Insights by Stanford Business discusses the new wave of entrepreneurs launching in North America’s most populous city. The following article highlights the successes of three Stanford MBA graduates- Loreanne Garcia, Maite Diez-Canedo, and Courtney McColgan- and discusses their companies’ involvement in Mexico City.
With a population of 12 million people — over 21 million including the entire metropolitan region — Mexico City is both its nation’s capital and the most populous city in North America. Mexico City’s highly concentrated market is becoming home to a new wave of entrepreneurs looking for opportunities outside the costly, competitive borders of Silicon Valley.
The city has no shortage of challenges: Infrastructure headaches, burdensome business practices, and a rudimentary startup ecosystem require entrepreneurs to embrace the unexpected. For some entrepreneurs, Mexico City’s presence as a resilient, international city where English is common and investment is on the rise presents a chance to help shape startup culture in a city with the potential to become the tech hub for Latin America.
“There Is a Lot of Opportunity”
Loreanne Garcia always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but didn’t make the jump until her brother, a Venezuelan living and working in Colombia with few contacts and limited free time, found himself unable to sell his car prior to taking a new job in Mexico. This is a familiar problem in Latin America, where most used car transactions are handled person-to-person.
“Security is also such a big deal… You don’t know what you’re buying, you have to meet with strangers in the middle of the street, they can rob you, kidnap you, kill you,” Garcia says.
In the end, Loreanne’s brother was forced to leave his car behind, eventually selling it nine months later. When he came to his sister with an idea for
Kavak, an online platform to transform the sale and purchase of used cars in the region, she jumped at the opportunity.
“It was a no-brainer,” she stated. “I said ‘Yes, definitely; we have to do it.’”
Raised in Venezuela, Loreanne had worked in sales at Procter & Gamble and as a business analyst at McKinsey & Co. prior to receiving her MBA at Stanford. Following graduation, she rejoined McKinsey, but in less than three years she and her husband— a Stanford GSB classmate from Mexico— decided to relocate to Mexico. There, she worked briefly in microfinance at Aprecia Financiera, then moved into a strategy role at Coca-Cola.
She began researching Mexico’s used car market, which was highly concentrated with little competition. The majority of the country’s used car transactions were private and occurred in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey. Encouraged, Loreanne and her brother began buying and selling cars and raising capital.
“We were older entrepreneurs than average, in our 30s, and had some contacts… A local fund led the round, and we got a lot of family and friend investors. We were picky with the people we let into the team as investors; we had to get people who knew Mexico very well, knew about cars, knew about the data around these cars, and could connect with Silicon Valley. So we had a really interesting group who helped us make connections and make good decisions,” she said.
Launched in 2015, Kavak now operates 10 centers in Mexico City, selling cars that are inspected and guaranteed to be free of legal or mechanical issues. The company is in a high-growth stage, Garcia says. She expects to double her team of 520 employees and expand to Guadalajara and Monterrey within the year.
Undoubtedly, there are hurdles. A large roadblock is the lack of resources commonly found in the United States. For example, in Mexico City, checking a car’s history is very time-consuming, as is finding sufficient auto parts to supply the company’s rapidly growing needs. However, such problems also provide unexpected opportunities to expand her company beyond its original mission.
“We’re now getting into everything related to the car-owning experience… People here haven’t traditionally financed used cars, so we’re getting into finance. There’s nothing like Carfax here, so we’re getting into data to be able to provide information on car histories. We’re also getting into servicing,” she says.
Mexico City’s concentrated market is larger than the sum total of every other Spanish-speaking country in Latin American, Garcia says.
“We’re really happy with how we’re growing…It’s a huge market fit, people know who we are, and investors are really interested in us, which gives us more capability to grow faster and better,” she added.
The region has also provided her the chance to have the impact she might never have found in Silicon Valley.
“Here, you understand the difference you’re making in people’s lives, in the lives of your employees, and to the market that you’re opening to other entrepreneurs,” she says. “There is still a lot of opportunity.”
“There’s a Comfort with Chaos”
Maite Diez-Canedo began her career as an analyst at JP Morgan in New York, but had long wanted to help solve some of the biggest problems faced by growing companies located in non-tech hubs.
Her opportunity came as she and sister, Itziar Diez-Canedo, were concurrently enrolled at Stanford GSB — Maite working on her MBA, and Itziar in the one-year MSx program for mid-career professionals.
“I was born and raised in Mexico City, and it feels very near to me to help entrepreneurs and young companies grow…At the [Stanford] GSB, we spoke with hundreds of entrepreneurs around the world and realized one of their key problems is always access to talent, as well as skill gaps locally. There is also a massive trend in the way our generation thinks about work. We want more impact, more meaning, and more global experiences. These two ideas sort of fell into our laps and we decided to build a company together,” Maite says.
Their platform, Via.work, created at Stanford’s
Startup Garage, connects professionals with startups around the world.
“We help companies recruit in an innovative new, fast way, connecting them with global talent… We’ve placed hundreds of people in over 25 cities around the world, everywhere from São Paulo to Bali. We raised a seed round in Silicon Valley a year and a half ago, and we’re now growing our team,” she says.
Diez-Canedo says the decision to locate in Mexico City was an easy one, as competing in San Francisco for talent is pretty impossible.
“Our clients are largely startups in Latin America, so it felt necessary to be in the region from a commercial perspective, but beyond that, there’s a real operational efficiency here…Competing in San Francisco for talent is pretty impossible. You’re one in a million and don’t have the resources. But in Mexico, you’re a Silicon Valley company operating in Mexico. You’re very attractive, and resources here are multiplied because the cost of living is so much lower and salaries are so much more affordable,” she says.
Hurdles do exist; as it can be difficult to find skilled talent, particularly in tech roles, and simple logistics — such as setting up an LLC or even a bank account — can be much more time-consuming than in the U.S. It’s not a deal-breaker, however, Diez-Canedo says.
“There’s a comfort with chaos here, and that’s an interesting thing I wasn’t expecting… We live in a chaotic country — everything from our morning commute to our politics. But I think that comfort with chaos and that resilience is really helpful for startups,” she added.
Despite such challenges, the culture of entrepreneurship in Mexico City continues to grow.
“What’s different here than in the U.S. is that there are still relatively few exit stories in Mexico, which means the risk profile of joining a startup here is very different than it is in San Francisco… A college graduate joining a startup in San Francisco is the norm, whereas in Mexico, people still think of stability more in terms of joining a larger company. But things are changing; there’s a growing ecosystem of entrepreneurs, a growing number of venture capital firms allocating capital toward entrepreneurs, and a growing openness to joining a startup. That wasn’t the case five years ago.”
“Mexico Is the Portal to the Rest of Latin America.”
As the CMO of Cabify, a ride-sharing company operating in Latin America,
Courtney McColgan was accustomed to a wide array of challenges. What she wasn’t anticipating, however, was an odd problem within her own organization.
“There wasn’t a month that went by that I didn’t get a complaint from someone on my team about their payroll… I don’t think I’d ever complained in my entire life about my payroll; I thought it was so weird that it was a common problem. I kind of put a Post-it on the wall reminding myself that when I’m ready to leave and start my own company, I should look into modern payroll for Latin America,” she recalls.
Within four years, McColgan had left Cabify and launched
Runa, a cloud-based payroll software system designed to automate payroll for small to medium-sized businesses in Latin America. Based in Mexico City, the company is now valued at $75 million.
Entrepreneurship isn’t new to McColgan. In addition to working as an analyst at Morgan Stanley and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, she launched a tech platform and an e-commerce site before moving to Latin America with her husband, a Peruvian-born Stanford GSB alumnus. But what she discovered about payroll systems in Latin America surprised her.
“What I learned is that payroll is very local… What works in California doesn’t work in Alaska, let alone what works in America doesn’t work in Mexico,” she says.
After researching payroll systems in both Latin America and the U.S., McColgan entered the three-month program at Y Combinator to launch Runa. The company raised $6 million in its seed round, and has raised $25 million to date.
“Our first year we grew 50% month over month, and we ended the year processing payroll for 10,000 employees… In 2019 we grew 18% month over month and ended the year processing payroll for 50,000 employees,” she said.
Runa now has over 150 employees and the capacity to serve all of Mexico’s 32 states. McColgan hopes to be processing payroll for over 400,000 employees across all categories of employment by the end of this year.
Despite these successes, McColgan says that operating in Mexico City presents challenges. For example, local investors- still new to venture- are reluctant to write large checks to businesses, and few entrepreneurs have the resources and knowledge to access Silicon Valley capital while also building a business in Mexico.
“One of the biggest hurdles is cultural difference… I had a template in my brain of how startups work, formed over the last 15 to 20 years working in Silicon Valley, and down here there’s no template. I’ve had to explain what a unicorn is to people, what a series A and B is, and what a Silicon Valley investor is. There’s a general knowledge gap because the sector here is so young and new,” she says.
Despite that, McColgan sees immense potential.
“Mexico is really the portal to the rest of Latin America, and well positioned to be the tech hub for Latin America… Brazil is a very large market, but Portuguese is spoken there, not Spanish, which is a big challenge if you want to build a company that spans the width of all Latin America. Mexico has amazing talent, there’s a lot of English spoken here, and a huge part of Mexico’s economy is tourism, so they’re very used to foreigners — especially Americans — coming down here. You also have a technical labor force here that is comfortable in English,” she says.
Launching in Mexico City has also afforded McColgan an unusual chance to have impact beyond her own organization.
“I’m excited about building a large technical platform that can solve a really fundamental problem for business, but I’m also excited, as we grow the company, to see the cultural impact we can have on the ecosystem of startups in Latin America… It’s a really amazing opportunity that doesn’t exist in the valley now, because we’ve sort of passed that point,” McColgan stated.
