In this week’s 3 Minutes With series on Rest of World — a fantastic organization dedicated to news and media from non-Western culture — the group spoke with Andrés Barreto, the Managing Director of the Techstars Boulder Accelerator:
What are the biggest tech investment opportunities in Latin America that are being overlooked?
We’ve seen a model that works in the United States being applied to Latin America. “Let’s get these blue chip founders that have all the right logos — the Stanfords, the HBSes.” There’s been a lot of money made there, and it’s still great. But what about the founders from a small town in Colombia creating robotics for food delivery? …
Those are not being evaluated right now, because if you’re doing machine learning or robotics, most of the VCs and even accelerators want to see a Carnegie Mellon grad or an ex-Google employee. But there’s talent beyond those geographies and those schools and companies creating global technology from the region.
Andrés Barreto
3 minutes with Andrés Barreto
Full Interview on Rest of World
Barreto is right, and I want to get that out of the way first. The Cherry Pick The College Logo Model has been successful, but the heart of his words is that you don’t need Facebook on your resume to Validate Your Talent. You aren’t minted a “blue-chip founder” because you went to Stanford or Harvard Business School. There are billions of dollars in revenue created from founders and entrepreneurs who didn’t go to a blue-chipper, didn’t spend a cent on school, or dropped out — famously including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. His whole point is that things like coming from small towns, countries that aren’t regarded as superpowers, or socioeconomic status shouldn’t play into who is being evaluated by the majority of VCs. He goes so far to say that those that don’t check off the right boxes “are not being evaluated.”
Barreto means well in his answer, but, man, I hate that his above quote is even prefaced with the idea of the “working United States model,” that “a) you’re a founder, b) you’re a Stanford grad, c) here’s investment” is worthy. (He still calls that model “great.” [Gross.])
The real charge is to desperately chase innovation. Entrepreneurship should never be prejudiced by discriminately selecting companies with founders that have a diploma stamped with a specific name. I don’t even want to subtly encourage young people — specifically poor people — to think they need those University Logos to compete. You don’t. You alone are enough. You do not need to go into student debt thinking it’s going to make you successful.
Clearly, as Barreto notes, this form of elitism still works. The best thing I can do is try to tell every future entrepreneur at every career day at every opportunity to chase the innovation regardless of where it takes you, to be the change so the ones behind you can follow a different model.
Elitism is a plague, and you don’t need a Harvard degree or Amazon on your LinkedIn profile to know you’re good enough.
