This week I started a new chapter in my life as the Open Innovation and Ecosystem Builder in Latin America for BBVA (I’ll write a longer blog post about this soon). I’ll be traveling quite a bit around Latin America (especially, to Mexico) and Europe, which makes me quite happy as I’ve always wanted to get a clearer picture of the great entrepreneurs that exist throughout Latin America.
Right now, I’m in Mexico, at the moment, before going to the Open Talent competitions in New York and Barcelona in the coming weeks. Yesterday, we had a great session, organized by Finnovista (who also organized today’s event) with the entrepreneurs before today’s pitch competition where they can win 30,000 Euros and enter an immersion program in London and Mexico with key experts.
As the picture shows, in the morning, a few BBVA executives (including the Data Science expert shown) gave a quick 10 minute presentation about what they do and we all had conversations with the startup founders. It was incredibly productive and it was good to see so much interest from both participants (founders as well as BBVA employees). There are founders from all across Latin America including Chile, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and the US.
During the afternoon, I was part of a panel of mentors that heard each pitch and gave some feedback offering opinions about the business and about how, possibly, to improve the pitch. I was really impressed with this group of entrepreneurs. The judges today will have their work cut out for them. It’s going to be really tough to select only two winners.
A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to chat in Mexico City with both the co-founder and the investor of one of Mexico’s key startups, Conekta. Conekta is a payments platform that has previously secured funding from local VCs as well as some international angel investors such as Dave McClure. I spoke with the company’s co-founder and CEO, Hector Cardenas, as well as one of it’s investors, Eric Perez-Grovas, General Partner of Jaguar Ventures.
