Ben operates in a “massively parallel” way most of the time. While some might dip their toes and tentatively seek out alliances, Ben’s preference is to address and pursue all tracks at once, knowing that some will work and some won’t.
Well, since January 1st, it seems that ALL of his tracks are not only coming in, but converging. Our policy is to not write about any business development until it has closed. We can only therefore write about the first of several exciting developments.
This track is Agora Partnerships. An organization built by a super smart, totally bi-cultural US/Nica, politically connected MBA, Ricardo, who is dedicating himself to enabling the emergence of social impact small companies. To date, his company, Agora, has assisted 4000 small Nicaraguan companies. But this year, Ricardo has taken an interesting turn. He has coalesced an alliance of similar firms in Central America, hence turning his Nicaraguan “nursery” of promising businesses, into a Central American “nursery”. CO2 Bambu met the profile for this Central American Alliance, which aims to focus on both social and ecological impact. This of course is our focus as well, and we threw in our hat to be considered.
Happy to report that we made it into this so-called “accelerator” program, starting from 30 companies, that were wittled down to 10, of which 4 are in Nicaragua.
And so, Ricardo and his team came to visit our facilities in Rosita. It was a great trip. He and his team got to see what all the CO2 Bambu fuss is about. And conversely, our team really enjoyed meeting a Nicaraguan businessman with an admirable record of supporting start ups, and who shares our social impact / ecological impact values.