Juan Andrés Fontaine: Start-Up Chile

Now, I know you launched this really interesting new initiative, this startup Chile, to entice folks from around the world to start their companies in Chile. I think it's really a bold move. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what this is about. What do people get? I mean, if I decide I want to come to Chile and start my company there, what are you going to give me? What we are doing is to offer $40,000 for people that go to Chile. That's a grant. They get that grant for doing their early stages of their project in Chile. And we help them with the other facilities, offices and things of that sort to settle there. And the condition they have to comply is that first of all, the project have to be approved by a board. So we have to apply for that approval. And they have to be there and interact with Chilean entrepreneurs to give a few talks of what they are doing. Because what we want to get from this is the interaction, the critical mass that creates interaction between Chilean people, Chilean entrepreneurs, and these entrepreneurs we are bringing from the rest of the world. And to do that, we need that kind of conversation to take place. And the other thing we want is that these entrepreneurs probably are going to, after they spend six months or a year in Chile, they are going to move probably here or some other place. And we want them to get connected to Chile. The best way to actually get this interconnection with these innovation centers of the world that I was mentioning is through people. In the end, this is basically a matter of getting to know the other people. And this is a way to do it. That's what we want to get through. So it's a nice way of inviting people down there and spend some time and get to know the country. Where is the $40,000 per venture coming from? And basically what sort of return on that investment are you expect? Well, this is a pilot program with a limited amount of money that we are devoting for this. So people are going to compete for this and we're going to see what happens. The pilot works well. We want to scale it and we are going to look for probably private money to actually expand it. And what would the return be? As I said, it's not something very tangible. In a sense. What we are trying to do is to develop the innovation culture and we think that creating this critical mass of people doing innovation in Chile is going to help in that direction. It's a small amount of money we're going to invest in this. In terms of the total fiscal budget, we are very conservative fiscal people. We are not actually engaging in large public investment program regarding innovation and things of that sort. This is a very limited intervention to get the thing moving, basically.