Entrepreneurs interact at Venture Café Monterrey

On Thursday afternoon, Venture Café Monterrey was inaugurated with the participation of entrepreneurs, investors, innovators, and other stakeholders from the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

This global initiative aims to promote entrepreneurship and innovation and opened in a Latin American city for the first time with the Monterrey campus as its venue.

“We’re living in an innovation district. We hope to generate an area where talent, entrepreneurs, investors, corporations, and Monterrey’s society in general coexist with a new vision of making us an innovative city,” said Mario Adrián Flores, Vice President of the Monterrey Region, at the launch.

Venture Café Monterrey’s Thursday Gathering was held on May 26th on the 12th floor and the observation terrace of the CEDES building, where Tim Rowe, founder of the global initiative, mentioned that a social factory is needed in order to continue the growth of cities.

“Companies are like trees. They have a lifetime that’s getting shorter and shorter. The speed of change is quite high, which is why it’s important to encourage entrepreneurship in the region since it’s through this type of network that companies of the future might be found.

“At MIT, we’ve detected that for a company to move forward correctly and grow, it needs to have three ingredients: 1) Money, 2) Ideas, and 3) Talent (MIT). However, this isn’t enough because entrepreneurs need to look for and enhance their talent in order to shift paradigms,” he added.

David Garza Salazar, Rector and Executive President of Tec de Monterrey, pointed out that these types of activities are what the institution needs.

“The theme of entrepreneurship is part of our DNA. It has to do with our foundation, and it has to do a lot with what we do today at Tecnológico de Monterrey and what we want to do in the future,” he said.

Venture Café in Monterrey

Rogelio de los Santos, Managing Partner of Dalus Capital, and Mónica Martínez, Director of Innovation at Venture Casa de Bolsa, talked about how the arrival of Venture Café in Monterrey began to take shape.

They pointed out that for years they had the idea of bringing together something that would promote innovation in the city. Martínez already knew about this initiative because she had lived in Boston, where it was born.

MIT REAP Monterrey, an entrepreneurial acceleration program in the city supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was also created as part of these efforts.

It wasn’t until a group of Tec professors and directors visited the Cambridge Innovation Center in Boston, of which Tim Rowe is CEO and founder, that the project began to take shape.

“We visited Venture Café and saw that people were really going there to connect, and that’s where the seed of this idea was planted that ‘you need a safe place if you really want to help build this great ecosystem.’

“You need trust to be at the core, where there is this attitude of abundance, where you don’t come to try to do business but come to see how you can collaborate with the rest of the ecosystem,” De los Santos said.

“The theme of entrepreneurship is part of our DNA. It has to do with our foundation.” - David Garza

Talking about the entrepreneurial ecosystem

The launch was followed by an interactive panel on innovation ecosystems, which was based on questions to the panelists from the audience.

Tim Rowe, Betsabé Rocha, Secretary of Economic Development in Monterrey, Karina Astorga, from Agile Teams at the UDEM’s Innovation and Transformation Hub, Liza Velarde, Co-founder and CEO of Delee, and Américo Ferrara, Managing Partner of Life Is Too Short Capital, were the participants on the panel.

Venture Café Monterrey’s mascot, a plush toy avocado, was also presented during this activity, and the attendees had the opportunity to vote for a name for it, with “Avo” being the one the public chose.

How do you start from scratch? What does a unicorn startup look like in its early stages? What is the hardest thing about starting a business? These were the questions asked by the participants.

Ferrara pointed out that investors are more motivated by the entrepreneur than by the product when deciding to invest.

“What we look at most is the rider, not so much the horse. The person must have overwhelming energy, clarity of thought, tremendous professionalism, and significant honesty,” he said.

Liza Velarde mentioned that the entrepreneur’s road is difficult. You can be close to bankruptcy more than once, but the important thing is to find something that people need and to not give up.

“They need to find a solution to a problem, something that people are willing to obtain and then make it grow. How do you become a unicorn? Solve a billion-dollar problem, whether it’s a dollar for a billion people or the other way around,” she said.

“The role of universities is to enable entrepreneurs and connect them to the ecosystem,” said Astorga.

“As well as being able to pave that very arduous road that entrepreneurs need to take. We train, we encourage, but entrepreneurs are born. They’re also made, formed, and enthused by these important inspirations,” she said.

The government should team up with what the city is already doing in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship, Rocha said.

“Many of the people we run into here are part of our board. You guide us. Thank you for taking care of us. That’s what we need to be able to build, your supervision, guidance, and expertise,” she explained.

“We train, we promote, but entrepreneurs are born. They’re also made, formed.” - Karina Astorga

Making connections at Venture Café Monterrey

As part of the activities, there was a space where entrepreneurs could meet and talk about their projects and then generate interactions.

In addition, they held a Drink Storytelling session, in which attendees were shown how to make a regional drink while they talked to each other.

For more information, please visit https://venturecafemonterrey.org/.

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