This Is Not a Rant
When I say I'm building a tech company from Venezuela, reactions tend to fall into two camps: those who assume it's impossible, and those who assume it's heroic. Neither one does me any good.
It's not impossible — thousands of Venezuelan professionals are billing, exporting services, and shipping product right now. It's not heroic — heroism is a label others apply to feel better about their own inaction.
It's simply an engineering problem with different constraints.
The Real Constraints
Payments and banking. You can't just open a Stripe account. PayPal requires acrobatics. International wire transfers take days and eat an absurd percentage. Solution: Binance P2P, crypto to receive payments, DolarAPI to know what your work is actually worth. Not elegant — it works.
Infrastructure from here. AWS, GCP, Azure — they all want an international credit card. Getting one is a bureaucratic nightmare. Solution: Cloudflare (Pages, Workers, R2) has a ridiculously generous free tier that doesn't ask where you're from. K3s on a cheap Hetzner VPS or similar that accepts crypto. You don't need an enterprise cluster to get started.
Internet and electricity. This isn't a joke. Power goes out. Internet drops. Solution: everything critical lives in the cloud, nothing local you can't afford to lose, backup battery for the router and laptop. If your deploy depends on your home connection, you've already lost.
Talent and isolation. The local tech ecosystem exists but it's fragmented. Most of the good ones work remotely for international companies. No weekly meetups, no VCs doing coffee chats. Solution: Twitter, Discord, open source communities. Your network lives on the internet, not in a co-working space in Caracas.
What Works in Your Favor
Cost of living is your unfair advantage. On $1,500-2,000/month you live comfortably and reinvest. In any major tech hub, that barely covers rent. Your runway is 5-10x longer than someone in SF, NYC, or even Mexico City. You can afford to iterate without every month feeling like a death sentence.
The talent is real. Venezuela produces solid engineers. The diaspora confirms it: you'll find them at FAANG companies, in startups that raised Series A, in top-tier distributed teams. Those who stay aren't less capable — they chose to stay or are building something.
You understand a market others ignore. Latam is a massive, fragmented market. Knowing how to operate in Venezuela gives you intuition for Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile. Solutions that work in SF don't always fit here, and that's where the opportunity lies.
What They Don't Tell You
Building from Venezuela isn't "poor you, how hard." Nor is it "you can do anything with a positive attitude." It's a problem of constraints and optimization.
- Your stack is minimalist by necessity, not by trend
- Your infrastructure decisions are more conservative because you can't afford a surprise bill
- Your risk tolerance is calibrated differently — things that paralyze others feel like a Tuesday to you
And that last one is a superpower. When you've operated with the power going out twice a day, a 500 error in production doesn't keep you up at night. You fix it and move on.
Not a Happy Ending — a Work in Progress
I'm not here selling "yes you can" with a motivational soundtrack. I'm saying you can, with pragmatism, open source tools, and a pile of workarounds that hopefully won't be necessary forever.
If you're in a similar situation — not just Venezuela, any country where the rules weren't written for you — here's my advice:
- Optimize for long runway, not quick comfort
- Use free or cheap tools until it hurts, not before
- Your network is global. Build in public
- What others see as a limitation, turn into efficiency
And if you're building something from a place like this, whatever it is, reach out. This ecosystem needs more people talking about what they're doing.
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