Santiago – first few days

I’d better log our first few days before the crazyness of signing up to the programme kicks off on Monday. Emily (my fiancée) is also blogging for her TinyEars StartupChile project.

We arrived safely on Wednesday after 18 hours of travel – BA treated us well (reasonably comfy seats and reasonable food). We were hustled into a taxi at the airport (at a rather pricey £45) but got delivered quickly to our rather nice apartments in swanky Providence.

We’ve had three nights of parties now, first with Jon and Anna (so lovely to catch up!), then lunch with Emily’s madrina Johanna (@J_Angulo) and on to meet our padrino Fernando (@fdelsolar), and finally two Phase 1 leaving dos last night. Pisco and rum seem to flow from all bottles. We seem to have found a nice Pale Ale too and London Pride has been sighted in bottles. We got to meet Fernando of SQMOS, the data guys of Junar and Tom of Rentalita (Tom’s Santiago tumblr) along with a whole bunch of others, some of whom are shortly off to travel South America.

Yesterday we climbed San Cristobel (photo) and met a Llama (pronounced ‘yama’). Today we had a nice run along the river at Tobalaba and Kyran has pointed out some other running sites.

Tonight we have another dinner, Sunday we chill (a touch, and prepare a demo), then Mon-Thurs are sign-up days, government ID card days, bank days and demo days all rolled into one lump. The week after we ‘officially’ start on our projects (even if we have launched StrongSteam to our first users already!).

Wifi tip – in the business district there are lots of StarBucks, these have free wifi when you buy coffee.


Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.