2013: The Year Of The Latino Entrepreneur

By Giovanni Rodriguez, Forbes

For anyone following Latino tech — I have several beats, but in 2013 the Latino tech beat kept me quite busy — this was a pretty remarkable year.  Not to mention = the new pope (Latino); great memoirs by Sonia Sotomayor, Luis Guttierez, and Rick Najera (Latina, Latino, Latino); and breakouts and breakthroughs by Latin-American chefs.  That stuff kept me busy, too.  But the big action this year was in tech.  Here’s a summary of what happened in that part of the world, from my POV, in 2013:

–The Latino tech story stopped being social media and started becoming entrepreneurship.  If you followed my coverage here in 2012, chances are you heard about the prowess of Latinos on social channels.  It was a story that was interesting to both marketers and Latinos.  For the former, it was about new ways to engage new markets.  For the latter, it was about self-expression, power, and empowerment.  The empowerment has evolved, and the dominant theme today is Latino entrepreneurship.  Everywhere you go, it seems, you hear about Latino accelerators, Latino crowdfunding platforms, Latino mentorship networks.  There are good reasons — good businessreasons — for this.  But if you slept through the year and only woke up today to read the coverage, you’d be surprised to see how much the Latino narrative has changed.

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