Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

Yesterday I came back from two days in Montevideo for the Endeavor Uruguay Conference and Gala Dinner.

I have a special feeling for Uruguay and its people, but beyond my “favoritism” I returned tremendously impressed.

On one hand, the Dinner gathered 500 people. Just adjusting for the relative sizes of the countries, that is like reaching a 5,000 people attendance in Argentina and over 30,000 in the US! In that Dinner, most of the Uruguayan business and investing Communities were present, expressing their support for Entrepreneurship.

On the other, the Conference gathered lots of entrepreneurs, that showed thru their stories what you can achieve when you have a big ambitious goal and leave everything to achieve it.

A few random notes:

• My personal contribution was a talk on How to Present to Investors, together with my friend Pablo Brenner. It was fun because the idea was that he would bring the perspective of an investor and I would tell the tale from the entrepreneur side. We did not share notes before and we ended up saying mostly the same! I don’t know if he is a very entrepreneurial investor or I am getting old and starting to think as an investor
• I was very impressed by the story of Jorge Nazer, founder of ALTO and an Endeavor Chile entrepreneur, who overcame big obstacles and personal tragedy on his way to build the company he dreamt about.

• I had given a speech there in 2005 and at that time I was frustrated by the negative sensitivity towards Argentineans as a result of the conflict of the Botnia and Stora paper plants. This time it was great to see that from a people perspective that issue seems to be finally put behind.
• From Argentina, besides me, there were Guibert and Martín from Globant. That gave me the chance to spend a lot of time with them and catch up to the amazing company they have built. Let’s put it this way: for those who have not visited their offices in Buenos Aires, the images from Google that Alec blogged a while ago are a copy of theirs - well, maybe not!
• Lastly, I thought I had been very smart to avoid Aerolíneas Argentinas and book my tickets on Pluna. Pluna is indeed a bit better since both flights were on brand new Canadian Bombardier planes (even the captain was Canadian!). But operationally the company is a total mess and service was very poor. It seems there is no way around it. If you want safe travels in South America, it has to be on Lan.