Over 800 entrepreneurs attended the 6th Annual Endeavor Conference in Cordoba. (Photo: F. Ancorena)
“Today there is a sensation in the country that, instead of upward social mobility, children are going to be worse off than their parents. There’s now a tendency to spend less, because of the situation we are going through.”
While this quote sums up a general uneasiness in the United States 2010, the source was actually a Clarin article describing Argentina 2003. The piece examined the national outlook in the wake of the 2001/02 financial crisis and posed the question, What Happened to the Country of “My Son, the Doctor?”
The saying, Mi Hijo, El Doctor, was a popular phrase describing the upper-middle class hopes that a child would achieve stable, professional employment with all the attendant social status and professional prestige.
Apparently the 800 Argentine entrepreneurs who just attended the 6th Annual Endeavor Conference in Cordoba didn’t get the “Become A Doctor” memo. “In North America, such an event would be unexceptional,” writes author and Fast Company contributor Rob Salkowitz, “But in Argentina, every one of these gatherings represents an important step forward in the maturation of a more diverse, robust and self-sufficient economy that the entrepreneurs and their allies in academia and the global NGO community are striving toward.”
Globant CEO Martin Migoya tells Salkowitz that “Some people here still have a negative opinion of business in general,” and that partially explains the Mi Hijo mentality. Slowly, that mindset appears to be changing in Argentina, more resources are being made available to aspiring entrepreneurs, and Buenos Aires has the highest start-up rate per capita in Latin America.
Imagining an Entrepreneurial Argentina
