Colombia Summer 2012 Blog

The Cali Chamber of Commerce Magazine visited MIT AITI Colombia 2012 on July 27th and interviewed students, including the winners of our final business plan competition. Click here to read the article. 

The last week of MIT AITI Colombia 2012 was a whirlwind for the entreprenuers and for the instructors.  At Universidad ICESI regular classes began this week, so AITI was in a different room each day. The teams learned to work wherever and whenever they could--this proved a useful skill because by Monday afternoon they definitely had achieved the required sense of urgency to get their demos done and presentations polished for Thursday's Demo Day and Business Plan Competition.  They voted for extended Lab hours on Tuesday and Wednesday night, hacking and practicing their presentations until well into the evening. 

On Wednesday morning, Jorge Quiroga, Google digital marketing strategist and web analytics whiz, helped our entrepreneurs understand the importance of setting up a webpage, launching a Google Adwords trial, and getting their MVP (minimum viable product) into the market. The beauty of Eric Ries' LEAN start-up methodology is that rapid MVP launch gains entrepreneurs immediate feedback on whether their product is meeting a customer need.  This learning helps the enterpreneurs iterate repeatedly to find the market and tune their product for it.  

I am extremely proud of all 10 of our teams, but I was especially happy to see the results from the teams that took the advice to launch their MVP and get out and talk to potential customers and partners.  The teams that talked to customers and partners and launched their MVP had the strongest showings in the final business plan competition on Thursday, July 26th.  

So, now (drumroll) the moment you've all been waiting for, the winners of the MIT AITI Colombia 2012 Business Plan Competition:

First Place: Bee Juegos – Juegos educativos para hijos con TDHA y una comunidad para sus padres (educational games for children with ADHD and a community for their parents).  Anna Maria Lopez and her team did a tremendous job communicating their value proposition and market opportunity.  

Second Place: DynAds – Publicidad dynamica y personalizadad en tiempo real para dispositivos moviles (dynamic personalized and localized advertising in real-time for mobile devices).

Third Place: Control in Touch – Security in Touch Traquilidad en tus manos (affordable home security in your hand)

Andromo – La forma mas fácil, rápida y practica para convertir casas en hogares inteligentes (the easiest, fastest and most practical way to convert your house to an intelligent home)

Mi Pico y Placa – Recuerda siempre tu Pico Y Placa, llega a donde necesitas, encuentra que hacer (always remember your Pico Y Placa, get where you need to go and find what to do)

 

My Route – Somos una FAMILIA, somos My Route y venimos para facilitar las cosas (Making public transportation (MIO) easy)

Quick Order – Rapidez en su pedido (rapid mobile ordering)

LIV – Communicate y Revive momentos, Vive LIV! (Communicate and revive moments with LIV, automated video management)

Cocina Facil – La forma facil de cocinar (The easiest way to cook with mobile recipes and offers)

Social Brush – Dibuja sin fronteras (Draw without boundaries)

But this is not the end, it's just the beginning. In the next two weeks, MIT AITI Colombia 2012 Business Plan Competition winner Bee Juegos will travel to Medellin to meet with angel investors. The company has already gained strong support from an advisor and garnered interest from potential strategic partners in Spain and from potential users in Spain and Argentina.  Second place DynAds has a meeting with a potential corporate client to discuss launching a pilot.  Third place winner Control in Touch has two meetings scheduled next week with angels who expressed interest in the their home automation solution, but who advised them to combine resources with fourth place runner-up Andromo to keep going.

Ongoing work and great opportunities are not limited to the winners.  Mi Pico y Placa launched its webiste and MVP seven days before the final and already had over 640 page views and nearly 50 downloads of the alpha MVP.  To put this in context there are four other companies working on solutions for pico y placa (a system, used in countries ranging from Colombia and Mexico to Bolivia and India, that limits car operation to alternate days with time outs during peak hours to limit traffic congestion and air pollution), but the leading company in Bogota has only 30,000 users and is offering only reminders and alarms. Mi Pico y Placa has already overtaken the other 3 solutions will be launching new capabilities for ride sharing, to do recommendations and cooperative buying as quickly possible to provide greater value to customers than the existing solution. The young MyRoute founders continue their work with contacts at the MIO in Cali, operator contacts and handset manufacturer contacts at Samsung and Motorola, advised by MIT Sloan Fellow Carlos Sierra. Quick Order will be working on a pilot to reduce the lines at one of the restaurants at Universidad ICESI and with a corporate partner in a local plazoleta.  

Many of the teams are looking ahead to upcoming business plan competitions including LATAM Start-Up, the PulsoSocial Conference and the next round of competition to enter the Wayra Incubator. 

Universidad ICESI and the local community are committed to supporting these students and future technology entrepreneurs.  We have events scheduled for the next three months, ranging from two hack-a-thons at which engineering, programming and business students can come hack along with the MIT AITI entrepreneurs to speed up technology and business development for the teams, to a condensed business plan seminar with ICESI Professor of Entrepreneurship Andres Otero and a weekend Start-Up Lab at which the MIT AITI Colombia entrepreneurs will serve as the instructors, mentors and advisors to help more young entrenpreneurs in the region come together, form new teams and get to work on solving the customer needs they see.

As I said, this is just the beginning!

 

This is the week of there ain't nothing to do but get down to it.  That's right this week is just pure work.  Sure we spent a little time on competition, financial modeling and capitalization (ie. ownership participation and investment), but mostly it was just work on the business plan and code, code, code.  The one thing that is hardest to get across in a 8am to 5pm lab is just how much work the start-up life is and how great a sense of urgency is required.  I think this is hardest for students to get because here in Colombia the academic life lives very much in theory and is often challenged when it comes to business practice.  

Not that this is unique to Colombia, even the the US a tremendous amount of great research at places like the NIH, DARPA, and our major academic institutions never makes out of the lab.  It takes a tremendous amount of work to get to the place that MIT has gotten--an organic process that took years--where there is support for the commercializing of technology in the labs ranging from IP licensing services to an ecosystem of investors and entrepreneurs-in-residence who are comfortable and have through trial and error developed a process to take this super early stage stuff and build a company around it to take it to market (Flagship Funds is one Cambridge team that does this extremely well in energy and biotech).  

Still the US, and Cambridge and Silicon Valley, have a rich history of start-up culture with a very high sense of urgency and a reasonably high tolerance for failure that makes it easier to get down to it with less of the that daunting combination of fear of success/fear of failure that can inhibit new teams from giving it their all and getting a product out there into the market. 

So, there has been some cheering and rah-rah, a pool-side Mexican barbecue prepared and grilled by Ivan and Miguel at our hotel to blow off some steam and do some team bonding (Colombian's don't generally like hot, spicy food so the jalapeno eating contest literally produced steam and even a tear) to inspire and motivate (the zanahoria or carrot), but also some cajoling and application of pressure (the palo or stick) that if a team's presentation is not done on time and practiced there is a risk they will not present on the 26th.  

Fortunately, the teams are making good progress.  My favorite accomplishment of the week was that one team managed to secure and meet with a leader at one of the agencies whose support is necessary for their product to succeed. The team learned a couple of useful things from that meeting that both confirmed their thinking and offered a route to help them reshape and further focus their solution. I love this because it is a great example of getting down to it.  If you wait to make the call/connection, you might never learn the critical thing you need to know.  And you never know where support might live. 

Speaking of support, the meeting at the Club of Executives on Wednesday night was terrific.  Thank you to all the Cali members of the Chamber of Commerce and the Club of Executives who came out to meet the entrepreneurs and offer their guidance and service as advisors.  It was greatly appreciated by the entrepreneurs who reported that your insightful questions advanced their thinking and helped them further refine their business models.  

I hope also it was a chance for business people to see that mobile technology, while it can be a thing in itself, is extremely powerful in creating value and even transforming traditional businesses and industries.  This means that mobile entrepreneurs can offer new opportunities by applying the technology in traditional industries but they need your advice, experience and knowledge about those industries and markets to understand how most effectively create and capture value.  We need angels in mobile who are not technologists but who have been succesful entrepreneurs in any number of industries to work alongside investors comfortable with software and mobile technology.  And we need executives in the large companies in Cali in both technology and other core industries to turn around and look for opportunities to work with and invest in these future value creators. (A shout-out to both Golden Seeds (full disclosure-I'm a member of this group) and TiE Angels, two US angel groups who provide a great model of doing just this!)

Next week -- the grand finale is just the beginning.

 

 

 

 

That's right it's the fourth week and now we are really into it.  On the technical side the teams are deep in Python and Django, have done a system design, and are starting work on their minimum viable product or prototype.  On the business side it's a steep learning curve to get from thinking about the customer and product to figuring out exactly how and why they will pay.  In fact, many start-ups find that they won't really know what the model is until they get that minimum viable product in front of customers and start understanding what the customers want and where they see the value.  

Still, we spent some time looking at different business models and channels from single to double-sided markets to direct and indirect channels.  Then we brought in some friends to help.  

Have I mentioned yet how strong, deep and international the MIT community is?  Well it is.  The reason we are, and the reason I personally am here, is that my cohort from the first-ever MIT EMBA program, Vladimir Ramirez, decided that Latin America, specifically Cali, Colombia, needed MIT AITI and that the Universidad ICESI would be a great partner (Gonsalo Ulloa, Director of the Engineering Department, his colleague Juan Carlos Munos, and Entrepreneurship Professor and ICESI Start-Up Lab director Andres Felipe Otero are proving this is absolutely the case). Vladimir convinced me to come teach and he was right--we have terrific entreprenuers here.  

And they have been lucky that we have some great Colombian MIT and MIT Sloan grads.  Last week Sloan Fellow Carlos Sierra, an early entrepreneur in the Colombian mobile market spoke via Skype and answered questions on mobile market trends, working with the Colombian mobile operators, and what advice he could offer on forming a new start-up team.  This week Fernando Cardenas, who brought Lo-jack to Colombia, served as the CEO of Lo-jack Brazil, and was a partner with Colombia's Promotora venture fund, talked about the experience of bringing new technology to new markets and discovering that the value for the customer might be different in different countries. When the value is different, the company may need to modify its business model to deliver and capture that value.  But the company must also ensure it has the skills and capabilities to make it worthwhile to serve the market. Fernando spent time with each team, listening to their pitch and initial thoughts on their business models, asking pointed questions and offering some clear suggestions and guidance. Not only MIT, but the whole Cambridge entrepreneurial ecosystem is strong even overseas, as Leah Ramella, a Harvard grad with her own social media content management company, demonstrated when she stopped by to help while visiting with her husband a Caleno (from Cali) private equity investor.

On some of the days, while the teams have been hard at work in the lab, I have been out of the lab networking like mad to build connections for these and future MIT AITI teams in the Cali and larger Colombian entrepreneurial community. Locally, I have met with the Cali Chamber of Commerce (thank you Daniel Zamorano, Nora Hurtado, and Gustavo Vargas, who also spent time in the lab meeting with each team and talking through business models), the new PacificTIC alliance, professors in the computer science and engineering departments at Universidad del Valle, ERP company Siesa (thank you Francisco Opina and the Siesa mobile ERP engineering team), incubator ParqueSoft and its founder Orlando Rincon, and the Cali Executives Club (thank you Sergio Ledesma and Stella Rubiano).  

And I've been on the road, traveling to the the EMTech (MIT Technology Review) Colombia Conference in Medellin to meet Jorge Barrera and other members of the MIT Enterprise Forum in Colombia, the VCs at Promotora, and angels like Esteban Velasco of Tagua Capital.  And thanks to the generosity with their contacts of Christina Kappaz of Cimarron Capital and Carlos Suarez of the US Embassy in Colombia, I was able to meet in Bogota with leaders at the Ministery of Information Technology and Communications' Apps.co effort (Claudia Obando and Albeiro Cuesta), the Ministery of Commerce (Sergio Zuluaga and Pedro Garcia Herreros) and the iNNpulsa program at Bancoldex (Catalina Ortiz and team), along with our Colombian Google connection Jorge Quiroga (Jorge will be in the lab next week to talk to the entrepreneurs about how to promote their apps within the Google Play store and use Google analytics to see how they are doing). At Google Business Groups Bogota, an independent organization dedicated to helping business people and entrepreneurs get the most of Google technology, I spoke to members of the Bogota start-up community about MIT AITI and what we are doing in CAli and around the world.

Everyone here is aligning to support entrepreneurship in Colombia and a number of the people I met in Medellin and Bogota will be traveling to attend our final business plan competition/Demo Day on Thursday July 26th. But that's not the end of it, next week all the teams will be meeting at the Cali Executives Club with local business people who are have been recommended because of their business savvy and interest in supporting entrepreneurship to meet our teams and become mentors and hopefully potential investors in the future. 

 

 

 

 

Week Three and we have 10 new MIT AITI Colombia 2012 Start-Up teams reving their engines.  Here is a quick run-down of the companies (in Spanish then English):

MyRoute: MIO en movil, rutas, horas de bus, comprar y recargar billetes.  MIO (Colombia bus system) information on mobile, including routes, schedule, and the ability to buy and recharge bus passes. 

LIV: Controlar, guardar y compartir sus videos.  Businesses and Families alike benefit from a simple streamlined way of controlling, saving and sharing videos

Quick Order: Pedir y pagar comida en plazoleta por movil, recibir ofertas y discuentas de lealtad.  Tired of long lines at take out restaurants, order and pay online with your mobile; restaurants avoid lost sales, improve efficiencies and increase loyalty. 

Cocina Facil: Recibir recetas y ofertas localizadas al entrar al mercado.  Young professionals on their own and on a budget to harried households receive easy to follow recipes with information on all the ingredients along with localized offers when they enter the supermarket. 

Bee Juegos Educativos: juegos efectivos para ninos con hyper-actividad, comunidad para sus padres y datos para los psicologos. Effective mobile games and activities for kids with hyper-activity disorder, a supportive community for parents and data to help parents and doctors monitor kids' progress. 

Andromo: Controlar sus televisor y entretenimiento por automizacion movil.  Control your television and home entertainment system with mobile automation. 

Social Brush: Juego de dibujos mundial con translacion de leguaje.  Draw and share world-wide with on-the-fly language translation: helping us understand each other through art. 

Dyads: El control es suyo, recibir solo los publicidades localizadas que Ud. quiere.  Dyads puts dynamic advertising in the hands of the user.  Users chose the content they want to receive, when and where they want to receive it, making it targeted, timely and near point of purchase. 

Control in Touch: Security in Touch provee un sistema de seguridad para el hogar automatica, movil y accesible. Security in Touch makes monitoring the security of your home automatic, mobile and affordable.

Mi Pico y Placa: Todo lo necesario para facilitar tu mobilidad, incluyendo alarmas y noticias del pico y placa, mercado/intercambio de "rides", compras cooperativas para su automovil. Everything you need to make getting around town easy, including alarms and notices of no-driving times, things to do while you wait, a market-exchange for rides, and cooperative buying of automobile related goods and services.  

You can find more information on the companies and teams on the Colombia Summer 2012 Program page.

The rest of the third week was spent on sizing the market opportunity and knowing the target customer. Once they identified their target consumer, the teams then went to work building description of that customer and identifying a potential advisor for each of their companies. 

Next week, now that we know who the customer is, why and how are they going to pay?  It's time for business models.

This week the MIT AITI Colombia Entrepreneurs demonstrated their creativity and drive.

I started Monday with a visit to the local morning TV magazine show, Amaneciendo, to talk about the MIT AITI program and how we are focused on building sustainable mobile application businesses and strengthening the ecosystem for entrepreneurship in Cali and Colombia at large.  

That afternoon what we thought would be an hour of finishing a few brainstorming topics turned into a full session.  By Monday afternoon, we had 7 pages (we filled our 3 whiteboards 3 times) of ideas for mobile applications to solve problems in transportation, finance, healthcare, retail, education, home automation, among other areas.  

On Tuesday, groups of student entrepreneurs reported back on homework they had done on determining the number of mobile phones with Internet access within Universidad ICESI.  One student from Universidad Libre took the work a step further, looking at Universidad Libre and determining not only the number of phones but the amount of revenue the Libre mobile Internet access market represented for mobile carriers. The work was encouraging because it validated the rapid growth of mobile Internet access within the University community and the trend for Colombia at large.

By Wednesday, nerves abounded as the individual idea pitches began.  The entrepreneurs were well armed due to the extensive brainstorming and preparation done earlier in the week, although we still need to express the business models for some of the ideas more clearly--I am sure this will happen in the weeks to come as we have not yet covered business models in detail (it's on this week's agenda). By Thursday, the pitches were getting stronger, and momentum was building for the final vote.  We covered Peter Levine's terrific mini-case on Forming Extraordinary Teams, and then held the vote.  On Friday, we settled the teams and the entrepreneurs left for the holiday weekend with an assignment that each team talk with 100 people/potential customers about their idea. 

Next week we will post the teams along with a brief description of the businesses-I'll keep you in suspense until then!  And, I'll leave it to Miguel to tell you about our great time over the weekend salsa dancing in the street.

Until next week,

Jennifer