Andrew Warner and I put together a little entrepreneur meetup last night which turned out really well.
Well actually, I emailed Andrew when I saw on his blog that he was in Buenos Aires, and he had the great idea to post the meeting to Hacker News. It ended up being a pretty good turnout.
Buenos Aires is turning into quite the little tech entrepreneur scene. As I wrote on Hacker News…
It does seem like something is brewing here. I think it got popular with Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Work Week where he talks about Buenos Aires…lots of founders came down here. It’s easier to bootstrap a web business because:
costs are much lower here
earning in dollars and spending in pesos means your money goes a long way (geo-arbitrage)
It’s by no means huge yet, but there is a band of renegade expat coder/entrepreneurs I’ve met up with here that are doing some impressive stuff.
Here is a sampling of the attendees (in alphabetical order) and the projects they’re working on. Take a minute to check out their sites, there is some pretty impressive work being done by this group…
Andrew Warner Mixergy.com (awesome interviews with entrepreneurs - and he’s a highly successful entrepreneur to boot, check out his about page)
Andy Cary from BecomeACelebrityJournalist.com (new ebook that just came out)
Brian Cary from InfusedIndustries.com (they make a shopping cart that fits right in a banner ad)
Chad Depue from RubyRescue.com (heads up a kick ass Rails dev team)
Eric Knudtson from ExpatQA.com (an awesome question and answer community for ex-pats, the format of the site is addictive, way better than a typical forum, and is built on the StackExchange platform) and EricKnudtson.com
Fernando Parra http://fparra.com.ar/
James Cox http://twitter.com/imajes
Javier Sitaker http://www.dist-exp.com (computer consultants and also check here if you want to know how to deal with the bureaucrazy in starting a business in Argentina)
Leonard Lin sched.org (an agenda builder for conferences and great domain name)
Mike Manning GoBigMike.com (holy crap he traveled to 28 countries last year?!) and TrackYourHours.com (700 paying customers!)
Manuel http://twitter.com/mergoc
Taylor McKnight also from sched.org
Tom Aadland from BuenaCarta.com (a soon to be launched restaurant review site for Buenos Aires)
Simon Bottling EnBuenosAires.com (an MLS system for real estate in Buenos Aires)
Vik Duggal from VikDuggal.com (check out his video blog) and Konstructr.com
There was a lot of talent in the room. Sorry if I didn’t get a chance to talk with some of you! Feel free to add your info in the comments if you want to be invited to the next one. Thanks!
Until next time, keep breaking free! Brian Armstrong