There’s a comic where the boss tells an engineer to “give the customers what they want” and the engineer says, “They want better products, for free.” The boss promptly scraps that give-the-customers-what-they-want nonsense. Almost from the first moment we produced Spirit Lake and Fish Lake people have been asking us, […]
AnnMaria De Mars
After a session on getting technology into Latin American organizations convinced me I needed to know more about how Chilean schools operate, I scheduled interviews with several teachers. To say that their responses were eye-opening would be an understatement. The first person I interviewed was an eighth-grade teacher and the […]
You have HOW MANY students? Discussions with Chilean teachers
If you listen to any start-up pitches, you hear about the $XX BILLION DOLLAR global market. When we were in an accelerator program, we were advised to “use global numbers to make your market look bigger”. There is just one problem there. Nearly all of those start-ups throwing out figures […]
The Global Market Ain’t All That Easy
Ogden Nash said, “Foreigners are people somewhere else, Natives are people at home If the place you’re at Is your habitat You’re a foreigner, say, in Rome.” As a general rule, Americans take one of two different views about foreign countries, and, in my experience, both of these views are […]
Am I Crazy to Be Doing Business in a Foreign ...
It’s not often that a single presentation has a significant impact in how you do business, but the discussion on sales in Latin America by Nicolas Elizarraga, did just that. He said that when he started selling information technology to corporations he started out by calling dozens of successful sales people […]
The Most Valuable Thing I Learned in Chile
2 Introduction I started to write this series with a different angle in mind, addressing first the coolest parts of Google Docs. After writing a few pages of that document, I felt the readers would be best served with a proper introduction to the basics of this cloud computing word processing […]
Google Docs: A (Very) Brief Introduction
It’s been crazy busy here, in a mostly good way, but I thought another Startup Diary, Santiago Edition was about due. One thing I get asked a lot is what people in Chile are like. I’ve been here four months, most of my time in Santiago, with a few days […]
Cultural Nuances: Chileans are more like Midwesterners than Mexicans
If you are immediately turned off by the idea of someone selling you technology or of yourself as a salesperson, you need to read this post. Thanks to Startup Chile, I spent Friday morning learning about business to enterprise sales from Nicolas Elizarraga, an expert on tech sales in Latin America . […]
Good Advice on Selling Technology in Latin America
Here it is, another issue of the Start-up Diaries, Santiago edition. I was talking with a friend of mine in Start-up Chile, she runs Mi Manuel de Bebe (your baby instruction manual) , one of the biggest parenting sites in Colombia. Like me, she had been saying for years she […]
Why Do We Put Off Making Changes?
You made it through another school year and you don’t even want to think about the fall. Maybe you have two weeks left of school and you don’t even want to think about the fall. I understand, I really do. After grading 200 papers, submitting grades for students, you just […]
How You Can Be a Better Teacher
I know a lot of people who want to work with the big accounts. Whether it’s a financial advisor who wants to start off by advising the latest athlete to sign a multi-million dollar contract or the sales person who is only interested in selling to General Electric or the […]
What Microsoft Gets Right and Other People Don’t
Recently, I was asked to answer three questions related to Common Core standards. Since I thought these were of general interest, I’ve posted the answers below. We currently develop and market our games in the U.S., Chile and Trinidad. Therefore, we make every effort to teach content that is essential […]