Wenceslao Casares, an Argentine native who is the unofficial leader of the Latin American diaspora in Silicon Valley Photograph courtesy Stanford Ecorner/YouTube.
While Silicon Valley is an immigrant-friendly place?witness Russian-born Sergey Brin?s triumph at Google or Hungarian-born Andy Grove?s success at Intel?there are signs that immigrants? influence in the tech mecca may be plateauing. A study released last month by AnnaLee Saxenian of Berkeley and Vivek Wadhwa of Duke found that 43.9 percent of Silicon Valley startups launched in the past seven years had at least one key founder who was an immigrant. That?s a big number, but it?s a drop from 2005, when 52.4 percent of startups were immigrant-founded.
The composition of immigrants in the Valley has shifted a bit, too. In Saxenian and Wadhwa?s ranking of countries that produced the most U.S.-based techies, Taiwan fell from fourth to 23rd. (The reasons for that drop?and the decline of immigrant-founders across the board?can be attributed in part to U.S. visa issues and burgeoning opportunities abroad.) At the same time, though, some tech insiders have seen Latin American-born entrepreneurs, a previously invisible cohort, begin to make their presence known in Silicon Valley.
Their numbers don?t come close to the Indian, Chinese, or even U.K. diaspora, and as of yet, our southern neighbors haven?t produced a nerdy-household name like India native Vinod Khosla of SunMicrosystems or Jerry Yang, the Taiwanese-born founder of Yahoo. There is, however, a nucleus of innovators from places like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia who have started companies aiming to create customized travel advice, digital wallets, and more. Like the Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs who came before, they are fostering interconnectedness between the United States and their native countries. And that?s going to have an impact on the tech scene in both places.
Globalization?where work is ?outsourced? abroad and companies target audiences far from their shores?is often portrayed as a faceless, malevolent, and inevitable, economic trend. But those connections are largely driven by individuals, particularly by men and women with roots in both the United States and a foreign country. The feet-in-two-worlds crowd can end up serving as a bridge, bringing together communities that otherwise would exist in separate spheres.
Consider the role Wenceslao Casares, an Argentine native who is the unofficial leader of the Latin American diaspora in Silicon Valley, has played in putting his home continent on Silicon Valley?s radar. In particular, two years ago, Casares persuaded Dave McClure, the former Paypal executive and founder of the accelerator 500 Startups, to take dozens of Silicon Valley types through Latin America. (McClure has been doing ?Geeks on a Plane? trips for years, leading engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists through Asia and Europe for 10-day stints.) Casares achieved renown for selling 75 percent of his company Patagon.com, an online bank for Latin American markets, to Banco Santander for $585 million in 2000, which meant his recommendation carried weight. He?s now the CEO of Lemon.com, which produces an app?currently the most downloaded financial one on iTunes?that allows you to capture both your paper receipts and your credit cards on your mobile phone. It?s well positioned to be a player in the move toward digital wallets, which means consumers will eventually pay for purchases with phones, rather than cash and physical plastic.
The 2011 and 2012 Geeks on a Plane trips to Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina didn't just result in U.S.-based angel investors putting money in Latin American companies. An introduction facilitated by last year's trip led the Buenos Aires-based venture capital firm Compan?a Argentina de Participaciones to invest $800,000 in AwayFind, a Silicon Valley startup that offers a Web application that identifies and sends important emails to mobile devices.
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=23be776fc097321e43fd4b2eb7045f88
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