A Glimpse at the Peruvian Ecosystem– “From a Product Perspective”
Jonathan Muniz, Product Manager at CVS and EIR for Wayra shares more about his experience meeting Peruvian startups and the potential he believes they have to continue growing and creating more success stories.
Jonathan Muniz, a 27-year-old with product management experience in IBM, EY and CVS Health, came to Peru on September 2019 to be a part of our EIR initiative. Jonathan’s expertise goes beyond multinational corporations, an entrepreneur himself, he started (and ended) his own business, making his participation in our program an even better fit.
Jonathan worked with Wayra for three weeks providing feedback to startups and their products and the problem they were trying to solve. He even helped a startup redefine their company pitch for an international competition in the UK-which they won! He enjoyed meeting individuals with a passion for their ideas.
For those of us who call Peru our home and entrepreneurship at any level our passion, what is most rewarding from these missions is the feedback given by these talented individuals who come from a different reality. From a product perspective (as Jonathan always says) the growth of the startup ecosystem in Peru will come from a focus on developing and defining business ideas. From his short time here, he gathered that this fundamental focus needed reinforcement and that in comparison to the U.S. there was much less help available. The steps of product development in the startups he met were often out of sync; developing a product before figuring out what the problem they were trying to solve was. If you ask Jonathan where the opportunity lies, he shares this:
“They [startups/support organizations] should identify niches where you would expect Peru to be the best at, like mining. Peru needs to do more to encourage the areas that its best at, to develop ideas and technologies in that because it is very hard to compete against the US and Europe on things like e-commerce. To define their own market segment, they need to encourage and focus on those industries. Not to say that e-commerce is not great…but to me, it is something that you will hear everywhere… therefore it’s very hard to compete with those [outside] markets in those categories”.
As an ecosystem, we must continue to polish our strengths by reinforcing the concepts that may be considered basic but are often overlooked.
On the last note, Jonathan encourages reading these two books before embarking on the entrepreneurship journey: The Innovator's dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
For more on Swiss EP’s EIR initiative, or if you would like to be a part of the EIR family, or know someone who would please visit: swissep.org/entrepreneurs-in-residence/join-us