Tras un año récord, donde startups locales lograron atraer US$ 136 millones de inversión, además de la compra del primer “unicornio” chileno -Cornershop by Uber-, el panorama es prometedor. Emprendedores y expertos del polo universitario analizan el fenómeno y dan las claves para crear una historia de éxito.

El mundo de las startups chilenas está en llamas. Las empresas emergentes orientadas a lograr un negocio escalable y repetible con capacidad de crecer muy rápidamente -apoyándose en la tecnología y la innovación- están pasando por su mejor momento. No solo porque en 2020 startups locales, principalmente gracias a NotCo, lograron atraer un monto récord de US$ 136 millones en inversión, según cifras de la Asociación para la Inversión de Capital Privado en América Latina, sino también porque el Informe de Competitividad Global , publicado en junio, colocó al emprendimiento chileno en el segundo lugar del mundo en su etapa inicial.

La evidencia de este gran momento se suma y continúa: hace unos días la startup nacional Cornershop selló la venta del 47% que Uber no controlaba por US$ 1.400 millones y la plataforma estaba valorada en US$ 3.000 millones, una cifra que impacta si se recuerda que cuando Facebook compró todo Instagram lo hizo por “solo” mil millones de dólares. Al contrario de lo que sucede con una pyme o una startup normal, donde su camino es más lento y puede tardar varios años en convertirse en una empresa mediana, las startups están diseñadas para tener un crecimiento explosivo. Todo o nada suerte. Cornershop debutó en 2015 y literalmente en un par de meses recaudó capital extranjero y fue valorado en $ 8 millones.

El impacto de este boom también es social: los expertos estiman que el 1% de las empresas creadas en Chile son startups y actualmente están proporcionando el 40% de los nuevos empleos. ¿Cómo se crea una startup? ¿Qué pasos tienes que dar? En este camino, las universidades chilenas han jugado un papel destacado en la promoción de la innovación en sus estudiantes. La mayoría de las casas de estudio cuentan con diplomas, postgraduados o incubadoras que apoyan proyectos relevantes y que pueden cambiar la vida de sus creadores y su entorno. Aquí, 7 claves a tener en cuenta.

 

1. Enamores de una idea que tiene un impacto social.

 

“Hacer algo que impacta en otras personas es una fuerza súper poderosa que permite crecer, innovar y conectarse de otra manera”, dice Eduardo Della Maggiora, fundador y CEO de Betterfly, una empresa nacional que acaba de recaudar $ 60 millones en una ronda de inversión -un récord para una empresa local en su etapa inicial- y que trabaja en seguros con alta innovación tecnológica para que las empresas los otorguen a sus trabajadores bajo el concepto de bienestar laboral.

Para Della Maggiora, es importante que te apasione tu idea. “Cuando las personas crean una empresa, se conectan en el fondo. Porque la pasión es conectar con algo de una manera profesional y personal, y te hace parar mil veces”, dice el empresario, y añade: “Si inicias una empresa porque quieres ser un unicornio (empresas de innovación que están valoradas en 1.000 millones de dólares) o por una cuestión de popularidad o cualquier otra razón más externa , se puede parar a veces, pero no los necesarios para poder empezar y crecer”. Para él, es una carrera de resistencia, donde la resiliencia es la clave. Y para eso, dice, tienes que involucrarte en algo en lo que realmente crees.

“Una innovación con impacto social será un catalizador para lograr financiación y posicionamiento, gracias al amplio espectro de beneficios que generan los diferentes actores de la sociedad”, señala Francisco Chiang, director de Innovación, Transferencia de Tecnología y Emprendimiento de la Universidad Andrés Bello, casa de Estudios Superiores que imparte un Diplomado en Creación de Startups y otro en Creación de Empresas. Daniela Soto, quien realiza mentoring (apoyo a emprendedores) en la UNAB, agrega que se está produciendo un cambio cultural: “Las startups buscan generar un impacto en la sociedad, ayudar a la evolución de la comunidad en torno a la economía, la empatía más que generar un determinado producto”.

Saber escuchar las necesidades de las personas. Así lo afirma Ángel Morales, director ejecutivo de UDD Ventures, la aceleradora de negocios de la Universidad del Desarrollo, que lleva 10 años transformando una idea o proyecto en un negocio de alto impacto. “Son esas conversaciones que nos permiten crear nuevos futuros con otras personas. Las ideas no van a nacer con nosotros encerrados en una oficina”, define Morales. En este sentido, la calidad de las redes de conversación e interacción permiten configurar estos escenarios futuros. “Mi consejo para un emprendedor que quiere innovar es que haga un análisis profundo de calidad de con quién está hablando, a quién está escuchando, qué está leyendo regularmente con respecto al campo y la industria en la que quiere entrar”, dice.

Es importante enamorarse siempre del problema más que de la solución, dice Ángeles Romo, gerente de Start-Up Chile, una aceleradora pública de negocios que, bajo los auspicios de Corfo y el Gobierno, incentiva a los emprendimientos tecnológicos a escalar globalmente con líneas de financiamiento y apoyo. “Es importante entender que son los problemas los que de alguna manera inspiran una solución. La solución, por sí sola, si no resuelve un problema, probablemente no se convertirá en un gran negocio”, dice el ejecutivo.

“Siempre hay que definir el objetivo del emprendimiento y no perder la visión que se tuvo desde el principio, aunque se puede cambiar, pero nunca perder los cimientos, nunca perder los orígenes. Entender cuánto se ha avanzado”, afirma Werner Kristjanpoller, director del Instituto Internacional de Innovación Empresarial (3IE), la incubadora de empresas de la Universidad Federico Santa María, que promueve emprendimientos de base tecnológica orientados al mercado global.

 

2. Equivocarse rápido y barato.

 

“We must not waste resources and entrepreneurial time to the extent that the need is not validated,” advises Francisco Chiang, director of Innovation, Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship at UNAB. “Validation is necessary at an early stage to avoid spending on initiatives that ultimately do not address a specific need and therefore have little chance of success. It is better to validate quickly and if there is no significant need, reformulate or seek another business idea, “he adds. Chiang says this concept is widespread in the United States. “There are companies that are stuck for two years spending money and end up realizing that there was no significant need and that they could have done it after six months and used the resources on another idea or adjusted what they were thinking,” he says.

Cristóbal Cassanello, founder of the startup Ecopass -a national company that sells tickets for ecological events- suggests that if you have a business idea, the most valuable thing is to launch it on the market, with little money and that it is the market itself that says whether it works or not. “Unlike the thought that existed before that you had to invest a lot of hours and money, the startup formula is that they launch many things at high speed and at low cost.” Under this premise, Cassanello ensures that this formula allows “iteration, which is listening to the market with these launches and after a while, the product they achieve is superior. The idea is to develop the MVP, a minimum viable product,” he explains.

“Testing, piloting and making mistakes is part of the way. Seeing mistakes as learning opportunities and with that building the company or the solution that each one is making,” says Della Maggiora, CEO of Betterfly.

Daniela Soto, from UNAB, says that you always start from a hypothesis, identify a problem and write a thesis on how to solve it. “The validation stage in early-stage ventures is very important to be able, in the field, to define if this hypothesis is correct. This allows you to transform your solution and lower it to what the market and your segment needs. You have to specify your idea as soon as possible to be able to validate it in the market and in your target segment. If this is not done, the company spends a lot of time building in the clouds, in pure theory, and the idea must be put into practice as soon as possible, validated with the target customer and market, “he says.

 

3. Resorting to mentoring and relying on incubators.

 

Francisco Chiang, from UNAB, says that we must remember how today’s mega-companies started: startups that were developed by university students, many times when they were studying, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, among others. “Knowledge is generated at the university and also a community to develop, validate and test it. The university is relevant in this ecosystem, because it connects knowledge with expertise on entrepreneurship issues, access to financing, and is a factor that catalyzes entrepreneurship ”, he argues.

Chiang leads the Diploma in Business Creation at Andrés Bello University, which will begin its fourth version, delivering tough skills to entrepreneurship teams in three months, where his focus is. “Within the diploma course the idea is to teach how to prototype and validate your idea at an early stage, how to see the issue of the definition of the price and the sales plan, correct definitions of company incorporation, tax regime and intellectual property, how to structure well the business model and how to value the startup “, he explains.

Mentor Daniela Soto says that there are many innovative projects that have removed the fears and that they come from the labs. “In the case of UNAB, there is a project by some guys who want to generate electricity based on plants (BiopaV)”. Another startup that is scaling is Phage Technologies. The company produces a virus that has the ability to attack a bacterium and they began to work it as a disinfectant of vegetables for the home, however, they realized that there was no relevant need in that market. After visiting fairs in the south, says Chiang, “they realized that this same bacterium had an important incidence in the mortality of calves and that is why they changed the application of disinfectant to treatment of diseases and thus opened a very important market and now they produce and sell through Bayer in different countries. ”

Regarding mentoring, Daniela Soto, who fulfills this role at UNAB and also at UDD, argues that the work can be taken at different stages of the project: “In my case, I have been linked to early-stage ventures, where the idea is to be a counselor and see what is happening in that team. What we do is make a diagnosis and establish the goals they want to achieve. It is an accompaniment to their processes “.

For Werner Kristjanpoller, director of 3iE, an important issue is that the entrepreneur has to be open, humble and approach those who know to promote their entrepreneurship. “Understand that an incubator, Corfo, mentors and investors have exactly the same objectives as yours. If Corfo gives them financing, if an incubator gives them sponsorship, if there are investors who put money, they all seek the success of the project,” he explains.

Cristóbal Cassanello left with Ecopass in 2014, when he was studying Industrial Civil Engineering at university. He had to work on a massive event and saw that the payment systems were very slow and worked with thermal paper. He realized that these hard banknotes cannot be recycled and their components cause cancer. From that, he got together with two programmer friends, they developed the idea and won a couple of CORFO funds that allowed them to develop the platform. They were incubated in the 3iE, until after the outbreak and the pandemic they had to reinvent themselves and began to bet on virtual events.

 

4. Be clear about the problem and your work team.

 

Daniela Soto, Andrés Bello’s mentor, maintains that it is important to understand “what I am solving and for whom it is a pain or a problem and if it really is a pain for the segment that I have identified. That is, the next step is to validate with the segments affected “. In this way, he says, you build a solid proposal and a solution that really applies to the problem and to the segment itself.

Regarding the work team, the experts affirm that the idea is to have a group that has the necessary tools to develop the project. For example, Daniela Soto continues, if the solution is to create an application to help people with disabilities, “it is necessary to have competent people on the team to understand the problem closely, such as someone related to health who understands the pain of nearby, a person with experience in digitization and computing. ”

Along with this, it is ideal to have a work team that gets along well, since they will spend a lot of time together developing the idea, so they must create a pleasant and conducive environment to be successful. Francisco Chiang, Director of Innovation and Technology Transfer at UNAB, points out that “if the organization is not aligned, it is most likely that a break will be generated and the most important piece of the venture is the team and if it breaks, there is a risk of continue with the initiative. ”

 

5. Use of technology.

 

María de los Ángeles Romo, manager of Startup-Chile, believes that entrepreneurship is a tool that is available to everyone. “Technological entrepreneurship is a tool that at the same time allows us to generate mobility, and to the extent that mobility can be accessed, the quality of life and ecosystems can be changed in a very resounding way,” he says regarding companies that grow fast, generate a lot of employment, contribute to the economic, social and cultural development of countries.

The inclusion of more entrepreneurs with complex solutions, digital, technological or scientific advancement is vital to achieve a higher level of productivity, GDP and quality of life for citizens. Ángel Morales, from UDD Ventures, assures that digital-based ventures are those that investors seek to bet on, since they allow them to have a global vision, operate in different cities of the world, go looking for volume and, therefore, long term to transform into businesses with positive profitability. “In this sense, the digital age is the amphitheater for the emergence of these new players, such as Cornershop, and thus lead the digital economy of the future,” he says.

 

6. Be financed with non-dilutive funds.

 

Francisco Chiang, from the Andrés Bello University, states that at the beginning it is important to start with financing with competitive funds from Corfo, entrepreneurship tournaments or similar, rather than with investment. “Undiluted funds don’t ask you for ownership. When an investor arrives, he tells you that he passes you 200 million pesos, but you have to give him 20% of the property. If you win a fund in Corfo or another, they do not ask you to participate in the equity, then you can take the first steps without diluting yourself ”, says the director of Innovation and technology transfer at UNAB.

 

7. Plan a good exit.

 

Startup creators speak of “exit” as if it were the Holy Grail. In formal terms, this is an exit-of-business strategy, which refers to an entrepreneur’s strategic plan to sell their property in a startup to investors or another company, as Cornershop did with Uber weeks ago. In this way, a business owner reduces or liquidates his participation and can make a profit if it has been profitable.

According to the director of Innovation and technology transfer of the UNAB, Francisco Chiang, to have a good exit you have to plan it, and for this you have to have good agreements with the investors who enter and try to dilute as little as possible. “If you had partners who are going to be majority in the startup, when they enter a shareholders’ agreement is made between the owners of the company, indicating that all must leave in the same conditions. That is, they cannot come and sell their part very well. and leave it without the option of selling at the same price, which is a drag. These exit conditions have to be previously agreed to allow a good exit “.