The Chile Connection: lessons for Lebanese entrepreneurs

For 17 years Chileans endured a right-wing military dictatorship that saw more than 3,000 people either killed or go missing. For the Lebanese it was a nearly 20-year civil war left up to 17,000 dead or missing.

But Chile and Lebanon share more than these raw, chilling similarities. They share a love of food, mountainous landscapes that rush into warm seas, and more recently, a mildly burgeoning startup community.

Recently, over the course of a week, organized by the World Bank as part of their Mobile Internet Ecosystem Project, four Chilean entrepreneurs and ecosystem collaborators visited Lebanon and met with various members of the startup ecosystem. The objective being to learn from, and share, ecosystem experiences.

Chile is moving much faster than Lebanon towards a mature entrepreneurial ecosystem: in 2010, the South American country birthed Start-Up Chile, a product of the Chilean government looking to grow their underground startup ecosystem.

The organization was a novel one in that the pilot project invited foreigners, not Chileans, to start businesses in Chile and offered a $40,000 equity-free grant and one year work visa. It’s not surprising, then, that by 2013 Chile played host to 750 new businesses and eventually opened their doors to Chileans.

Original article by Lucy Knight

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The Chile Connection: lessons for Lebanese entrepreneurs