During our last trips to Mexico, we found the need of visiting and learning more from the ecosystem in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, (the city of mountains). For all the people that do not know, Monterrey is one of the biggest cities in Mexico and has the biggest and most important international and national companies in each industry. In a few words it is a pretty developed city amongst other Mexican cities. Something that is important to consider is its accessibility to the US market - it is just a 2.5 hour drive from the border.
Our agenda was planned with meetings with top organizations and leaders of the tech industry in Monterrey. All this was possible due to the huge support Casa San Antonio and the Cluster of Software offered to us.
So our first day started with a meeting at the Club Ejecutivo de Monterrey with the Cluster of Software of Monterrey and Casa San Antonio, where they introduced us to some facts and data about Monterrey’s IT industry.
After having an “excelente” and lovely Mexican breakfast we went straight to meetings with universities such as UDEM, Tecnologico de Monterrey and U-Erre (Universidad Regiomontana).
We talked with these universities about ways to connect their students with universities and students from San Antonio. An idea came up about having an internship program where Mexican students can come to Geekdom to work as interns in their startups for two months.
One university is actually starting to develop a co-working space in Monterrey based on other co-working places located in different parts of the world.
We also met with organizations such as Softek Innoventures and talked about how the San Antonio Mx Challenge could help their Innoventures startups to globalize in a friendly and riskless environment such as San Antonio along with help from government organizations such as I2T2, Instituto de Inovacion y Transferencia Tecnologica de Nuevo Leon. We learned that they currently have 48 startups under acceleration with seed funds of up to $200,000 USD. We also learned that they even have dedicated funds for US entrepreneurs wanting to expand into Mexico (Monterrey). I think that there are many people not aware of these programs, so we decided to exchange information so our entrepreneurs can become more aware of programs happening “on the other side of the border”.
We were impressed about how cool the places of Naranya and the Monterrey IT Park are. We held our meeting in there and it was hard to focus on the meeting because of being in such cool and sophisticated places. It is amazing how everybody is working on something - on one side we have Naranya working on their own challenges gathering entrepreneurs and turning those entrepreneurs into startups, and on the other side we have the Monterrey IT Park, creating their own incubator and gathering its own seed fund.
At the end of the trip we found that Monterrey is a land of opportunities and people there are serial entrepreneurs looking for creative ways to succeed. At some of our meetings we had the opportunity to meet some young entrepreneurs that are working on super cool technology and when we talked about all the technology deals that are happening in San Antonio, they were excited to go and visit Geekdom as a first step for a future expansion. We are excited to come back to several events that we got invited to with different organizations, so see you soon, Monterrey entrepreneurs!
