Quote: (09-26-2014 05:26 PM)anonymous123 Wrote:
What I learned:
- Trying to make money down there is time consuming, expensive, and ultimately doesn't have a payoff anywhere close to what you would get in the USA, even if everything worked perfectly
- Everything moves so much slower in business (compounding point above about time consuming , expensive, and lousy payoff)
- Finally, I thought there would at least be some grease in permitting, regulations, and labor laws...nope...and I thought California had red tape...
Lot of truth here
Quote: (09-26-2014 05:26 PM)anonymous123 Wrote:
My final assessment of how to make money in South America: You can't.
This is obviously an exageration as plenty of people make money here.
My 2 cents after being here 3 years and knowing foriegners who are running successful companies in Brazil (I have small equity stakes in 3 such companies):
- South America is not a homogeneous region. Chile is pretty business friendly, Argentina is impossible, Brazil is somewhere in the middle.
- The following thoughts are based on my experience in Brazil.
- Bureaucracy is stifling. This makes it especially hard for start-ups, but it also serves as a barrier to entry once you've established yourself.
- Nothing happens as fast as people think / say. Brazilians have a terrible habit of overpromising and saying what you want to hear. As an anecdote: I was in a meeting with some PE investors, they asked me a timeline, I said 2 years, they laughed and said "you're obviously not Brazilian. A Brazilian would have said 2 months".
- Given the above, and fact that OP was only here for 2 years, it's easy to see why his venture didn't work out. He didn't put in the time necessary to make it happen.
- Being a foriegner makes it even harder to get something off the ground. Impossible to know your customer, the culture, the norms, and the business atmosphere in that amount of time
- Labor laws are a huge risk. Fucking ridiculous. It's frequently better to keep an unproductive employee on the payroll than to fire them.
- Overall the businesses here are less sophisticated than the US, and they are 10-30 years behind in terms of innovation. You don't have to have the next great idea here to be successful, you just need to find a niche where you can implement what has already worked abroad.