Public meetings / Investing and entrepreneurs / Challenges for entrepreneurs in remote locations such as 3rd world

Reference

• Subject: "Today I found a question from an entrepreneur that wondered about the challenges of finding investors in a 3rd world country. My answer was probably frustrating and quite standard — go find customers and find your way to break the barrier — but anyway I wanted to keep up this thread to also understand more about how things are shifting and new matching opportunities. #vc #investing"
• Parent project: meeting-investing
• Reference meeting: "a06-400 — minisites — mgalli — writing — entrepreneurship in the 3rd-world country and foreign investors c6151c93-b723-4cdc-85b0-b6e4af73bcbb Friday, January 17⋅5:00 – 5:30pm"
• Participants: Marcio S Galli
• Text Language: en-US
• Tags: Investing, investor, entrepreneur, early stage, 3rd world, sequoia, innovation, pitching, communication, barriers, customers

Question at Clarity, from an entrepreneur, "Where to find potential investors to an early stage startup, being a foreign and living in a third world country?"

My reply was probably a bit general but I have focused in the following points:

• Seek investors that are considering innovating also in your country (global or not)
• Seek investment firms that are innovating the model - assuming that an investor normally would stay 200km distance from the entrepreneur (the sportscar distance, if I am not mistaken this narrative was created by Marc Andreessen).
• Seek to break normal barriers - in the end is what the good investor is seeking.

My original reply

With other straight-to-investor answers taken care here (and by the way I appreciate those straight answers because I am an entrepreneur that lived in the past in Silicon Vally and find myself today in Brazil) I would like to throw a contribution to this thread.

The consideration that crossing that barrier, finding your way from the 3rd-world country towards a remote investor, is yet another test. Of course, there is the question of market, so of course an investor that does not want to invest in Brazil won't be willing to know much about your startup idea targeting Brazil.

But taking that aside, we should remember that a great investor is busy with a network around her, her network is streaming relevant information about possible investments to make.

Therefore the way to get there has to do with climbing the network up. Solving your locality barrier, can be thought as a test similarly to what Marc Andreessen said about pitch, that "the formal presentation is another test" 1.

Beyond this test component, the following assertion in the same interview from Marc really shows one of the most critical things you gotta tackle, that "every other pitch you’re ever gonna make is going to be to somebody who’s going to be much worse than us investors right? customers".

In other words, if you are able to convince customers to your solution, you have paved one of the most difficult things for an early stage. Sorry for potential distance from the main question but I feel this is anyway very related.

Other related point is to seek top investment firms that are looking at emerging countries. There are cases of top VC firms, like Sequoia, that are always looking for fresh perspectives about investments, which includes solving this barrier.

1 https://medium.com/@taboca/how-investors-sees-a-formal-presentation-pitch-6d85df0c7bb