On Tuesday, a group of founders and investors gathered in a creative studio in the New York Lower East Side for a routine passage rite in the world of technology: a demonstration day. What distinguished this event is that each company at the start of the stage is from Latin America. And even more atypical was that several of the projects in the running for dollars of venture capital would use the funding to apply to move to Tulsa, Okla. – A city is not exactly known as the center for startups.
Michael Basch hopes to change this. Basch and his venture capital company in Anto Capital may be familiar to the readers of this newsletter for their thrust to integrate Tulsa into a technological outpost. Antoto’s only funder, George Kaiser Family Foundation, has long defended the initiative, going back to its Tulsa remote program, which was launched in 2018 and paid for distant employees to move in the state earlier. But the strategy has become even more refined in the past year, Antanto working with hard science startups based in Latin America to help them find fund funding and set them up with a resettlement package of $ 100,000 to finance visas, office space and housing.
Basch stood on the touch of demo day, looking at the grounds and nodding. When the founders of one of the companies, a startup of materials based in Mexico called Monte Caldera, said they were planning to transfer operations to Tulsa, Basch smiled and pumped his fist.
The reason for guidance for any venture capital company, of course, is the yields. The unique structure of Atento to have a single limited partner and a family foundation to this, means that it can have another mission: the diversification of the economy of Tulsa. It turned out that the search for Latin America was the most effective vehicle to reach the goal. Antanto does not even participate in return in return from the relocation package.
“I think about it more as a model to use philanthropic incentives to facilitate the investment of venture capital to change the landscape of a city … as well as the faces of the founders of this city,” Basch tells me.
Basch himself is not an Oklahoman, any more than he is not Latin American, although he married an Argentinian and lives mainly in the university city of Cordoba, in Argentina. However, the emphasis on the region seemed to be predetermined – its name means attentive in Spanish, and the company obtained agreements in Latin America and Spain thanks to the Spanish natives of its investment team.
Antanto began to work with a Latin American venture capital company and a startup accelerator called Gridx, which focuses on life science companies: a hot sector in the region thanks to the prevalence of research universities. Although it is not a technological center, Tulsa has a rich experience of research and manufacturing, and Basch had the idea of bringing Gridx startups to Oklahoma to help them raise seed capital on the part of American investors who would probably not do the flight to Latin America.
The full -time Oklahoma move has proven to be a next natural and symbiotic step for startups and Atento. On the first cohort that came last fall, which included 11 companies, Basch said that eight said they wanted to move to Tulsa.
The second cohort has just come to Tulsa, with two startups examining this decision, notably Monte Caldera and Migma, an Argentinian project developing antioxidants.
“We are a startup, so we have no millions to put everywhere – we have to think differently and be strategic, where our money becomes more exponential,” said Sofia Garcia Franco, CEO and co -founder of Migma. “In this sense, I think Oklahoma and Tulsa are a good opportunity because they develop an ecosystem.”
To put it slightly, Antanto’s project arrives at an uncomfortable moment in American politics. Just a few months ago that X raged on a ugly debate on H1B visas, launched by Sriram Krishnan, an official of the administration of Trump of Indian origin and an former A16z partner, with Trump acolytes who argue the authorization of all workers born abroad, regardless of the way the talents are qualified. Brutal prison Salvadoran. Oklahoma is one of the redest states in the country, with 66% of voters supporting Trump last year.
But Basch insists that this is the ideal moment. “In a moment when the migrant word is considered a bad thing,” he said, “I think all Americans may agree that we would like to have 1% of world scientists living in America and the highest 1% of entrepreneurs living in America.”
I pushed back, pointing to the break on Krishnan, but Basch argued that the program should be common sense. “As a person who likes to believe that America always wants the best talent on earth, and America is always a place where the words of the statue of freedom count,” he says, “this program is as close to something as many people on all sides of the aisle can take into account.”
The founders, for their part, ventured at the time tense without reservations. Hector Medina, CEO of Monte Caldera, said that uncertainty is cooked in the start -up experience. “It’s part of the game,” he said.
And Basch already plans how to extend the program, seeking to associate itself with governments such as Chile and Argentina to find new companies to come in Tulsa. “The Foundation has a story of scaling up things that work,” he said, pointing his distant program from Tulsa, who brought thousands of people after set an initial objective of 10. “There is a lot of appetite.”
Leo Schwartz
X: @Leomschwartz
E-mail: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
