Update from Cuba: Mapping the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
Country Manager Orlando Zambrano shares highlights of his work as he meets with some of the most promising new ventures in Havana
We’ve maintained radio silence for some time, but not for lack of things to share — it’s been anything but quiet in Havana. Alter has been in Cuba for two weeks now and it feels as if we’ve gained a year’s worth of knowledge about the country and its nascent private sector.
Since landing in Havana, I’ve had the opportunity to immerse myself in a country approaching an inflection point that is widely perceived, but hard to pin down. Our CEO, Jesse Sullivan, joined me last week and together we’ve tried to gain a sense of the Cuban reality, explore the city, and work towards mapping it’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Some highlights of our time so far:
- Embedding ourselves with the team at Proyecto Cuba Emprende and seeing first-hand the inspiring work they do to propel Cuba’s entrepreneurs. Participants arrive with an interest in a topic and leave equipped with business plans and the tools to implement them.
- Meeting the team behind Negolution, Cuba’s first and leading entrepreneurship publication. With a diverse staff and wide ranging appetites for great stories, the magazine is changing the way entrepreneurial tales are told. The founders also run their own accounting, delivery/messenger, and design/printing firms.
- Chatting with the team behind ConWiro, a video game developer creating mobile games that preserve Cuba’s culture, music, and art heritage. Their first offering, Rayo Guaracha — a mobile game where players defend Cuban landmarks from invading aliens with Cuban music ray-guns — debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt NY earlier this year.
- Serving as guest judge on a SharkTank-esque technical committee to select companies for an incubator program.
- Hearing the founder of Cubazon — a service that allows customers residing outside of Cuba to buy gifts for friends and family who live on the island — explain the genesis of his idea. All the goods listed on the site are produced by Cuban businesses. Cubazon is this founder’s third venture.
- Talking “What matters most to you and why?” with a Cuban entrepreneur who hopes to apply to the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the class of 2020. Jesse and I aren’t sure, but we think he would be among the first Cuban residents to attend. We’ll have to check with admissions.
- Getting used to the 1950s era cars that operate as collective taxis and our primary means of getting to meetings. Spare parts are scarce in Cuba and these are kept running on ingenuity and creativity. It’s not a shock to see a bus transmission somehow operating clutch-less in a 1953 Chevy.
- Mastering the WiFi parks. For the vast majority of Cubans (and visitors) the only way to access the internet is via hourly top-up cards that one buys from ETECSA (the national telco) and government-installed WiFi hotspots in parks across Havana. Spot a cluster of people huddled over their phones in the shade at all hours of the day and night? You’ve likely stumbled upon an ETECSA hotspot.
- Running the Nelson Mandela Day 10k with one of Cuba’s top masters triathletes. The heat took its toll, but the experience of running along the Malecon with hundreds of other people was one of a kind.
- Eating a traditional Cuban dinner with Richard Blanco (the inaugural poet), Ruth Behar (renowned anthropologist and MacArthur genius grant recipient), and 9 Cuban-American writers visiting Cuba for the first time. The team at CubaOne was exceptionally welcoming and does impressive work connecting the diaspora with Cuba.
Among these experiences, meeting the entrepreneurs and deepening our relationships with them have been the foremost highlights. Hearing their tales of success and failure, of passion for work and country, of uniquely Cuban obstacles and uniquely Cuban solutions, conjures an unmistakable sense that in a version of the future their names will be spoken with awe and reverence by students studying entrepreneurship in Cuba.
We are set to meet more entrepreneurs this week. We’re excited to transition into selecting those teams with the greatest potential for impact and thinking about how to add the most value to their ventures. Until my next update, I invite you to follow the links above and learn more about the truly impressive people and ideas shaking things up around here.
