How start-ups are helping countries to catch up
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Alejandro Pitashny raised more than a few eyebrows when he left a comfortable job at Deutsche Bank in London to return to his native Argentina to start a business during the worst moment of the country’s financial crisis.
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Four years later, the strategy appears to be paying off. Jos?, which Mr Pitashny created with two former school friends, exports luxury tea and herbal infusions to Britain, the US, continental Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Although sales were just $100,000 in 2004, they grew by about 500 per cent last year.
That someone could forge such an entrepreneurial success in one of the world’s middle-income countries is not surprising to the authors of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the world’s largest analysis of start-up activity, which published its seventh annual survey this month.
