There is this story that I always mention when I talk about my trip to Medellin, Colombia: a simple man with a simple fruit stand on the side of the road, selling aguacate (or avocado in Spanish).
Being too shy and too ashamed of how little Spanish I knew, I always wanted to ask this man whenever I passed him if I could build a website for him to sell his goods.
But through trial and error, I soon understood all too well how limited and futile that would be to his operations.
If anything, he probably already had a WhatsApp business account just to sell fruit.
I should have known; in my home country of Kenya, my auntie and cousin did the same thing.
I thought that WhatsApp was mainly for messaging people—I didn’t quite understand just how capable the platform was in entrepreneurship.
But Nicolas (or as I called him, Nic) got me together in quick order.
I first met Nicolas not in Colombia, his home country of Peru, or his born country of Venezuela but in good old smog-filled New Jersey, USA.
And this meeting wasn’t even in person, but virtual, through a cofounder accelerator program funded by Rutgers University-Newark called Black and Latino in Tech.
I was elated to be among so many smart and enterprising folks like him and was so proud when he was one of the winners of the Demo Day that we had and won a huge grant for his business. This was in June.
By December I had connected again with him on LinkedIn, got an interview scheduled, and the rest was history.
I was so electrified by the talk we had, that I decided to start the first chapter of Behind the Beta to highlight Nícolas Robles, a Latino AI founder who is chill enough to call himself "that Peruvian guy from New Jersey".
Besides being a businessman and tech genius, he is a father to a young daughter and a son to another tech leader and cofounder, Ruben Robles.
He is in the right field, the right place, and doing this at the right time: AI is seeing more growth than any other VC or non-VC-funded startups in the United States and globally.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, he took an already existing app (Whatsapp) and decided to turn it on its head.
A survey by Statistica states that "during the third quarter of 2023, WhatsApp was the most used social network in Latin America, with more than 92 percent of internet users in selected countries accessing the messaging app."
For 68% of users in LATAM, connecting with companies is easier using WhatsApp than any other social platform. This means of communication has become a two-way street, as brands also find WhatsApp an effective platform to connect with their audiences.
Nic is using artificial intelligence to bring a different component to an already fast-growing market, and he deserves some shine.
Share this post