Tell us about your journey to working with entrepreneurs
As for how I ended up here, I think I started from the traditional world. My mother is a commercial engineer, I saw a lot of people in the family who also studied the same thing, so I thought about studying commercial engineering. At some point, studying medicine crossed my mind, but the other thing took precedence.
So I entered the course, thinking that I could work in banks. I think I like numbers, so that's where I'm going. Over time, I realized that there were more alternatives within the university. I met new people who thought differently, people motivated to help, student movements for social causes.
I became interested in these new ideas, and at the time I applied to the student union, but I didn't win, but I was always involved in student participation. I became good friends with someone who worked at TECHO and together we went to help people from Bajos de Mena who were starting their businesses.
We helped with digitalization and work tools. After that, we started to organize EDay at the university, where we invited people from Sercotec and that's when I started to get more involved with the world of entrepreneurship, because before I was more involved in the construction of houses and squares.
With your approach to entrepreneurship, did you begin to apply the content of your degree more?
Yes, but only very little, because the course had a more managerial focus and there were no entrepreneurship support programs within the faculty.
There was a first milestone when the FIIS (International Festival of Social Innovation) was held in 2015 at the Pontifical Catholic University. As fate would have it, I ended up on the FIIS finance team. There I had contact with many entrepreneurs, because I was also in charge of organizing the fair.
With the organization of that festival, I also got involved in Colab, where I have been working since 2015, and I started by supporting a socio-environmental entrepreneurship accelerator, which was also linked to Simon of Cyrene.
Nicolás led the first space to support entrepreneurship within the Catholic taiwan number example University, Despega Comercial.
I feel that there is a path to take in linking entrepreneurship that is essentially social or environmental and traditional entrepreneurship in Chile.
I think that both worlds, which are different, have a lot to learn from each other. However, it is difficult for them to come together at some point, because they are ventures that are born motivated by a different purpose, some motivated by a need, to be able to generate income, hopefully with something that I like, and others with the purpose of helping the planet.
And as I was saying, I think that traditional entrepreneurship has a gap in moving in that other direction. And in turn, entrepreneurship that is socio-environmental also has many management gaps. It is usually mentioned with more complex concepts than this one, such as MVP, design thinking , but they lack management tools, such as: being profitable, knowing the numbers, setting prices, which are tools that surely a grocer can know much more about, or someone from the world of traditional entrepreneurship can have better management tools.
Which actors do you think are not taking on the role they should in society to work towards entrepreneurship?
I think that we are moving forward to a certain extent. Rather than having a critical view on the matter, I think I really value the progress that universities are making. Academia and research used to be further away from the more practical world. They are going in the right direction to the extent that they link academia and research, which are super relevant, because in the long run they allow you to have a direction, although it may be with a language that is not so down to earth, but it does give you a certain notion of things that are useful.
There are also other actors, there is the world of civil society, from which we also insert ourselves as Simon of Cyrene, and which has a tremendous role to play, even more and more it is mixing with the rest of the public bodies. Today there are the COSOC (Civil Society Council) where civil society is a kind of directory for the public world. And today from Simon of Cyrene we can be part of the COSOC of both SernamEG and FOSIS, that is already a strong space of influence and of passing on certain knowledge, sharing and generating collaborations from the strategic and from the execution.
The public sector has become very open to this, and so has the private sector. Following the line of ecosystem actors, companies are becoming more synergistic. Today they are starting to see work with the community as part of their business model. It is a bit like the desire that one should see, to be a social and integrated company, where support, in this case for entrepreneurship, can be seen as part of, for example, a supplier development program.
Do you think it is important to support entrepreneurship in Chile?
Yes, because I believe that the great importance of entrepreneurship lies in the vocational gap that exists. I highly value the progress in education, but when access to higher education is not possible, entrepreneurship is seen as a great opportunity to generate income and promote family development.
And therein lie the more than 2 million micro-enterprises in Chile that we try to support, without leaving aside the companies that may need us and where we can leave a good impact.
Entrepreneurship has a very strong social role based on necessity, but there is another side, which is the vocational role. Example: I studied something and I have an idea, I want to dedicate myself to something that the world needs and I am not seeing it in my company or in the public world or in civil society. I want to be me with my vocation, doing what I want and generating resources from that. And there, it has a second important role, that a self-built professional career allows you to get closer to your purpose and generate income when the job opportunities in the dependent market do not give them to you.