CORFO had coordinated with Fundación Chile to create an agenda for my visit. Eight meetings had been scheduled literally all over Santiago in the first two days, with a software company, a staffing company and with academics from Chile's three top universities. The objective was to demonstrate that others had successfully invested in Chile with CORFO's assistance to pursue their software technology expansion and there was sufficient talent and facilities to support zAgile's incubation.
However, it was the first meeting with CORFO itself for which I felt I needed to be most prepared. Based on all the dialogs and communications thus far, I had expected to spend time with the CORFO team evangelizing my background in software outsourcing, zAgile's vision, as well as discussing with them various strategies for establishing a footprint for zAgile in Chile--likely a first within the context of Silicon Valley software startups.
As I arrived at the CORFO offices in downtown Santiago early Monday morning, I found no CORFO team. As it turns out, the meeting was with one of their investment executives who expressed no interest in zAgile or its vision or my agenda but offered to answer questions regarding the types of government grants one could expect for investing in Chile. I also found out that in order for me to get support from CORFO, I would have to commit to investing at least $1M over the course of the next 2-3 years. Other than the grant money, there was nothing else for them to offer -- no facilities, no infrastructure, no guidance and no strategy. Chile had made lots of money in their copper trade and was hoping to invest some of it to develop other economic sectors, with a keen eye towards hi-tech. It is easy to imagine their motivation, given the success of this strategy achieved by India and China, but was it really going to be just that easy? Could they jump on this bandwagon by simply offering financial incentives?
Whereas I had come with some expectations of working with Chile towards helping them understand the needs of entrepreneurs, on my first day there, I was being told that they were prepared for more established companies, the likes of Tata Consulting Services and Software AG, to invest much more heavily into Chile.
Something had obviously been lost in translation.
However, it was still too soon for me to draw any conclusions or make any judgment on the outcome of my visit. It was only the first hour. Therefore, I continued with the rest of the meetings. The trip was a calculated risk from the beginning. I was now challenged with trying to figure out how to use it to build momentum for zAgile, take a step beyond the concept stage where things had been stalled over the summer.
The rest of the meetings over the first two days were quite a reflection of this disconnect. None of the people I was to meet were given much background or context in terms of why the meetings had been set up. I should give them some credit for taking the time to meet with me without clearly understanding the objectives or the agenda. Although, this scenario gave me sufficient opportunity to construct my own agenda. Therefore, I decided to use each meeting to make my pitch, evangelize zAgile's vision and explore various types of partnership and networking opportunities. If I could get people to become aware of my purpose, perhaps they can help me find the right connections in Chile.
Overall, the outcome of the meetings was reasonably encouraging. The academics, in particular, expressed very keen interest in zAgile's technical vision. I was surprised (and at times shocked) to discover the level of interest and types of ongoing projects in the Chilean universities that were related to semantic web technologies. Moreover, everyone expressed strong interest in either working with zAgile or helping me in some way to accomplish my near-term objectives of building a product proof-of-concept as I explored Chile's viability for zAgile's incubation.
The last meeting (which almost didn't happen) turned out to be the most promising one of all. A professor from UTFSM (Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María ) located in the seaside city of Valparaiso, had just returned from the International Semantic Web Conference in Athens, Georgia with one of his students. We obviously had a lot to share about our interests. He not only expressed deep interest in the architectures related to semantic tool integration but also offered to engage some of his students with zAgile so that we could begin to explore some ideas. The meeting felt quite fortuitous.
While continuing to follow up with the earlier meetings as well as building a network, most of my focus shifted to UTFSM and Valparaiso. In the next few days, I made several trips to Valparaiso to meet with the students, pitch to them the technical ideas and discuss the opportunities for engaging them on a proof-of-concept project.
I had found a place to start.
Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María Campus, Valparaiso
View from UTFSM campus
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