Great opening launch by Cesar Salazar, who merged Mexican.vc with Dave McClure's 500 Startups, as he kicked off 500 Startups Mexican Demo Day.
12 startup founders gave their demos at our BizSpark Lab today, and here are a few shots that depict the goings on.
I was sitting in the front row around people like McClure, Brad Feld (couldn't tell, was looking from an angle) and some other Silicon Valley investors, when Salazar said what I thought was the most important thing of the whole demo day. He said that Silicon Valley was transforming from the venture capital hub for entrepreneurship to more of the spiritual hub, as the global expansion of entrepreneurship was on its way. You could see a lot of heads nodding yes. I snapped this shot of him. Sorry for the light glare, but we are very bootstrappy when we do these things. I like to catch it all on the fly.
For a write up of the day, you can turn to this TechCrunch article. I love being at these things. Here are some of the startups that presented, as written by Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch:
Boletia – This startup helps events organizers sell tickets and find an audience for their concerts, conferences, and other events. In addition to sales online, Boletia also allows organizers to sell through local convenience stores, which is a popular way of purchasing tickets. The startup takes a 6.5 percent fee per ticket. Seven weeks after launch, it’s had more than $100,000 sales in tickets with just one salesperson.
Capptalog – Capptalog provides a way for small and medium-sized businesses to quickly create catalogs to showcase and sell their wares through mobile devices. It provides a SaaS platform on the web for creating and managing product descriptions, upload multimedia, such as photos and videos, and create sales pages for those products. It says there are 5 million SMBs in the Mexican market, and is looking to attempt to capture 72 percent of those.
E-Training – This company seeks to help train the 20 million professionals in Mexico that are underemployed or unemployed. In the Latin America market, the company sees 152 million web users, of which 14 percent are participating in online education. That will grows annually at a rate of 15 percent to 32 million people in 2015.
Femininas.com – This startup is going after the fashion and beauty market in Spanish-speaking companies. There are already 100,000s of customers coming to website every month, and it’s profitable. But it’s looking to expand in a market where there’s no Pinterest or Glam Media to compete against.
Harris – “Obesity is a ***.” That’s the problem that Harris seeks to solve, by connecting users and nutritionists and allowing both to track a user’s diet. The company offers a SaaS-based platform with a subscription model for its dashboard. It has a large list of foods and nutritional info that users can check out to choose what to eat, and nutritionists can use to keep track of their diets.
Nuperty – Nuperty helps connect buyers, sellers, and mortgage lenders in real estate. The company provides a platform for searching real estate listings, and also provides buyer profiles to financial institutions for those who wish to qualify for loans. The company has generated $100,000 in leads so far and is growing quickly in Mexico, and is looking to expand to other Latin American countries.
