Chile Wants Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses, Your Tech Entrepreneurs

So the question is: why aren’t we (in the U.S. and Canada) as interested in these talented people from all over the world?

Are you an immigrant who is fed up with waiting for years for a green card which you may never get? Or a tech entrepreneur looking to dramatically cut costs? I’ve got a suggestion for you. Move South. No, I don’t mean to Los Angeles or San Diego, I’m taking about way down South in Chile. They’ll welcome you with open arms and offer you incentives which will cut your burn rate more than half. And you’ll get to live in a land which makes even California look drab.

I just returned from a fascinating trip to Chile. Their government invited me to view the progress they had made in becoming an outsourcing hub. I was impressed with their ability to grow outsourcing from nothing to close to $1 billion in revenue over a mere seven years. But I didn’t see how they could grow much more in the body-intensive outsourcing segment without choking off local industry by sucking all the capable engineers and scientists into relatively high paying IT jobs. I told them that they had as much of a chance to compete with India in outsourcing as India had in competing with them in copper exports. India has a billion people. Chile has only 16 million people, less than some Indian cities. But Chile does have 40% of the world’s copper, a magnificent inflation hedge.

Chile may not become an outsourcing powerhouse. But this South American gem could very well morph into the new land of opportunity for immigrants in general and export-centric tech entrepreneurs. The Chilean government has put together an incredible slate of incentives for technology-based companies that export their products. The government wants you to invest $500,000 over 5 years, but is pretty flexible about how you do this.

So what do you get for your $500,000? To start with, they’ll give you a visa. You can stay as long as you want – even permanently. You need to submit a business plan but you have a lot of latitude for what’s an acceptable business. Any type of high tech products, medical or biotech products, or green or cleantech products get the stamp of approval, as does software or even online gaming or social network software. Even if you want to set up a call center or technical support service that derives revenues from sales to foreign companies and they think you’re legit, you’ll get the visa.

But first, you want to check out the country, right? The government will give you 60% of your due diligence costs, or up to $30,000, to visit and explore Chile. And they’ll grant you another $30,000 to launch your company in Chile. If you work from one of their tech centers, the government will pay for 5 years of rent (up to $1 million) or split the costs if you want to locate elsewhere in this gorgeous country.

Read more . . .

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Tags: business plan, capable engineers, chilean government, entrepreneur, green card, immigrant, immigrants, incentives, land of opportunity

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Consider This, Innovation, Innovation Needed, TechCrunch, economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.