Why You Might Want to Start Your Business Overseas Foreign programs are funding a new breed of expats.
By Michelle Goodman •
This story appears in the April 2015 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
By the time he was a senior at the University of Wisconsin in 2009, Nathan Lustig's startup had customers, revenue and national press. But the company, a digital estate-planning service called Entrustet, lacked a scalable business model and had yet to turn a profit.
That's when Lustig and his co-founder, Jesse Davis, made a bold move. Presented with an opportunity to join Start-Up Chile, a program the Chilean government launched in 2010 to attract entrepreneurs to the country, they leapt at the chance. Under the program, Lustig received $40,000 in equity-free capital, a one-year work visa, office space in Santiago and a steady stream of introductions to the country's business elite, including potential investors and partners.
"We probably couldn't have gotten $40,000 of free money in the U.S.," says Lustig, who raised $125,000 in equity funds from friends, family and angels in the U.S. before moving to Chile.
