Start-Up Chile is a Great Experience But Be Careful Too

As someone who went through the program:<p>(1) it's not technically true that you HAVE to spend the money before you get it reimbursed. We were given the option of purchasing insurance from the private sector to cover the government in the event of the funds being misallocated. None of the teams decided this was worth doing since it takes time to arrange the insurance and you end up paying the bank for holding the risk. Why waste that money?<p>(2) My understanding is that the $750 monthly salary mentioned here is the no-questions-asked limit on personal compensation for the individual whose name is on the contract. It was introduced to avoid having people need to keep track of all of their receipts. I believe you can justify more if you're willing to collect and submit those receipts (not worth the time), and you can always pay coworkers more by simply issuing a legal receipt for services rendered by them to your company. I didn't take salary myself but had no problems paying individual staff up to 2500 USD per month.<p>(3) It costs about 6000-8000 USD for a team to take advantage of the program since there are some things you can't get receipts for (housing deposits, miscellaneous cash expenses). Those expenses end up being front-loaded, but you are still looking at a 7x money multiplier on your matching funds (the funding works out to over 42000 USD once the exchange rate is figured in). Expecting teams to contribute 1000 of their own capital per month while pursuing their own business is not a high bar.

i was surprised by "agent fee for finding your apartment" - apartments are listed in el mercurio. just go to <a href="http://www.propiedades.emol.com/_portada/index.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.propiedades.emol.com/_portada/index.aspx</a> and do the clicky. also, i imagine you can't claim for housing deposits because it's a <i>deposit</i> - you get it back.<p>[i'm a software engineer that lives in santiago and i'm in the middle of buying an appt as an investment and would be happy to rent it to someone in the business, so can i ask some questions? are people looking for furnished or unfurnished? does it need to be central or is anywhere with access to the metro ok? what kind of rents are people paying?<p>and finally, i imagine you're already inundated with help and contacts, but if anyone does need someone local who speaks english just drop me a line.]

BTW ... do you keep the job offers up to date? I'm Chilean and interested on joining a startup but I'm not sure if the offers published on www.startupchile.org/joinastartup/ are up to date or not.