Viernes, 18 de Abril

El humo (the smoke) came and went in waves since arriving on Wednesday night. But when we woke Friday morning the smoke was worse than ever, covering the city like a French duvet. Friday was a late state start. We had lunch and grabbed some of Argentina’s finest helado (ice cream) at Persicco in Las Canitas. Then we walked into the residential neighborhood of Belgrano, where the consultants our first potential investor referred us to had an office.

We met with the consultants for an hour, picking their brains about our idea. Did they think it would be popular? How many customers could we expect a day? What were there feelings on the macro-economic situation in Argentina and Latin America? Then they explained what they could offer in the way of developing a market study to test the actual viability of our idea in Argentina. All it would cost us was $12,000…U.S. dollars that is. We were prepared to pay a few thousand dollars to prove our concept to investors, but twelve grand was unreasonable and unaffordable for Jaspar and me.

We had done everything right: set up the lawyers, suppliers, and had a few good prospective locations. But the investment was proving the real challenge. I was no longer sure we had chosen the right industry. There were definite opportunities in Argentina. But we were trying to enter a highly competitive industry with a new product. Doing this generally takes a large balance sheet to finance a marketing campaign. During this week it became clear we did not have access to these kinds of resources. We had also chosen an industry in which we would be selling to Argentine’s, and thus earning pesos in a historically unstable economy. I began to ask if there wasn’t a better business for us to start in Argentina…

Friday was Tyler’s last night. Saturday morning he was taking off for a two-month journey through out South America. To celebrate Nick, Jaspar, Tyler and I went to La Cabrera a classic parilla in Palermo. Here we ate more lomo and bife de chorizo, and I tried morcilla, Argentine blood sausage. That night Jaspar and I called it early once again, as we had a 10 a.m. meeting the following day.