of your project. If you pass Startup Chile, return home and at the same time continue to work on your project - you are ready to transform from a startup to businessmen.
And finally, my video interview.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/298574/
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