Comment by trevelyan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trevelyan | Hacker News Reader

As someone who went through the program:

(1) it's not technically true that you HAVE to spend the money before you get it reimbursed. We were given the option of purchasing insurance from the private sector to cover the government in the event of the funds being misallocated. None of the teams decided this was worth doing since it takes time to arrange the insurance and you end up paying the bank for holding the risk. Why waste that money?

(2) My understanding is that the $750 monthly salary mentioned here is the no-questions-asked limit on personal compensation for the individual whose name is on the contract. It was introduced to avoid having people need to keep track of all of their receipts. I believe you can justify more if you're willing to collect and submit those receipts (not worth the time), and you can always pay coworkers more by simply issuing a legal receipt for services rendered by them to your company. I didn't take salary myself but had no problems paying individual staff up to 2500 USD per month.

(3) It costs about 6000-8000 USD for a team to take advantage of the program since there are some things you can't get receipts for (housing deposits, miscellaneous cash expenses). Those expenses end up being front-loaded, but you are still looking at a 7x money multiplier on your matching funds (the funding works out to over 42000 USD once the exchange rate is figured in). Expecting teams to contribute 1000 of their own capital per month while pursuing their own business is not a high bar.

I'm the writer of the post. You were in the Pilot of the program, they adjusted the rules of the program through their experience with you, our program is subsequently different. The same thing is currently happening from feedback within our cohort and they are adjusting it for the next cohort, it will be a different program for them than it is for us. I stand fully behind the $10K being the number needed to fully access your grant. This is a critical number that the new cohort should know so that they don't come in and end up in a difficult position.

I'm also on the current program. It's true, you need at least $10K cash in the bank to be able to gain full access to the grant. We thought it would be around $5K that we would need but it's turned out to be much more.

I very much hope that this changes for the next cohort of participants.

hey, since you've been through the program and we recently got selected I had a few questions - that I hope you'd answer:

1) Can you stay on there longer after the 6 months? What are the permit restrictions etc?

2) How many people actually came there with little or no product ready and actually built up while in Chile itself?

3) What are the odds that people who fall under the category of 2) got funding there itself?

What I am trying to understand is - is this something more worthwhile for those who already have something running and are maybe already talking to investors? Or is it also an equally good opportunity for people who've been playing with an idea and will have maybe 60% ready by the time they get there - but have no other investment other than their own money ?

Thanks a lot!

and in that case what are the odds of actually finding investors during the program? (do they have serious investors visiting etc?)

We got serious inbound inquiries just from taking part.

thanks for the quick answers! can I contact you in any other way with more questions please?

absolutely -- contact info through profile. It's a brilliant program though -- if you've been accepted, by all means go. :)

(1) The visa is good for a year and you can extend as long as you're able to support yourself. (2) Every single person there was building something. (3) It's not a lottery -- if you want funding you have to be fundable, and decide to raise money instead of bootstrapping.

There is serious investment capital available. The point isn't that you're guaranteed to raise it. It's that if you can't get a higher valuation and better terms after six months of work and 40,000 in free outside investment then you probably don't have a company anyone will fund anyway.

As a current member of the program, I would argue that it is better suited for a company in idea-phase, where the founders likely still having a savings account available (for the two month money issue Ken describes).

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