With the New Year just a few weeks away, I have been thinking a lot about seizing the opportunity when it serves. More on this topic to come next week.
Until then, meet Leslie Forman, who is living her dream. She is a seriel entrepreneur living in Chile. The interview covers:
- Her Startup-Junkie Parents
- Her life-changing trip to China
- Her advice to newbie entrepreneurs
Why do you love start-ups and entrepreneurship?
I grew up in Silicon Valley, the daughter of two serial start-up veterans. My parents met at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in the late 70s and they each have worked for more than ten startups since then. My dad’s work has focused on internet technology and my mom’s has focused on educational software. From them I learned that the idea of working for one company for your entire life was not really an option; the world changes too fast!
I have worked for various start-ups including a software company in San Francisco and a British education consultancy in Beijing.
However, I really didn’t think much about (or love) start-ups and entrepreneurship until I moved to Chile and it became “all start-ups, all the time!” Here in Chile I have met dozens of inspiring entrepreneurs from all over the world. I have given lots of speeches in Spanish about start-ups and entrepreneurship. In Chile I have, for the first time, found my own entrepreneurial vision.
What are you doing right now?
I am living in Santiago, Chile and participating in Start-Up Chile, a government-sponsored entrepreneurship program.
How did you end up here? (growing up, jobs, college, etc)
I first came to Chile in 2005 as an exchange student. I spent a full year studying history, business, and literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. I also interned with a microfinance non-profit and in a shantytown library, and met lots of great friends. This experience counted towards my degree in Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
When I graduated in 2006, I decided to move to China to teach English at a university near Shanghai. This was by far the most random and empowering decision of my life.
Leslie in China: The word "controversial" was not an easy concept to teach, because controversy is never emphasized in Chinese schools. To explain this word I said, "Imagine I have a plate of food. Sally says it's very delicious. Apple says it's very bad. Orange says it's very spicy. Fish says it's very salt. The food is controversial. Different people have different opinions." This simple and concrete explanation helped them understand this foreign concept!
For four of the next five years, I lived in China and worked in a wide variety of roles in advertising, consulting, corporate social responsibility, and education. But I never stopped mentioning that my degree was in Latin American Studies, and I would always get so excited to speak Spanish or talk about Chile.
In March of 2011, a Canadian-American renewable energy entrepreneur that I’d met in Chile in 2005 contacted me about a fabulous opportunity. She’d just found out that Start-Up Chile, an innovative program sponsored by the government of Chile, was offering $40,000 stipends, visas, and other benefits to teams of entrepreneurs from all over the world. The application was due in two days.
I sent it in, and in May 2011 we found out we’d been accepted to the program. At that point I was freelancing for a handful of clients and burned out on China, so it was relatively easy to pack up my life there. I left China in June and landed in Chile in July. I wrote this letter describing my decision: Dear China: It’s Not You, It’s Me. Let’s Be Friends Forever.
As members of Start-Up Chile, we work in a spacious, glass-walled office sponsored by a telecom company called Movistar, alongside inspiring entrepreneurs from Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Estonia, Canada, Ecuador, China, Chile, and many other countries. Along with my work with the Canadian-American renewable energy entrepreneur, and with her blessing, I have been decided to start my own business.
My business is called Tricontinental Advisors. My goal is to connect Chile, China, and California in three main areas: translation, training, and trade. In the past few months, I have served as a Chinese-Spanish and English-Spanish interpreter for mining companies, and I have given training sessions at a number of university and corporate events.
To a newbie entrepreneur, what’s the best advice you can offer?
Start a blog and get on Twitter. These are great tools to connect with people with similar interests.
Start small and make sure you have paying customers before you start investing tons of time and money into building your business. Before I started calling my business Tricontinental Advisors, and before I made business cards and a website, I already had a handful of customers paying me for Spanish-English and Chinese-Spanish translation work. This gave me confidence in my idea.
Read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. His approach to entrepreneurship is practical, efficient and inspiring, and applies to so many kinds of new projects.
Where are you going from here? Five years down the road…
Hmmm… I really don’t know. Five years ago today I was nearing the end of my first semester as a teacher at a university in China. Five years from now I hope to have published my writing in some form and to have built a successful and sustainable business connecting Chile, China, and California. I can imagine that I will still be living at the intersection between many languages and cultures. Maybe I will have settled down more by then. One step at a time!
[...] 4) Last but not least, I did this interview for The Workpreneur, which Ryan titled La Entrepreneur-ista. [...]