Argentina's Opportunity: The Crecimiento Vision

Transcript

all right awesome uh super excited to be here with with you um we're going to talk about the vision for cres Mento and the goal here is to kind of like give you a sense for why we're doing this what's possible what's at stake and get you give you a sense of like why this year matters so much in the next five years so um who here is like Argentinian raise your hand okay a lot of people awesome this is great you get it you get it who here um has been in crypto for like three or more years okay awesome you get you you get a lot of this so um if you haven't noticed for the people who are

not Argentinian argentinia has had this horrible problem with inflation for quite a long time already like it was kind of like. three of a dollar or even like one to one to a dollar like not that long ago and it's now 0.001 of a dollar this is like a massive decrease in value like heard crazy figures like 100 to 200% inflation per year like that that's kind of like an insane level of wealth destruction um for a society and like you can't build a life that that way you can't build a prosperous um Society with like businesses and and an economy and so on um in that situation so many people have suffered this um in fact Emy like this is like you you're

living this like how do you how do you feel about this yes it's really bad yeah I mean it's kind of funny it reminded me like when I went to University you know they have the curriculum it's like you have to present a a three-year plan for your business and it's like why like it makes no sense and the teachers are like I know but they asked me to so just percenta and we were like just dropping numbers you know uh next year we're going to make 20% and it's going to cost us this amount and everyone is like this is pointless right and like that support infrastructure for startups is like you can't get it and then never mind the people and like many of you are artine yeah so you know what I'm talking about but like building a startup building a company like having a

family and knowing like why are you going to how are you going to buy a house in the future you know our generation doesn't buy houses like most of my friends like they build a prefab house on top of their parents' house you know it's like great if you have a date you know like it's my mom and dad let's go upstairs and like it's sorry no is exactly so that sucks right and like that that's an economic structural problem and so in you know a lot of us who are in crypto um a lot of the potential of crypto is in greatly improving economies like the the one of the foundational components of all of this cryptographic technology that we're developing is into being able to create this coordination tools um to give you better currencies

better economies better structures so that economic macroeconomic problem has led to one of the highest adoption rates in crypto in the world so crypto has 10 to 20% of the people on crypto already this is massive compared to many other countries it's a pretty large country already as we we saw like 40 to 60 million people or so 60 million is 46 um so that's a lot of people that are already on crypto and who use crypto as a huge fraction of their their uh their wealth actually the question for their arents in the room how many of you use crypto as your primary source of of like funding yeah like more than half yeah everyone's like I don't know do I want to okay yeah more than half um that's more than

half the people in the room most theirs like that that shows you the confidence in the traditional economy um so now there's a huge opportunity right like this this am amount of Bottoms Up adoption that is not seen in almost anywhere else presents this amazing opportunity to try and build an economy a national economy on these foundations on this structure on this like much better um tooling so kind of like why the why this moment like kind of like enter mle as a as an opportunity so mle was elected as kind of like the we are sick and tired of the situation this has got to change uh candidate and he came in to kind of like unwind the the

inflation and that's you know so far like has reduced it but that's not at all sufficient right like you need to get into a spot where this problem isn't going to come back and more importantly where you have economic prosperity to lift millions of people out of poverty like there are millions of people in Aria right now that are in poverty that need to be able to pull themselves up and that means creating jobs creating businesses creating economic prosperity for a ton of people so how do we get there like the opportunity space here is we have massive Bottoms Up adoption we have openness from top down of like um you know at least a very strong alignment with the crypto ethos right like a lot of the mle government is

aligned with the with the crypto ethos in terms of um hey less uh less government control of money don't print let um let businesses figure it out um the the government is not like super crypto uh positive in the way that say Salvador's government or other places are but it's very open to the these ideas and very aligned um with the ethos and so that is a massive massive opportunity so these like the the terrible economic conditions that created this massive bottom up adoption and the openness from the top like it's kind of like this crazy perfect s in the next four years to try and do something really significant which is to try and bootstrap Argentina's economy into a crypto first economy and generate

massive economic prosperity for all of the people there through these these Financial rails that can't be co-opted and can't be um taken over and can't be like printed against right so like that's the that's the opportunity so there's a bunch of like um you know pull and and push factors in all of this first off like you know half the room is Argentinian how many of you are like building a company or building a startup and so on almost all of you great uh how many how many like argentian um startups in the crypto space how many startups in the crypto space come from Argentinian um Founders or Argentinian Builders working on them all of them yeah almost like huge fraction of Argentinian founder startups

and all almost all of them have lots of Argentinian Builders working on them right the Argentinian people are like this amazingly talented group who've been building massive parts of this industry and they've been improving the rest of the world with with their talent and so this possibility is like hey let's take all of this amazing talent and now turn it inward into Argentina to build up the Argentinian economy like that's you know an amazing opportunity um so the so white crypto like one of the interesting things here is when you look at the major problems um plaguing the Argentinian econom it's basic stuff it's like hey don't devaluate the money hey I need the ability like send payments to people I

need I need like a bank account that I can trust that isn't going to get devalued um hey I need to be able to have credit I need to be able to like um take some assets and borrow against them to be able to like invest in myself or invest in a business or something like that like I was shocked to hear that like there's no mortgages in in Argentina like what this is like the Bedrock of like the the US economy like most people in the US economy can can rely on their being a mortgage for to support their their growth um and all this is doable with crypto like how many crazy defi loan things are there like this is insane right and so we have the tech to be able to solve this sort of stuff we just have to point it at like

solving the real world problems for you know 46 million people so you know all of these kinds of problems have a corresponding potential tool or service that could address it but why hasn't this happened yet well because these things are super hard to use right like this is super difficult today and it can't help most of the people like when most of the people try to get into the crypto space it's very difficult to use there are some amazing exceptions but for the most part like you you can't as an Argentinian in Argentina try and get your house and collateralize it with crypto and get a loan like that's just not a thing you can do and today in like the last 20 to 30 years the way we have

a lot of of us in the world have improved the world is by building extremely high quality products and delivered them as services to the world and enabling like people to transact with these things you know kind of on a you know uh direct consumer basis so these Solutions if we can build them as high quality products like most people in the world can access or like most people in Argentina can access this can uplift you know millions of people so like that's the that's the opportunity so okay sounds crazy like there's a lot to build here like man this is like each of these things is a whole startup right like each product here is a massive startup how do we get there well there's not that many first of all there's kind of like 10 to 15

separate products or services that would have to be built and each of those you know you need a super high quality successful product and to get to one super high quality successful product you usually need something on the order of like 5 to 10 solid startups giving it a shot because most startups fail and so this means like Argentina is maybe like 50 to 100 startups away from solving the the economic problem which is not that crazy right like 50 to 100 startups away from solving the economic problem what do we know that's like 50 to 100 startups a batch accelerator y so you know like what like YC pumps out what two to 300 startups a batch like across you know a very large field but like you know that

we these are like these are totally realistic numbers if we created you know this kind of like acceleration structure for Argentina around these kinds of problems and started supporting a lot of Founders you can pump out somewhere between 50 to 200 startups in in the next year or two the question is like who are the builders what are they doing and is a plan legit like is this like a really good thing that you know deserves the support and that deserves the help and and whatnot is this a good plan so the the opportunity space is saying hey everybody oh my God like this is an amazing aming opportunity in the next few years to try and create all this economic Prosperity we need good Solutions and services to be built we

can do that through startups the way we stimulate that growth is we like draw attention to this problem space and paint the opportunity space for people like create a request for startups create like point out opportunities point out problems like support the people doing it like give grants to people to like give it a shot um attract accelerator programs so like come and run accelerators in the space attract investment Community the all the Argentine Founders and builders that have built great products they can support the next generation of Builders like you the people in this room can be the angel investors of all the people either you can go build these Solutions or you can be the angel investors that can support the growth of of this community so it's kind of like that trying to cause this whole growth is

what ceso is about cool so you know there's a lot there like let's summarize it like you know bring 5 to 10 million people on chain kind of like getting to like the right percentage size create this um very powerful Tech startup ecosystem using crypto um through these kind of funding and support structures and you know this third one I haven't really touched on it but we need to get a get a kind of like 20year stability structure for the startups because today in Argentina you have this problem where like you might have a few years of like regulation that's Pro business and then a few years that's not and so that that pendulum swinging back and forth is very difficult to build with like most founders are like can't do this got to leave right um and so that that one that

one can come if the first two show promise if the first two are legit creating significant value for the for the um community and for Argentina the third one is very possible through and we'll talk through kind of how that that can happen cool Emy hey um yeah so it just reminded me of this a talk by Peter the talking about PayPal and the beginnings of PayPal and how he said that 6 months after the creation of PayPal if someone did PayPal it wouldn't have happened because enough regulation would have was put in place and got in the middle so it was like the time to create a network effect strong enough that they couldn't stop it because it's like so beneficial for people and sort of this is what we're conveying here of

like we have the moment in time in order to build all of this um all of this products and structures and give like benefits and value to people and then once they've tried them and they're kids then there's no going back you know that stability I mean we're working as well and um like Millie is going to talk later about like sandbox regulation a lot of stuff that we're doing to change the system like through Voice through the inside but also like exit and just like change the system with new products it's it's like attacking everything in different fronts right so we who are we uh we are a bunch of people and the idea is that this is an open movement anyone can participate that there's some structure to it that I'll talk to but the idea is that there's so much there's so many

companies in Argentina and and like startups there so I'm glad to see so many argentines here it's um I was going to say I don't know if you've seen on YouTube the video about the Argentine Ant which is uh is an ant that yeah have you seen it so the Argentine Ant is the only ant that expands multiple colonies and it can conquer uh continents because the genetic difference between the Queens is so little that an ant that moves from one colony to the other is accepted and it's becomes little for makes a barbecue and everything is fine right so that's me so here are the Argentine ants that we're like Building Products around the world and helping so if we can Empower

that and create that and expand that then we're going to have an ecosystem that's not only going to help Argentina but everywhere right so we're organized and basically um a course center with leaders and a Secretariat which is where we help coordinate I'm one of the leaders so bow to me it's like me and other people are basically helping coordinate this movement and then the work comes from different working groups where we're tackling you know funding World Business Development like research and know the ecosystem like where the ecosystem is right now what what it needs who is the people involved who is the people that don't know are argentines but they're involved um crypto adoption like bringing educations to universities to every place in Argentina I like that

this movement is very Federal so it's not concentrated on bontis but it's like spread out um then the organization of the popup City that's a great thing that we're going to talk about later and money like someone has to so what's the plan and I don't know if you want to jump in one a bit but when the guys came and propose the idea of Gro that was like three months ago and it's been crazy hectic chaotic I just arrived to one siters to listen to a talk and two months later I'm here talking to all of you guys yeah is there like a thousand people in a

telegram there's 1,200 people there's like 50 companies involved and I mean at this rate in two months I'm like M's advisor or something but so the guys came what I really like about uh when they proposed the idea is to it's like understand the ecosystem that already exists how to empower it how to organize it and like make it a a de centralite movement that also has like some verticality and know this of organization and being very like active and actually working um so that was April August then during August we're going to do the launch of the pop-up City that's going to be amazing from the 5th of August to the 1st of September and then this is a long-term movement so how do we continue supporting this in

the long term you know through accelerators through sandbox regulation through support of mentors bringing people in and like anything that you can think of and want to participate to do this like a longterm movement exper experience then we are very happy to have you so the the the timeline has to be kind of compressed right because um this top down support for crypto potentially could disappear in four years like it's not clear the whether mle will um remain um and it the pendulum can swing in the other the other direction so from our perspective if we can get massive economic prosperity for

5 to 10 million or ideally 20 million argentinians in the next two to three years if if that can happen then that can flip Argentina into having much stronger economic rails long term and fix Argentina's problem and if that happens it could be the first nation in the world that uses crypto as its rails for its economy for its National economy which would be massive like that would be like the one of the biggest wins for the entire crypto industry as a whole right so if you have like no connection at all to Argentina um and the Argentina specific Mission um is like far away from you just the crypto wide mission of like hey come help this happen to kind

of improve a ma a macro National economy with crypto should be like this you know amazingly inspiring potential vision and so that in order to to make that happen we need like very strong products to be in Market with massive adoption by like 2026 which is doable like when you look at you know startup growth rates and product growth rates that can happen but you need a lot of this stuff to you know get started now and get started growing and kind of like stimulate the the the the growth which is kind of why we're doing the popup city um why we want um startup accelerators involved early and why we want like you know a strong founder Builder Community trying a lot of things why we want um a lot of

potential you know Angel Investors and so on exploring the opportunity space why we want a lot of ERS uh helping support support the movement because you know through 2024 to 2025 if we can kind of like launch a lot of those products see what's what's sort of working over time then kind of by 2026 we can be in a in a pretty good um trajectory so uh sound good who's like yeah let's do awesome so this is where like the city is so important because the city is how we build the culture of the movement and we stimulate the first that we support the first wave of Builders and Founders that are going to go and make

the first wave of products and how we can set up the kind of like accelerator type structures uh to support that growth um one of the things that we know we need is we need a startup accelerator type thing that that has been a tried and true model that helps a lot of startups what we also think we need is something that we haven't quite seen anywhere which is kind of like we're calling like a Founder accelerator where it's like help enable Builders who are who are super talented but who've never like considered the the landscape of like going to build a startup try and compress that Journey that usually takes somewhere between one to two years and turn that into two to three months and that's kind of like happening before the startup accelerator um and so you know we need some kind of program like that

um and over time like we'll see like if this is very successful like this could repeat and keep you know pumping out like successful startups this could repeat and keep supporting a lot of the growth of Founders um all of this you know it's a very organic movement we'll see what happens and how it it grows but the popup City in August is going to be kind of where a lot of the culture gets built a lot of the first applications get developed and um and I think the rest follows from there yeah yeah I mean like talking about Founders and accelerators like as well I think we should do like an investor accelerator because I've gone to I mean I've been in this like startup industry let's say 10 15 years or something in Argentina as well you go to ask for money from a

traditional investor in Argentina like I need 50 Grand to start and they're like okay I want 50% all right it's not how it works I'm going to show you YC and they're like yeah but that's the US so like this sort of learning um and I think the popup is going to be a great shelling point for everyone to pay attention to Argentina during that month and see what you can build and how how much of a hub it is um so this is the introduction of Al left we're going to be talking much more about it later but it's going to be from the 5th of August to the first first of September it has a Dev connect style calendar so we encourage everyone that wants everyone that has a company to do their own events like for a day for a few days we

have venues we have space and we're going to help bring people in so it's going to be a space of around five blocks in the heart of bositis that it's going to the like the key metric is a percentage of people that are into crypto that's going to be involved there it's going to be like massive um so we want to catalyze those crypto solutions that ju is talking about and basically 400 Founders startup Builders experts researchers government people we're going to make a big party of it and uh Barbe and stuff all of this is going to be frame as well within a regulatory sandbox that Millie is going to be talking about later but this is amazing because it it allows us the opportunity to test use

cases and things that normally wouldn't be possible to do and as well as a great first start to like many things are going to happen in the future in terms of uh research for potentials um free economic zones or like different developments of a group working group that is building and researching everything in order to like have a space that creates this prosperity of 20 years that Juan is talking about so you don't build a company it's huge and then you go live in U or Portugal because you can't stay in Argentina and I know that the argentines here know what I'm talking about um okay so like I said said before we're going to have great people we have like investors that are like R

Adventures nutopia protocol obviously lemon St for blockchain the this envir environment just like the learning and the education that we're going to receive during that month is going to be incredible and again the idea is that this is not a creso event this is like an event that everyone can participate and if you have a company that is an Argentine company that wants you like host events um you're more than welcome to so please join the telegram we have like 12200 people already many companies um Regulators like the introduction channel is amazing the the amount of people that like participate that you didn't know are involved in the in the movement so please join and up next we're going to be talking about regular yeah sorry go

back one one thing so kind of like calls to action for the group here so a you're here hearing about it awesome like that great great that you're here and we'll talk through all this problem space to um join the telegram group and kind of see what going on help contribute to things like you might find something that's very interesting to you specifically or where you can contribute help that way that like that goes a long way third come down to the city in August and like just help build this culture and help build these things that I think will be you know very significant for um if you are working in an organization that that can contribute to this thing to this kind of mission come host events there Co like or maybe Focus some of your products towards that come come help uplift um um the the

economy there uh and Orient your your organization or your products in that direction um fifth if you're considering some in some jump of like actually going and solving one of these problems like we would love to hear from you because we want to support that group of Founders that are going to go and take on these challenges and these products and build um those Solutions and you don't have to have done this in the past um you know this this we we're trying to think of like the structure to support as many people as we can in that Journey uh and a lot of times it might be by joining a group that that exists already or by you know starting something from scratch and and uh I guess six what am I on six um if you're if you've ever invested or you're interested in that

like consider doing this down down the road later in 2024 as the startups mature um we think a lot of these startups are going to get a ton of support um from a very large community and are going to have like this amazing growth trajectory with a lot of the Argentinian people and a lot of those startups are going to be applicable to the rest of the world um and so those might be some of the best startup Investments to make in that time frame um and so just consider that might be a great standpoint for you know helping Mentor the next generation of Founders and Builders um in that community so yeah really kind of like get involved and and do the thing that you find most appeals to you that can be a useful thing for the for the movement really think of like the uh I think is it

Kaizen like the Japanese style of like you know what what uh what you really like what you know is your calling what uh is valuable um and you can can be like a good good kind of business opportunity for you so yeah come and let's grow together