Crossing Borders with Nathan Lustig

Not all global startups were founded in a Silicon Valley garage. OpenEnglish, an online platform for teaching English with over 500,000 students in 40 countries, started in a student apartment in Caracas, Venezuela in 2007. Open English started as in person English classes for Fortune 500 companies’ Latin American offices and morphed online so that it could reach a wider audience. While Andres Mor...

How did a curious young web developer from Guatemala become one of the first Latin American entrepreneurs to enter YCombinator? Christian Van der Henst fell in love with the internet in the 90s when he realized he could use it as a tool to communicate with the whole world. He knew he wanted to share his knowledge with people and collaborate with a global tech community long before Latin America’s...

Jack Fischl and Kyle Wiggins studied across the Charles River from each other in Boston, but they didn’t meet until they both became Peace Corps volunteers in Panama. Even then, they were placed in two communities that were a 14-hour bus ride apart. So how did they build a successful Latin American travel marketplace together? It started with a simple Wordpress site they created over several visit...

Miguel Torres is an Ecuadorian entrepreneur who knew he wanted to start businesses when he saw needs that were unmet. After starting his entrepreneurial career in the food and drink industry and building the business to a successful exit, Miguel built out a daily deal site in Ecuador and other countries in Latin America. The daily deals business morphed into Escapes With You, a travel and experien...

One of my most popular blog posts is my ecommerce case study from when some friends and I started an ecommerce business in 2012. It gets hundreds of people viewing it each month and leads to lots of questions on twitter, linkedin and my blog. I covered how we decided to launch an ecommerce, how we picked a product and how we validated the idea without spending lots money out of pocket. My goal was...

Launching your startup on a waterproof phone from a Colombian prison. It sounds like something out of a movie. But in this case, it's the true story of Criptext, an encrypted email service, founded by Panamanian entrepreneur Mayer Mizrachi. How did Mayer end up in a Colombian prison? What was it like? How did he continue working and keeping his team together? How did he raise money and even do an...

Paraguay is often overshadowed by neighbors Brazil and Argentina in conversations about the Latin American startup ecosystem. Despite being one of the world’s largest hydroelectric energy producers, Paraguay has yet to emerge on the global or regional stage as a tech hub. However, Paulo Duarte, founder of Broterra, a Paraguayan superfood company that provides wages for more than 2500 families and...

When Latin America shifted abruptly to mobile in the early 2010s, the online dating industry had to change with it. Luckily, Pedro Neira, the founder of Mi Media Manzana, now Latin America’s most-downloaded dating app, had enough experience from his three previous startups to know when to make changes. Mi Media Manzana now has over one million downloads and recently received an undisclosed investm...

According to Antonio Nunes, Latin American families spend up to four hours per week in the supermarket. When combined with crippling traffic and safety concerns in many Latin American cities, it becomes clear why delivering groceries in Latin America could be a highly lucrative business. Antonio Nunes noticed that opportunity while living in Bogota and sold everything to go on a mission to deliver...

The US healthcare market loses up to US$750B in fraud and inefficiencies every year. The insurance industry is famously bureaucratic and relies on antiquated technology to communicate with healthcare providers and patients. My guest today is Lauren Cascio, co-founder and COO of Abartys Health, a health insurance tech company that created a system that allows seamless data flow and communication be...

Lisa Besserman escaped the New York winter in 2012 to work remotely from Buenos Aires, and never came back. She fell in love with the city’s entrepreneurial culture and began to build Startup Buenos Aires (SUBA), an organization that helps represent the startup, tech, and entrepreneurial community in Buenos Aires. With SUBA reaching its five-year anniversary this year, I sat down with Lisa Besserm...

According to Pierpaolo Barbieri, Argentina is a country where young people would prefer to visit the dentist than to go to the bank. More than half of Argentina’s population is excluded from traditional financial institutions and few efforts have been made to help the middle class access services like savings and credit. My guest on the podcast today is Pierpaolo Barbieri, the founder and CEO of U...

Marcus Dantus launched his first tech startup in 1993, selling email addresses through a portal that he hosted on the domain Mexico.com. Born in Mexico City, Marcus studied Media Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, but his career quickly switched to technology when a friend introduced him to the Internet. Since then, Marcus never looked back. He founded a telecommunications company,...

Jie Hao is a partner at Magma Partners who previously built and sold two companies before heading to Chile to look at investment opportunities in 2012. To make this podcast, I repurposed a segment of a conversation we had while I was in Shanghai for the launch of the partnership between Kr Space and Magma Partners to create the Sino-Latin American Accelerator. This conversation was a part of our d...

GroupRaise is an online platform that helps groups raise money for the causes they care about by eating at restaurants. I previously interviewed two of the other founders of GroupRaise, Devin Baptiste and Sean Park, in Episode 5 and Episode 31 of Crossing Borders, so please check out those podcasts if you are interested in learning more about GroupRaise. In this episode, I sat down with Kevin Vald...

Through my Crossing Borders podcast, I’ve had the opportunity to interview dozens of Latin America’s most inspiring entrepreneurs. In this special episode, I decided to turn the tables to bring a former guest, GroupRaise CEO Devin Baptiste, back to the show to ask me about my first days as an entrepreneur, and how that eventually brought me to Chile. I sat down with Devin, a close colleague and fr...

Movile is a global leader in mobile marketplaces with a dream to make life better for 1 billion people through marketplaces on their mobile devices. Movile is a remarkable story of innovation from Latin America, driven by people who are willing to take risks to learn and grow quickly. I sat down with the CEO and founder of Movile, Fabricio Bloisi, to talk about why he started Movile and how he and...

Alba Rodriguez is on a mission to solve hunger and malnutrition in Mexico. Alba is the founder and CEO of Gricha, a company that sources crickets as the main ingredient in a high-quality, sustainable protein powder. On this episode, I sat down with Alba to talk about how she came up with the idea to feed people crickets, how she got started as an entrepreneur and what it's like building a business...

Nestor de Haro grew up in Guadalajara, where he learned about the auto parts industry from his father. After obtaining a B.S. Degree in Industrial Engineering, Nestor co-founded Rigs Inc, an online marketplace for selling auto parts in Latin America. We talk about his inflection point from an underperforming business model to a new marketplace model and his advice for other entrepreneurs who are j...

I asked Cristobal Perdomo to join me on this episode of crossing borders to talk about venture capital in Latin America. Cristobal is one of the founders of Jaguar Ventures, a Latin American based VC firm. After getting an MBA and consulting for a couple of large companies in Brazil, he realized that the VC world was largely ignoring the rest of LatAm, so he set about to expand funding opportuniti...

When I first got to Chile in 2010, it took me five years to understand all the nuances of how business was conducted. There are several important cultural differences between LatAm and the US that foreign entrepreneurs should pay attention to if they want to be successful. There are also very important differences across Latin American countries that should also be accounted for. Here is a distill...

Amir Salihefendic joins me on this episode of Crossing Borders to talk about why working remotely is the way of the future. Listen to hear how he helped bootstrap a fully remote company, his perspective on funding a startup and how to create products that help solve real problems. Amir also shares how companies can gain a competitive edge, find outstanding talent and increase workplace productivit...

Sometimes the best ideas happen while sharing a meal. In the case of GroupRaise, it’s not just ideas that get shared, but a percentage of the profits as well. GroupRaise is a fundraising organization that partners with restaurants across 50 states to offer time slots where local organizations and international charities can book fundraisers in a few clicks. But most people don’t realize that Group...

Being able to open a bank account, exchange currency, open a credit card or have access to business credit in something that we take for granted in the United States. I know I did before moving to Latin America. In the US, most people can easily open bank accounts, apply for loans, and transfer money digitally. But that’s not the case for the bottom 80% of income earners in much of Latin America....

In this episode, I reconnected with my friend Brenna Loury, one of the original founders of Startup Chile, and the current head of marketing and PR at Doist to talk about her experience of learning a new job in a new country, the challenges and rewards of working across borders, and how she helped bootstrap a tech startup that now has more than 13,000,000 users worldwide.    Brenna shares how her...