Startup Chile is a program started by the Chilean government to attract entrepreneurs to the country and ultimately increase local entrepreneurial activity. The program provides companies with a $40,000 subsidy, office space, visas, and more. Companies must operate from Chile for 6 months. Startup Chile has attracted a lot of press, and has established Chile as the entrepreneurial hotspot of South America.

Back in the US, President Obama recently announced Startup America, an initiative to “celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation.”

“Entrepreneurs embody the promise of America: the idea that if you have a good idea and are willing to work hard and see it through, you can succeed in this country. And in fulfilling this promise, entrepreneurs also play a critical role in expanding our economy and creating jobs.”
-President Barack Obama

The initiatives of Startup America are a great start, but could also having a program similar to Startup Chile (that provides subsides and support directly to startups) help even more in attracting and creating new startups at the local level (particularly in Madison)? Could we pull off a Startup Madison and establish Madison as even more of a startup hotspot?

Lustig is confident that there will be a shift in attitude that will manifest itself in the healthy profits (he jokes that his company’s unofficial motto is: “Everybody uses the Internet and everybody dies.”)

“People need to make the mental leap from considering online accounts as just the main activities that they do all day online to actually real digital assets,” he said.

“I do not know the speed or how long it’s going to take for that shift to take place but we’ll all see it happen before our eyes.”

The founders of Entrustet are surprisingly young. Jesse Davis , who is 23, was still a student at the University of Wisconsin when he wrote the original business plan in 2008. He came up with the idea after reading what has become one of the best-known stories on the complexities of digital assets and one of the few that has found its way into the courts. Justin Ellsworth, a Marine killed in Iraq in 2004, did not leave behind the password to his Yahoo e-mail account, and when the company refused to give his parents access to it, they sued. Eventually, under orders from a probate judge, Yahoo gave them a CD it said contained Ellsworth’s e-mail. Ellsworth’s story convinced Davis and his business partner, Nathan Lustig, 25, that there was a market for “digital estate planning” services. In the case of Entrustet, this means an automated system for storing passwords and instructions for all your digital assets.

Such businesses rest on a simple idea: Web, mobile and social-media use keeps exploding; everyone still dies. Meanwhile, much of the archiving of basic family life is becoming digital. It has become routine to have an online “presence” even as an infant, by way of a picture posted on a parent’s social-networking profile. Lustig pointed me to a recent corporate study that identified “chief memory officer” as a kind of unofficial role taken on by someone (often mom) in many families — the person who is paying attention to the idea that there may be no physical scrapbook or set of journals to hand down to future generations and that bits-and-bytes memory objects need to be preserved somehow. Trendwatching.com has predicted a “burgeoning market” for products and services that protect the digital content that is “the nucleus of one’s personal brand.”

Entrustet was also featured on an NPR talkshow interview that can be listened to here.

We’ve used this money to launch our product and become the thought leaders in issues dealing with death and the Internet. In March 2010, Jesse spoke at a panel at South By Southwest called People Die, Profiles Don’t. That same day, we launched Account Guardian, which allows consumers to create a list of their online accounts and computer files and decide which should be deleted and which should be transferred to heirs when they die. Our SXSW panel allowed us to break onto the scene and we received our first press features in The Washington Post and Rocketboom Tech.

We also calculated that three Facebook users die every single minute, a stat that has been published and blogged about all over the Internet. We’ve been featured in Mashable, TechCrunch, Forbes, Fox Business, Lifehacker, Wired, BBC, Financial Times and a whole host of other publications. I attended the inaugural Digital Death Day in Mountain View, CA and Jesse and I (along with A LOT of help from our interns) have written over 170 blog posts about digital estate planning, digital assets and websites issues relating to digital death.

We’ve used our press, blog and marketing to sign up over 20 attorneys for our attorney partner program. These attorneys represent over 15,000 estate planning clients and have learned how to create wills and trusts that incorporate digital assets. In fact, Jesse and I were the first people in North America to execute wills that include all of our digital assets. Our partners and attorneys at Neider and Boucher have taken the lead as the preeminent digital estate planning firm in the United States and probably the world.

In October, we officially launched our corporate partner program. Partner websites agree to allow their users to transfer or delete their online accounts when they pass away, and Entrustet notifies each partner website whenever one of their users passes away. We’ve partnered with a bunch of websites so far, including Flavors.me, Broadjam, Vendder, Goodsie, others.

We’ve also seen a huge change in public awareness and perception of our industry. When we first started, there was only one other company in the “digital death” space. Now there are over 50, including 4 who are direct competitors in the consumer market. We love competition, as we believe it validates our market. If you Google digital estate planning, digital assets or any other keywords, you’ll find hundreds of press mentions and blog posts about digital death.

We believe that we’re nearing a tipping point where planning for your digital death becomes mainstream. Facebook, Twitter and Google now all have death policies and have actively updated them in 2010. Facebook even admitted they have a death problem. Oklahoma just passed a law that requires websites to allow executors access to deceased people’s online accounts. I’m confident that other states in the US will pass similar laws in the near future. Entrustet was even featured in a book about our industry called Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter Are Your Estate, What’s Your Legacy?

In November, Entrustet was selected for Start-Up Chile and Jesse and I moved to Santiago to continue to work on the business. We’ve been here for about a month now and have enjoyed meeting all of the other startups and experiencing life in another country. We’ve had the opportunity to meet successful Chilean entrepreneurs, professors, as well as Silicon Valley icons like Steve Blank and Vivek Wadwha.

We believe that 2011 will be the year that our industry becomes mainstream. More states will pass laws similar to Oklahoma’s and more websites will realize that they need to create a plan for dealing with user deaths. We believe that we are in the right place and have the right plan to help websites, consumers and attorneys create plans for dealing with digital death. Look for big things in the digital death space in 2011, with Entrustet leading the way.

Contributed by Nathan Lustig of Entrustet.

“A lot of the people in high-tech and creative industries really want urban settings,” says Cieslewicz. “With the Capitol East District we can offer them what they want, so they’ll develop all their amazing entrepreneurial ideas here rather than in Palo Alto or Ann Arbor or Boston.”

And what they want, according to Cieslewicz and others working hard to bring Capitol East to life, is to be where it’s all happening, both at work and at play.

“All of the startups I’ve been talking to want to be located downtown, within walking distance of other startups,” says Nate Lustig. “It’s really important to us to have that cluster of high-tech new businesses sharing ideas, people and all kinds of resources.”

Wisconsin IT Startup Relocates to Chile, Celebrates Global Entrepreneurship Week

This week is global entrepreneurship week and Chile is celebrating. The Chilean Government wants to be the startup and innovation hub of South America and believes that it needs to inspire Chileans to take risks and start businesses. We attended an event in front of La Moneda yesterday called Chilean Entrepreneurship Day, which featured successful Chilean entrepreneurs, government officials and many Chilean students. It’s great to see a government that’s getting behind entrepreneurship and innovation and actually doing something. All governments say they want to foster innovation, but Chile is actually doing it. We’ll keep you updated on the Chilean startup scene, Start-Up Chile and other interesting things we find from Chile in our series here on WTN.

First Impressions from Santiago

Eastern Santiago very developed and clearly first world.  If it weren’t for everyone speaking Spanish, I could be in any other mid to large city in the US or Europe.  The center, where our office is located, is a little older and really busy, but still nice.  There’s people everywhere during the day.  It’s filled with shops, restaurants and businesses.  We’re not sure what it’s like at night, but people have told us it can get rough downtown.  There’s got to be at least 6-7 universities headlined by Universidad Católica and Universidad de Chile, so there’s lots of young people seemingly everywhere.

Digital Firm takes Chilean Detour

Now the two Madison entrepreneurs are on their way to Santiago, Chile, where they will spend six months running their two-year-old digital estate planning services company. Entrustet, which operates in the emerging “digital afterlife” industry, is among 25 companies from around the world that are receiving a $40,000 grant and free office space in Santiago in exchange for temporarily locating their business there.

“We think entrepreneurship and starting your own business is an adventure in itself, so why not keep the adventure going and go somewhere else?” said Lustig, 25.

Punishing Failure and the Ramifications on Entrepreneurship

On just the first day here in Santiago, Chile, I had a very interesting conversation with a thoughtful Chilean businessman about the cultural difference between the U.S. and Chile regarding the punishment of failure. He explained to me that the biggest impediment for entrepreneurs in Chile is the fact that Chilean culture harshly punishes failure in general. All the other Chileans in the room concurred.

As I spoke more with this Chilean businessman, it became truly apparent how debilitating it would be for entrepreneurs to grow up in a society that punishes failure. And it makes perfect sense, right? I mean, If I had my family and friends looking over my shoulder constantly and warning me not to fail, I would never have started Entrustet. I would never even have set up the food stand outside the Newton Little League field when I was fifteen.

Entrustet’s founders, Nathan Lustig and Jesse Davis, will be moving to Santiago November 15^th to continue to run Entrustet.  As part of Startup Chile, the Entrustet team will receive a $40,000 subsidy, free office space and connections into the Chilean entrepreneurship community.

The CE blog will post updates from Lustig and Davis as they run their business from Santiago.  We’ll also try to foster some ties between Madison and Santiago, which we believe are quite similar.  Both cities are up and coming startup hubs and we believe we can learn from each other.  Watch this space for continued updates.

Entrustet is a free service that enables an account holder to pass on digital assets to up to 10 designated heirs and one executor, who is in charge of executing a person’s digital wishes after they pass away. Digital assets include social networks, financial accounts, blogs, e-mails and other Internet properties or files.

Check out the video above where Rocketboom Tech’s Ellie Rountree interviews Jesse Davis, co-founder of Entrustet about how the service works and why it is important.

Entrustet is a free service that enables an account holder to pass on digital assets to up to 10 designated heirs and one executor, who is in charge or executing a person’s digital wishes, after they pass away. Digital assets include social networks, financial accounts, blogs, e-mails and other Internet properties or files.

Check out the video above, in which Rocketboom Tech‘s Ellie Rountree interviews Jesse Davis, co-founder of Entrustet, about how the service works and why it is important.