Today, I had the pleasure of meeting Ricardo Guerrero during his brief visit to Bogota, Colombia. We’ll be seeing more of each other during South by Southwest (SxSW) next week, but it was great meeting in person. We had an enjoyable breakfast and, afterwards, as I smoked my stogie and annoyed him with my cigar smoke, he talked about how he got into Social Media. After creating a radio show in Texas and working at that for a while, among other things, he started working for Dell Computer. Then, in 2007 after a visit to SxSW, he got introduced to Twiiter and found a way to use it to sell refurbished PCs for Dell Outlet. Now that’s digital innovation.
Ricardo has a new company called Stwittergy which is developing a tool to help businesses better use Twitter to achieve business objectives. He also has his own agency aptly named Social Media Dynamo. Nevertheless, he’s not completely disconnected from his Latin American roots and is working with colleague and friend Fernando LaBastida in setting up the first Americas IT Forum the day before SxSW (next week) in Austin.
I was able to record a small portion of our chat and here it is:
Hoy en la mañana estuve desayunando en la Zona T de Bogotá con Ricardo Guerrero de Austin, Texas. Ricardo trabajo por diez años con Dell Computer en Austin y, en el 2007, formó parte del equipo que aprovechó la innovación digital del momento para vender productos utilizando Twiiter. Este caso es estudiado hoy en dia por muchas agencias y compañias. Como muchos de los que realmente saben de su tema, es excelente persona y es excelente conversador.
Ricardo tiene una historia variedada como personalidad de radio con programas sobre musica y docente entre otras cosas. Hoy en día tiene un emprendimiento llamado Stwittergy creando una herramienta para que las empresas le saquen provecho a Twitter y su propia agencia llamada Social Media Dynamo. Mientras yo fumaba mi tabaco (terrible vicio) y lo molestaba (de apostas) con el humo, me comentó que el y su amigo, Fernando LaBastida (lo conozco y tambien es excelente persona), están coordinando el Americas IT Forum en Texas antes de South by South West para conectar a profesionales de tecnologia de america latina con los de EEUU.
Abajo incluyo un video de una porcion de nuestra conversación:
It’s been quite a week. I was finally able to write about a VC round closing in Colombia. A local VC actually closed a $1.3M series A round with social gaming company, Zio Studios, based in Colombia. This has been the talk of the town down here since VC investing is pretty non-existent here (although, private equity investing is pretty well-established). It’s really another example of how things are changing making geography less of an obstacle and more of a choice of life.
Last week, I also wrote in a local portal called KienyKe about the stuff going on in the Middle East with the toppling of Mubarak in Egypt and the turmoil in the other countries. In this new world we’re living in, if entrepreneurs aren’t connected to other world-class entrepreneurs and investors, it’s almost becoming a matter of choice. As I said, geography is becoming less of an obstacle.
Even within the Latin American region, digital strategies that target the whole region used to emanate from countries such as Brazil and Mexico and, on occasion, from Argetina (Mercado Libre) or Chile. Nevertheless, now companies such as PagosOnline with their Latin American Payments (see video) strategy and VivaReal are targeting Latin America all from a headquarters based in Colombia.
Yesterday, during a rainy afternoon in Bogotá, I interviewed the co-founders of Latin American Payments, Jose Velez and Martin Schrimpff, which offers a robust payments platform, anti-fraud system and payments collection all designed specifically for the needs of the Latin American market. The company is PCI certified, have won international prizes for their platform and are already working with clients such as Sony, Amway, Harvard Business Review and Telefonica and are starting to speak with international retailers, gaming companies and travel players among others.
Latin American Payments is a division of PagosOnline, a Colombian start-up with almost 100 employees which counts Buscapé, the large Brazilian comparison shopping site, as it’s majority shareholder (75%). As many know, the South African investment firm, Naspers, bought almost all of Buscapé’s shares for well over US $300M a couple of years back and is busy building it into a Latin American powerhouse (along with it’s satellite companies).
As the pictures below show, there’s quite a bit of hustle and bustle going on right now at Latin American Payments. Jose and Martin are busy complementing an impressive team of developers and business people from top banks and international credit card companies as they go after a Latin American e-commerce market that is surging almost 40% annually to $21.8B.
It might seem strange to offer a Latin American solution from Colombia instead of Mexico or Brazil. Nevertheless, it makes more sense if you consider that, unfortunately, Colombia is one of the most challenging regions for combating credit card and ATM fraud in the world. Several years back, I was talking to a local bank executive who told me that ATM machine makers had to continually innovate in Colombia (some of these innovations found their way into the entire product line) because of the “creativity” with which some Colombians would try to “beat the system.”
Those Colombians are the bane of resourceful and entrepreneurial Colombians like the people at Latin American Payments who are using their ingenuity and hard work to make sure their clients are protected from losses. Incredibly, as happens all around the world, when you are challenged to survive (and thrive) in such hostile circumstances, you come out stronger. That’s one of the reasons that Jose and Martin are so confident about the future.
Nonetheless, there are competitors. Paypal is working to penetrate the market further and local competitors are also developing their own solutions and expand to other countries. Jose and Martin are conscious of this, but believe that 8 years of experience, constant investment in their platform and the ability of clients to collect payments from customers in a variety of ways (overcoming the low credit card penetration in the region) are key assets.
The final asset, they believe, which gives them an edge is the entrepreneurial environment they’ve fomented and the impressive team of young, knowledgeable collaborators they are assembling with the necessary chops to execute on the vision. Finally, (and for disclosure purposes), I the company its sponsorship of the Founder Institute in Colombia (for which I am the director).
Today, I had the pleasure of meeting Ricardo Guerrero during his brief visit to Bogota, Colombia. We’ll be seeing more of each other during South by Southwest (SxSW) next week, but it was great meeting in person. We had an enjoyable breakfast and, afterwards, as I smoked my stogie and annoyed him with my cigar smoke, he talked about how he got into Social Media. After creating a radio show in Texas and working at that for a while, among other things, he started working for Dell Computer. Then, in 2007 after a visit to SxSW, he got introduced to Twiiter and found a way to use it to sell refurbished PCs for Dell Outlet. Now that’s digital innovation.
