

Beyond the Maquiladora: A Look at Mexico’s Startup Scene - tmoretti
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/26/beyond-the-maquiladora-a-look-at-mexicos-startup-scene/

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angdis
I got to visit Guadalajara for work a few times and was blown away by it: a
mega-city with mile after mile of factories, major CM's with enormous
campuses, high skill educated workers, low cost of living. I got the feeling
that it is on the verge of something great.

~~~
HillRat
I love Guadalajara -- one of my favorite cities to do business in, though it's
not really a tourist-friendly city, unless you want to day-trip to Tequila or
the Primavera Forest. I agree that it feels like it's ready to go big, kind of
like Shenzhen in the '90s, and the tech community is rapidly expanding
(though, I was told, government meddling with the higher education system and
student obsession with finance has severely restricted the number of Mexican
computer scientists). There are some great nearshore development firms in
addition to the local startup scene, which have the advantage of being in the
same timezone as US firms.

Unfortunately, the ambient level of violence and corruption in Mexico is still
too high to support a vibrant commercial scene, but the locals aren't letting
that slow them down.

For anyone who might be visiting there, I recommend staying at the Fiesta
Americana Grand Guadalajara Country Club, and dinner at La Tequila on Avenida
Mexico -- you can't miss the flights of hyperlocal tequilas, and appetizers of
escamoles and saltamontes.

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peter303
The US gets the wrong impression of Mexico from the immigration to the USA.
That immigration is disproportionately undereducated, rural farmers. A
thriving middle class has tended stay in Mexico. And we are starting to see
the economic results, if the governmen doesnt blow it as usual.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The US gets the wrong impression of Mexico from the immigration to the USA.
> That immigration is disproportionately undereducated, rural farmers.A
> thriving middle class has tended stay in Mexico.

Actually, lots of Mexicans have complained about the enormous brain drain of
the Mexican middle class into the USA; while undereducated rural farmers may
be disproportionately represented in _illegal_ immigration from the US to
Mexico, _legal_ immigration (which is, even considering the not-inconsiderable
expenses that often associated with illegal immigration, in practice as I
understand it more resource intensive) from the US to Mexico (and some of the
illegal immigration, as well) is educated professionals, especially those with
family in the US, moving here because the pay they can get even taking a big
step _down_ in prestige compared to the positions they are qualified for in
Mexico is enough to not only live better in the US _even accounting for the
higher cost of living_ , but _also_ provide surplus after that to improve
quality of life for a lot of their family living in Mexico (plus, give more of
their family the opportunity to eventually legally immigrate to the US,
through family-based immigration visas.)

The uneducated, rural farmers get more attention in US media coverage of
immigration, perhaps because they are overrepresented among illegal immigrants
(which is usually the focus of media coverage), and perhaps because they are
better fodder for emotional images ( _both_ those seeking to provoke sympathy
for the poor _and_ those seeking to provoke fear of the unwashed masses).

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jordigh
I was in the tech sector in Mexico around 2007-2011. This article seems quite
accurate to me. I even fact-checked the official motto of Monterrey, and yeah,
it is "el labor templa el espíritu".[1] Quite an obscure fact! I asked my
regio coworker, and he had no idea what it was. And yeah, the stereotype in
Mexico is that regios are all businessmen, ranchers, conservative, and
stingy.[2] Kind of like their neighbours the Texans. :-)

Anyway, the thing that struck out to me as a Mexican at the time is that all
of the actual "business" was coming from somewhere else. You can read in the
article how Guadalajara is a city where a lot of foreign companies host some
offices. When I was looking for jobs, by far the most common kind of thing was
some local recruiting agency looking for outsourced workers to complement US
or sometimes European companies.[3] This bothered me a little because it
seemed like the long tail of the colonialism that plagues Mexico's history.

This is not to say that there are no purely local startups, who are trying to
sell locally. Some of the startups mentioned in the article like Métros
Cúbicos were already bought by 2011. I myself had a brief stint at a startup
that was doing some very interesting machine learning in 2011. My heart wasn't
in it and I failed the trial period. But I did get to see that it had several
local clients, including a major nation-wide cineplex chain. They were also
working at the time in growing their business into the US, and looking at
their website, it looks like they are succeeding.

I had the privilege to work with some very smart hackers, I must say. One of
my first jobs was with a company whose local office largely consisted of a
band of buddies that knew each other since university and boasted amongst its
ranks kernel hackers. The company was actually Spanish (Spaniard), but the
Mexican office was quite sizable. Like probably most other countries, the vast
majority of tech in Mexico is based on turnkey, replaceable Java-style
software developers, but there do exist pockets of great innovation.

Ultimately I left Mexico to work at the actual company that I was being
outsourced to. Not because I was facing any kind of hardship -- on the
contrary, my outsourced salary in the end was quite generous in Mexican terms
-- but because I wanted to be where the action was. But if the action is now
back in Mexico, I am considering moving back.

\----

[1]
[http://portal.monterrey.gob.mx/tu_ciudad/historia.html](http://portal.monterrey.gob.mx/tu_ciudad/historia.html)

[2] An example of an old Mexican sketch comedy show parodying this stereotype:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNI5KLLTfLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNI5KLLTfLM)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NbJ18S80ig#t=284](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NbJ18S80ig#t=284)

[3] You can see an example of this attitude in Agave Lab, one of the companies
mentioned in the article:

[http://www.agavelab.com/why-mexico.html](http://www.agavelab.com/why-
mexico.html)

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kbradero
Oracle, IBM, Intel and Freescale has big development buildings here, actually
GDC (Guadalajara Design Campus) just opened a new building.

