Meet José Cayasso (commonly known as Caya). A Costa Rican graphics designer and entrepreneur. Jose was a Trainer and Senior Support Agent for Intel, covering Desktop Boards and Processors for the North America Region; he obtained extensive experience with hardware and software support over the course of 6 years. In 2011, Jose founded Saborstudio, a creative content company. Their first startup, Pota-Toss, was an iOS game crowdfunded on Kickstarter and released to the App Store on October 2012. It was deemed by Techcrunch and CNN as "The Next Angry Birds" and having its graphics compared to a Pixar movie by Business Insider. Pota-Toss was installed in over 300,000 devices that year. Saborstudio was also the first Costa Rican startup to be selected for a major US Accelerator. In November 2012 jose was selected as a one of the 40 Under 40 Costa Rican innovators by El Financiero Newspaper; and was also named an Innovation Champion by the Costa Rican Ministry of Science and Technology. Jose was also invited to speak at the 2013 TEDx Joven PuraVida Conference in Costa Rica, along with speakers like Luis Von Ahn and Michael Lindenmayer. In mid-2013, Jose founded Slidebean, a simplified, cloud-based presentation tool. Slidebean was part of Startup Chile, one of the most important accelerators in Latin America and then selected for Batch 11 of 500 Startups, one of the top US Based Accelerators according to Forbes and Techcrunch. Slidebean has been featured in Techcrunch, TheNextWeb and The Economist, as the third most valuable internet startup in Costa Rica.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

Who are the players involved in early-stage funding in Latin America?

What were the biggest value adds going through Startup Chile and 500 Startups?

How conducive is Costa Rican culture with startup culture?

How effective are Latin American government in fostering their startup scenes?