Nico Orellana - My Journey ;)

Interesting way to look angel investing - 2008.

Just updated my about page: My Story

I was born in Chillan, Chile in 1985, but I grew up in La Serena. At the age of 10 I got a computer with Internet access and I was crazy because I was able to meet people all over the world—-it blew my mind! A few years later I asked my mom: “Mom, I want to manage companies. What do I need to study?” She recommended Engineering, so when I finished high school in2003, I moved to Valparaiso (Pablo Neruda’s birth city) to study, but then I realized that studying Industrial Engineering just didn’t suit me. I wanted to start tech companies.

In 2006, in my third year of university, I dropped out to study English in Manchester, England. I traveled around Europe for eight months, meeting a lot of people, especially in England and Spain. I was a techie, a web developer, a front-end designer and a networker, so when I came back to Chile, I decided to get people together and I moved to Santiago. 

My first venture was Webprendedor in 2007, a small meeting of friends to speak about technology and now the biggest Internet conference in Chile. We’ve attracted more than 3,000 people to our conferences and raised more than US$300,000 for our events. Thanks to Webprendedor, I traveled around the world meeting people and attending conferences in Buenos Aires, Miami, San Francisco, London, Madrid, etc. Awesome time of my life. 

In 2008 I founded OW, a digital agency that was perfect because it allowed me to build technology for big brands (and budgets), but after two-and-a-half years working with brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Unilever and others—-35 customers including a presidential candidate in Chile—-I realized that I didn’t love advertising and marketing—-I was in love with technology. That same year I was named one of the 100 Young Chilean Leaders by El Mercurio newspaper and “Tech Entrepreneur of the Year” by the Diario Financiero newspaper in Chile. 

Because of Webprendedor, I made a lot of friends, one of them being the founder of a company called Needish, later acquired by Groupon, who ran the operations in Latin America. And in August 2010, the VP of Groupon Latin America said to me, “Nico, stop building shit for companies and build products, I will help.” I said, “I’m IN” and one month later I left my agency in the hands of my partners and dropped out of an executive program I was doing at Columbia Business School (wonderful experience, but I was improving processes in the agency I was leaving ).

After that, We founded Welcu in October 2010 —- the best way to manage high-end events — and everything has been a breathtaking journey. My co-founder (a good friend I had met in 2007) and I worked in my apartment for a month in November, figuring out our legal stuff and making the first hires. My co-founder became the CTO of the company and in December we moved to an office in Santiago, thanks to my closing a small angel round. 

Then we moved to Silicon Valley in March 2011. We got Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures and Dave’s McClure’s 500 Startups and we’re expecting to close our advisory round in a few weeks. 

Story in progress. 

Our social media strategy for the next months

Highly inspired by our class mate TK from ToutApp - and starting again to blog about everything on my journey to Silicon Valley. As founder of Webprendedor (on the biggest conference for wannabe entrepreneurs in LatAm) I used to blog a lot! But with the rise of micro-blogging and Twitter I just stopped.

I attach a little picture of what I’ll be doing with my personal social presence and my new company Welcu. We’ll see. Talk to you soon ;) 

Startup 2 Startup Interaction Design

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