I applied for the current round and will know by next month if I get accepted. What I read are mostly positive, however I'd love to hear your experiences.
Are the required events very time consuming?
Can you get by easily with the maximum salary you can take?
Is it easy to find local talents with good English skills? What's the average salary for an intermediate web developer?
Thanks!
-Work on your Spanish ahead of time. It helps a lot, but you don't NEED it (I knew nothing before coming down).
-Stay in a hostel/hotel for a few days when you get down here in order to find a better place.
-Bring down at least $10K. It took me two months to get my first reimbursement and I was running pretty low by then.
-Accept that at least one full day a month will be wasted on bureaucracy (reimbursements & mandatory presentations to locals)
-Don't expect to get high quality talent here that speaks English fluently. Those that have found talent are far outnumbered by those that haven't (technical & business).
-Don't expect to have strong mentorship like 500, YC or TechStars. It's all peer mentorship.
-Realize that the strength of the program is the international component. There's a lot of market opps in Latinamerica that a lot of people have no idea about. It's also rare to have such an global composition of entrepreneurs.
It's not perfect for everyone, but if you're:
-pre product/market fit
-interested in international markets
-cool with trading some time wasted with bureaucracy for equity free funding
then it's a great choice.