2011 20
Wayra: Telefónica’s start-up accelerator
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Entrepreneurship with No Comments
A couple of weeks ago, Telefónica announced the launch of Wayra, a program that will support the creation of high-tech IT companies in Latin America and Spain. Basically, Wayra is a business incubator, although it wants to be more than that and calls itself a business “accelerator”. (Future) entrepreneurs can submit their projects, even if they’re only at an idea stage, and the 30 teams with the most promising ideas will be given the opportunity to present in front of a jury which will then narrow the selection down to 10 projects (this occurs on a country level). The first three countries are Colombia, Mexico and Spain, and the goal is to have this initiative running in eight countries by the end of this year. This will bring the number of supported projects to 80 by the end of 2011.
Every project will get access to Telefónicas top-notch technological infrastructure, and in addition will receive financing of $30k to $70k during the first six months and will obtain all the necessary support needed to establish and build a successful company (office space, mentoring, day-to-day management, technical support from Telefónicas R&D department, etc.). Wayra will also help the most interesting of these projects to obtain additional financing after the initial six-month period.
The idea behind this project is to facilitate the creation of global tech companies out of Latin America and Spain, which, despite some great successes like MercadoLibre, is still very difficult. Many potential founders move to tech hubs like Silicon Valley, New York, London or Berlin because they can’t find the necessary environments needed to create and grow an international company in their home countries. Access to capital is difficult (especially finding “smart money”), it’s hard to find skilled employees and the overall environment (legal, etc.) is often not supportive of entrepreneurship.
Wayra’s mission is to plant the seed from which local “Silicon Valleys” can emerge over time in the target countries, enabling talented individuals to pursue their dreams without having to leave their home country and fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in the region. A great initiative, I am looking forward to seeing the first projects emerging from the program.
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No Comments
Jose on May 23, 2011 ·
Hi Martin,
when talking about ‘… access to Venture or Angel Capital is still difficult …’ what do you mean by “smart money”?
J
Anthony Hess on June 11, 2011 ·
Joe –
What Martin means is that it’s not just investment, but advice (and hopefully connections) on how to succeed with the new venture.
From an outsider’s perspective (I’ve been here a little over a year) I think that Spain’s culture is actually compatible with entrepreneurship, and could be a great place to start a business. We’ve done it, but I haven’t decided on the intelligence of what we’ve done just yet ;). It won’t look like US style entrepreneurship to be certain, but I think there are some things here – such as a focus on design and fashion – that could translate very well into tech startups. Time will tell, but it’s good to see an established player in this market looking to make something happen – hopefully the startup culture is compatible enough with Telefonica’s to allow for success.
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Tomasz Zawada on May 20, 2011 ·
It´s always good to see initiatives like this but I hope is not going to take them a year to decide on the ideas…
One of the reasons I like private investors is because they are usually quite quick in deciding, at least most of them.
Public financing is Spain, like Neotec takes more than a year to obtain. That is really slow and many startups may not last enough to get it.