Chile will pay you to move there

Damn, wish I had known about this sooner, but I found out that Chile will pay you $50,000US to move there!

Santiago, Chile
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Well, of course there's a catch, silly. You have to come up with an interesting idea for a startup business, one with a potentially global reach, and yes, the founder of the startup must move to Chile for the first six month of the project. The Start-Up Chile program is entirely in English, but you will be living in a Spanish speaking country. The program has been going on since 2010 and apparently is a success for Chile

Not only will you get $50,000 to bootstrap your company, you get a one-year work visa and plenty of business contacts to start with. And you can bring business partners with you. You can leave after you get your startup launched, but as the BBC reports, many Start-Up Chile businesses are making the choice to remain in Santiago (and that's a great article, by the way).

Business Insider has a lovely write-up of the program and already some Start-Up Chile companies are built up enough to be sold off

You'll need to move quickly, though. Round 2 of applications for 2012 starts on June 11th, 2012 and round 3 is opening September 14th 2012.

Check out all of the Start-Up Chile on Youtube videos to get a sense of what others are doing.
... and their Twitter feed
... and their Facebook page

On a side note, I've restarted a personal blog at blog.overseas-exile.com. Some things have leaked into this blog that should really be on a personal one. By having separate blogs, I can keep this more focused on "how to become an expat".