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Comment by nischalshetty | Hacker News Reader

The applications would be open until Oct. 27th. I would recommend all of you to apply. $40k without any equity and a chance to live in a beautiful country like Chile should not be missed. Plus, you get to meet entrepreneurs from all over the world.

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It still has some strange points: the $40k is a reimbursement -- not a grant or funding. They reimburse you up to 90% of your expenses and expect you to show up with over $5k in cash to support your group until you start getting reimbursed.

It sounds like a great program if you have $10k+ sitting idle and want to extend your runway as far as possible, but it may be a stretch for a zero-customers/zero-products web startup.

Yes it is true, reimbursement fills up 90% of all expenses, but allowed salary compensates for the remaining 10% even if the team has only one member. But since the grant money is dispensed via reimbursement you will need ~5-7K of cash per team to start.

We came to Chile with around US$1500 each (we're a team of two). We could survive (pretty comfortably) till the first reimbursements came in (once you get a bank account which is within a week or two you have around $2000 more at your disposal thanks to the line of credit you get at the banks here).

Yeah, you get reimbursed for 90%. But I think it's fair. As founders we need to have put some money into our start-up and have something to lose when things don't work out for us.

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