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

When the goal is to promote the economic growth of a country there is abundant research that shows that very few factors weigh as heavily as the birth of new businesses founded by entrepreneurs.

That is why in the last 10 years I worked with Endeavor to promote entrepreneurship and that way improve the Economy of my country.

Recently we have been having a debate inside Endeavor that I would like to share with you to promote a discussion.

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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.

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After a little over two weeks of launching this blog, the biggest surprise is the amount of visits I am gettingto the English version from South Africa, ranking #3 behind expectables Argentina and the US.

Probably, the help I got from Greg Durst from Endeavor South Africa and this post by Fred Roed have a lot to do with it.

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A few days ago I received a question from an entrepreneur called Nicolás Millaner, who asked what are the key areas to “take a hard stance” when negotiating with an investor. I thought it was a good idea to post my reply here because I believe it can be useful to others as well.

Obviously, the question is very broad and does not admit a simple answer. But there are certain general comments I want to make.

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In this week’s edition of The Economist in the Business section they
published a full article about Endeavor!

For those who don’t know about it, Endeavor is a Foundation created by
Linda Rottenberg and Peter Kellner that helps entrepreneurs in emerging markets around the World.

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Most of you who studied Economics or other social sciences are likely familiar with the “Pareto Rule” or “80/20 Rule”.

The rule was invented when an Italian economist of the 19th Century called Vilfredo Pareto noted, while analyzing the distribution of Income in Italy, that 80% belonged to the richest 20% of the population. The rule was then extended as the “Pareto Rule” to any situation where 80% of the effect can be traced to 20% of the causes and is used in many different fields

All this introduction serves as background to a breakfast I attended a week ago, organized by the Ashoka Support Network. There we attended a presentation by an amazing social entrepreneur called Alberto Croce from Fundación SES.

I could talk a lot about Alberto, but in this post I want to focus on one single aspect of his speech. He mentioned that when someone is trying to promote a social change in a group of people. 20% are very open to it and embrace it easily. Another 20% is completely resistant, no matter how much effort we put. But the secret is in the 60% in between, that does not jump in easily, but can be attracted with the right approach and effort.

What is the catch? That tempted by the Easy 20%, we tend to concentrate our efforts there, not where we can really make a difference.

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Sometimes I am asked about my personal definition of “Entrepreneur”. There are lots of them around there but what I like the most is to say that an entrepreneur is a person that sees the same as everybody else, in contrast to the rest, decides to do something about it.

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OK. Here I go. After hesitating for a long long time, I am starting the millionth blog on the internet.

As you may expect, the main subject will be Entrepreneurship, but I plan to write about many different subjects as well. The common ground shall not be Entrepreneurship itself, but Risk.

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