Building Bridges U.S.- LatAm: "We Need to Become Bigger Dreamers"
Building Bridges U.S.- LatAm: "We Need to Become Bigger Dreamers"
At AS/COA’s YPA entrepreneurship forum, New York and Latin American-based digital entrepreneurs discussed the challenges and cultural barriers of doing business in both regions of the world.
When connecting two different geographical areas through commerce, one might think that language is the most relevant barrier of entry. It turns out that it is actually culture what makes differences even harder to overcome.
“In Argentina, everybody ends an email with besos (kisses), it seemed so inappropriate for me at first,” said New Yorker Lisa Besserman, who set up her company Startup Buenos Aires in Argentina and who is one the most influential tech women on Twitter according to Business Insider. “For the English-speaking world, I have to cut the word shorter and change it for a best. Even the timing is different: it can take them weeks to answer an email, whereas in the U.S. it is a matter of a few days.”
Besserman was part of a panel called “New York to Latin America: Building Bridges for Entrepreneurs, Investors and Companies” on May 21st organized by Council of the Americas’ network of young professionals YPA and sponsored by Telefónica. Entrepreneurs from Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia debated with their US counterparts on what it takes to do businesses in both regions of the world. For most of them, in spite of the region’s increasing potential for entrepreneurship, the most challenging factor is dealing with cultural issues.
A matter of style. “I have the impression that people in Latin America are more sensitive, and we tend to take things more personally,” said Aldo Alvarez, the creator of the NGO Aporta from Monterrey, Mexico. “This causes that many things get lost in translation. We can never translate expressions literally, because they can be interpreted in so many different ways....”
