| | AUGUST 2023 8OPINIONIN MYIS THIS FINALLY LATIN AMERICA'S START-UP MOMENT?By Cristobal Perdomo, Co-Founder and General Partner, Jaguar VenturesLatin America embraced the dot-com boom of the 90s with gusto. Venture capital funds were raised, domain names were bought, young wunderkinds came back to the region, and money was deployed in almost every country on exciting technology ventures. Sadly, until recently, it seemed it all had been for naught. After the dot-com crash of 2000, and until 2017, only one Internet startup had successfully IPOed­MercadoLibre in 2007 in the Nasdaq. "A sense of maybe this just doesn't work here" lasted for the better part of the first decade of the 21st century. It wasn't until the rise of everything Brazil (remember The Economist's cover showing the Christ the Redeemer statue taking off?) that venture capital, both local and foreign, began coming back to the region. While in the first Internet craze Argentina and Venezuela registered the most .com domains and captured the most capital, this time Brazil was clearly the leader of the pack.Foreign funds like Sequoia moved fast and established local offices to capture the Latin American opportunity. Alarmingly, the legendary fund decided to close its office less than 2 years after having opened, saying that the opportunity wasn't as big as it had first thought. It looked as if this second chapter would end up as painfully as the first one, but that hasn't been the case.
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