Energizing The Spirit of Entrepreneurship in Local Communities Worldwide with Susana González

Like any other city, Denver also boasts a thriving entrepreneurial spirit. As a matter of fact, we celebrate it annually during Denver Startup Week. This one-week celebration shines light on local economies across the world and the inherent role that remittances play in boosting local innovation and entrepreneurship globally. It's a great way to meet like-minded individuals who share the same business interests and passion as you. Speaking of which, our guest Susana González is here in The Commons on Champa. The Commons runs on shared ownership. This incredible community continues to give expertise, time, funding, and volunteerism to build and support Denver’s entrepreneurial circle. Suzana is spending her time getting involved and continuing her quest to bring Denver’s rich entrepreneurial community to her hometown back in Venezuela. Let's hear from her in today’s episode. --- Listen to the podcast here: Energizing The Spirit of Entrepreneurship in Local Communities Worldwide with Susana González Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In a recent episode, we talked with Jodi Fischer of the Adelante Foundation about the entrepreneurial spirit in Honduras. The entrepreneurial spirit can be found in a lot of different cities. Blessed to live in Denver where we have a really strong entrepreneurial spirit. My guest today, Susana González, is here in Denver at The Commons on Champa, which is Denver’s entrepreneurial hub and a place that anyone with that spirit can come drop in and work and talk with other like-minded individuals. Susana is here to talk about her quest to bring the entrepreneurial spirit to her town in Venezuela, where there’s a lot of interest in starting businesses. --- Susana, welcome to the program. Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be talking here with you and getting to know the Denver side scenes and the community that I think is very lovely and I like it very much. Yeah, I love our community here too. I’ve said before in other episodes, one of my favorite weeks here is our Startup Week, which is in the fall every year and we have tons of people and it’s the place where you see people that are doing stuff about their problems as opposed to people that are just complaining, which there’s plenty of that elsewhere in the world. I think this is the first time I hear somebody saying that entrepreneurs are those who do instead of complain and I love it. Yeah, for sure. I think you have said something mind blowing to me. That’s the spirit. Now, Susana, you notice this spirit in your hometown. Explain the observations that led you to the path that you’re on right now. Well, the thing about Venezuela is that we are culturally in this type of mindset that we like to do things, like if there’s something wrong in the office, we will clean it, we will fix it, we will just do it, it doesn’t matter that it’s not our job to do it but it’s the mindset that people take responsibility of things that are happening around. And then we have this strange political situation, economical decline, and people decided that they needed to do things to fix the reality and I think those two things together created this very entrepreneurial mindset, where everybody wants to start a business, everybody has an idea, because everybody needs money, and seems attractive enough. So you’re observing, and I think most people listening are probably familiar with what the situation in Venezuela is like, this spirit of people, the average Venezuelan, as you’re observing, is someone that’s saying, “Okay, we’re in this tough situation, we had all this stuff happen over the past couple decades, now, I wanna do something about it. Now, I wanna help build everything back, I wanna build something that’s gonna make what I see around me better.” Is that accurate? It is kind of in a way. I mean, I think I’m not the only one who has some questions to oneself regarding am I going to save the country? And if I’m going to do it, how am I going to do it? You cannot stay in a place that you don’t like how it is if you’re not doing something to change it, at least in a way. So, it tends to happen a lot that people are just looking for an income, like something secure to put food on the table, and they end up doing a business because it’s the only way. And what kind of businesses are you observing people starting or people talking about starting, people have any interest in building? There’s like going back to production of things, like I want to start farming, I want to start producing a type of meal fruit or product, because there is a lacking of local production. It is part of what happened a couple of years ago. The government made these policies that made it so difficult to have local production that they just started to bring it from abroad. Now, there’s no money to bring it so we have to rethink everything again. It’s about finding solutions to problems and necessities to cover. So, a lot of this is just building back society almost from scratch. It sounds, and I say maybe it is something like that, like there’s a lot of — the social fabric has suffered a lot. There’s a lot of things that happened and people are just trying to rebuild their lives. They’re just trying to make things better in many, many ways, which includes creating economical opportunities and getting the business up. What barriers are you observing for the average Venezuelan that you’re trying to help that wants to build one of these businesses and is going about trying to build it, I guess? The biggest thing entrepreneurs find in their way is always fear, especially because this is a leap of faith. You have to jump into the void, and if you don’t have experience, if you don’t have the tools, it can be very scary.Share on X And the other thing, of course, is necessity. If I am really starving, I will just try to make money any way I can. So, it’s not like they won’t do their entrepreneur but they can maybe end up doing a cheap way or settling down for a very small goal instead of going all the way there. And, of course, there’s a lot of political issues regarding how legal can it be to become a fully operating business. It’s very challenging to do that nowadays in the country. Instead of being easy, now the government makes it very hard. Yeah, so it’s like something I take for granted, because I’m sitting here at The Commons on Champa and that’s a center specifically set up here in Denver to foster our entrepreneurial community and it’s like people who donated, trying to make it easier because we talk about our challenges, which is often how much money do you have saved up? Do you have some sort of cash flow? Can you take care of yourself and sometimes your dependents and your family from the time in which you decide to go full in on the idea to the time when it becomes a profitable business, which is never a short period of time. You can never come into the endeavor expecting to suddenly be profitable on your business in two, three months. That’s just not realistic. But you’re talking about not only do you have that standard set of challenges that I just mentioned, but also additional hindrance from your government and challenges with the whole social situation going on around you. Yes, that is a thing, like I have a co-working space in my country too, which has the same mission that The Commons has here, but we don’t have the same support from government and other partners. We have to make everything from our own pockets, in a way, sometimes, or just be funded by events or maybe the same members. So, actually, here in Denver, you are very lucky to have this types of spaces and this type of activities, with the only goal of giving you all the tools that you need. I mean, that’s why they are here. They’re just here to make your life easier. I think, actually, I cannot say because I haven’t been in that many cities but this is the best city to start a business, at least here in the US, and it has all the cool things that you need and you have the mountains. The mountains make it a very desirable place to live. People want to live here, which is probably why it costs a lot to live here, but this is not the time or place for a tirade about how much houses cost here, but there was one in my neighborhood that sold for a million. Well, but that’s the same cost in Florida, and they don’t have mountains. Yeah, they have — They just have lots of rain and hot — And alligators. Yes. Lots of alligators. They can eat everything you have. They can eat your child. No, no, no, it’s awful. I don’t know. It’s not — I don’t hate Florida, no worries. I think this is a very nice place to come and start your business and give your ideas an opportunity to become reality so I invite you to come. Well, you’re here, I don’t invite you here. And so you’ve been here in Denver for a few weeks now. What have you noticed about the culture here? You’re around a lot of entrepreneurs, probably because of everyone in your program. What else you can bring back to Venezuela or was there some things that we can learn from Venezuelan cultures that we’ve neglected here because no place is perfect? Well, that’s true, no place is perfect, but every place can be improved and everything can be improved and that’s a different way to look at it. I recommend you to think about that, especially if you’re an entrepreneur, but here in Denver, I have noticed that the only one thing that appears to be a common theme is that people take a little bit things for granted. You have something so you don’t pay much attention to it but you should pay attention to things,...