This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Juan Andrés Fontaine: Bringing Global Players to Chile" from November 29, 2010, featuring a discussion with Juan Andrés Fontaine about the benefits and challenges of attracting global talent and investment to Chile, comparing it to Silicon Valley.
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One of the benefits of being in Silicon Valley is this huge influx of people from all over the world with different ideas, with different cultures, with different, all different resources they bring in. In fact, if you look around this room, it looks like the U.N. right? We've got people here from all over the world. When I go to Chile, I don't see that. So is that something that you see as a challenge to instead of having people in Chile looking outward to the rest of the world to have the rest of the world coming to Chile?
Well, we welcome that happening. And as we start growing fast and having investments coming and demand for high qualified professionals and things of that sort, we are going to get, I think, that inflow of people coming to Chile. We do have it at a small rate these days, but it's going to increase significantly, I think, in the future. We are attracting foreign investment, we are attracting IT companies to settle in Chile and that's going to create that movement. We have to review, as I said, the visa procedures. We have a bit, always some problems there and we are working on those. But clearly we think that the, the consequence of this strategy is going to be to change the mixture of people you saw in the streets in Chile to resemble more of what we see here.
Great, terrific. Now you talk about visa issues. There are all these little things that end up having a really big impact on people's ability to show up there and then essentially turn their ideas into companies. What are the variables that you are thinking about? Are there things that actually work better in Chile than here? Are there things that you go, wow, this is something I should really advertise, that we've got these resources that actually don't exist anywhere else.
Well, first of all, as I said, we are situated in a location that is very unique to exploit the growth of the emerging world. And we think growth is going to come in the near future in from the emerging world, both Asia and South America or Latin America. Second, we have a very open free market environment that is good for starting businesses. And third, we have low costs, which of course helps a lot. So in comparison with Silicon Valley, let's say that variable is crucial. We are much lower cost producer or in many services and that helps to foster businesses there.