Why It's So Relevant That Canada And Latin America Work Together?
In September 2014 we launched the first Latin American Startups Conference connecting the tech ecosystems of Canada and Latin America. It was certainly a learning experience and we identified at that time, many challenges and opportunities, but more than that, we realized Canada and Latin America have so many things in common—our tech ecosystems are different for sure. Canada has a great experience working with deep technology—research and development is a big part of the ecosystem, that's why many Canadian tech companies can be innovative and disruptive.
Latin America works very little research and development, and even when we see universities working on this part, the process takes so long that by the time they want to commercialize is just too late. Besides this fact, Latin American startups are very creative and they work in tough environments, reason why they have less fears in going to other markets and try to expand.
What I can see from my point of view is that these two situations are very complementary, Canada has less risky startups, besides having better R&D, startups are in their confort zone and they don't want to go out, they don't want to take risks and this makes difficult to reach global markets—sometimes they don't grow big enough. We have a strong ecosystem in Canada with a lot of support and tools but startups don't take enough advantage of this fact to grow big. While Latin Americans are encourage to do that for actually the opposite reason, the lack of support. Having Canada and Latin America partnering to help each other can be a powerful combination.
We both Canada and Latin America are too dependable of the USA market. We need to diversify specially in times when business with the US has become soo difficult for both. There has never been a better time to create a strong partnerships with other countries in the world.
As Anthony Lacavera pointed it out in his book "How We Can Win"
We haven't come up with an effective Canadian way to sell ourselves, so, at least in the business arena, we often sell ourselves short.
An abundance of modesty can be mistaken for a lack of vision, ambition or competence, or all of the above
I have to say, I agree with so many things Anthony pointed out in this book about the Canadian startup ecosystem, and many of the challenges Canadian have in this ecosystem, are actually common challenges we share in our Latin American startup ecosystem.
Let's work together! and to do so, we require to learn about each other and to connect with the right people. We're arriving to the sixth edition of the LatAm Startups Conf in Toronto and we feel that this year will be so different, because this time we've actually seen more people encourage to partner with emerging markets and we also have seen more Latin Americans willing to explore Canada as an option for them to grow global.
USA will be always there, will be always a partner for Canada and Latin America, but it's time for us to start looking for other business outside of the USA and don't be so dependable in our economies to one single country.
If we want to see more Tech companies from Latin America and Canada growing big, really big! we need to start changing things, even with small steps, but make the change, take the risk and explore new opportunities.
About LatAm Startups
LatAm Startups is a non profit corporation based in Toronto supported by the City of Toronto, members of NACO and designated company for the Startup Visa program. We support international startups with bootcamps and softlanding programs to grow global from Canada.