Search for “entrepreneurship” and “Chile” and you’ll find Start-up Chile, the accelerator modeled on programs in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs get support to grow their companies in “Chilecon Valley.”
It’s great idea, but it’s not the real story of Chilean entrepreneurship. That story begins decades earlier, on the streets of New York City.
In the 1980s, a Chilean entrepreneur named the Rabbit stumbled upon delicious nuts being roasted on a New York sidewalk and was blown away by the nuts, and the cart:
Nuts4Nuts! Get it? The cart, or the customers, or … somebody… is really into nuts!
The Rabbit immediately realized this was a disruptive hot nut technology. He took Nuts4Nuts from New York to Chile.
Nuts4Nuts exploded hard in Chile. They even opened an airport branch. Fittingly, it’s on the sidewalk, right outside of departures:
But upon arrival in Chile, the nut carts that had previously exclaimed phonetically “I’m Nuts for Nuts!” now proclaimed “ Yo Soy Nuts Quatro Nuts!”
.
.
Chileans were totally quatro about nuts.
.
.
But, the trademark — alliterative in the wrong language — did not confer Nuts4Nuts with enough of an unfair advantage.
Other entrepreneurs also saw the opportunity and a race for nut dominance began.
One of the fast followers had a formidable trick up its sleeve: A higher coefficient of nuts.
Yep. Nuts5Nuts. But the race wasn’t over. Competitors plowed money into R&D to develop entirely unimagined nut coefficients.
As sugary peanut technology leapfrogged sugary peanut technology and more money was plowed into disruptive nut cart business models, the denizens of Chilecon Valley feared a bubble.
Luckily for the Chilean nut economy, higher nut coefficients also drove more customer value and the total available market grew in tandem. This story has a happy ending: there is still money to be made in the Chilean sidewalk snack vertical.
As we walked through the beautiful southern town of Valdivia, Chile where I was an exchange student in 1996, we got a glimpse of just how far the Chilean street-nut-marketing arms race had progressed:
… and ….
….wait for it….
…. we 8 deez nuts.
