Freddy Vega Co-founder Platzi @StartupGrind Bogota

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to the Startup Grind Podcast. Startup Grind is the world's largest independent startup community. Inspiring, educating and connecting millions of entrepreneurs across the globe in partnership with Google for Startups.
These are the stories of disruptors, innovators and game changers from the fastest high growth companies and venture capital firms in existence. Join us as we unpack their strategies, learn from their mistakes and grow together. There's no time to wait, so let's begin.

**Chris Joannou** (0:30)
Hey all, Chris Jr. here. And we have a big one coming to you from Bogota, Colombia, our first international fireside chat as part of the relaunch. And it was very important to both myself and to Startup Grind that we are showcasing some of these stories from around the world. We have incredible stories coming out of every corner of the globe, and we are in 600 plus cities around the world.
So, yeah, that's definitely worth bragging about for at least a few seconds, 600 plus cities. And in Bogota, Colombia, we have Alan Colmenares from tropicalgringo.com, which is both unique and interesting choice of domain name.
tropicalgringo.com, don't know how I feel about that.
Interviewing Freddy Vega, CEO and co-founder of e-learning startup Platzi, and Platzi is massive. 500,000 plus subscribers on YouTube, another half a million on Facebook. They're everywhere. And that's why I love bringing these stories, because I never heard of them. Perhaps you have, congrats. And Freddy goes back to his story as a young child, a young entrepreneur, selling bootleg Pokemon cards, which is one of the more unique backstories I've heard. I love it. I love when they get a little bit chifty. And we have, and then onto his journey at Y Combinator, and then on, of course, to his growth, the fast track with Platzi, Latin America and around the world. Enjoy the interview.

**Alan Colmenares** (2:06)
Okay, everybody, let's give a warm welcome to Freddy Vega. Freddy, welcome, and thanks for coming.

**Freddy Vega** (2:17)
Thank you very much for inviting me. Yeah.

**Alan Colmenares** (2:18)
Okay, so I know there's a lot to talk about. I know you just graduated from Y Combinator.
There's a lot of stuff happening. You have a great education startup. But I want to start out at the beginning.
So where were you born? What was your upbringing like? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

**Freddy Vega** (2:34)
Okay. My name is Freddy Vega. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Platzi. We do online education effective. And I'll tell you later why.
I'm 29 years old, which means that I was born in 1986, which also means that I was born before the Internet was massively available. I remember that I didn't connect to the Internet until 1999 1999 was more or less the first time that I connected to the Internet. I remember that I didn't have a computer when I grew up.
And it was actually really weird and really hard to get a computer in the neighborhood that I was born. My grandmother comes from the countryside, and my mother as well had a story until she was 10 years old picking grapes three hours from here, from Bogota. Eventually, they migrated here to Bogota, and most of my uncles and aunts went to work at different things so that they could pay my mother's college education. She was the first to graduate from my family, but we were still not exactly a rich family.
I was living in the deepest, deepest south of the city, but in my perspective, I was a child. I didn't care. It was fine. Everything was perfect. I remember having a first contact with technology through video games. We couldn't afford video games, but a lot of our friends had them. And I remember being incredibly overwhelmed by how interesting it was to have a kind of art that was interactive. That was something new to me. And I really wanted to create something like that. So against my mother's wishes for me to be a medic, I went ahead and studied, how do you do video game development? When I was like 10 or something like that, 10, 11, and that's how it started my interest in technology. Incidentally, that's also how I started to learn English.
I was in a military school where there was no regard whatsoever for teaching English, or anything at all, besides military things, but well.
None of my friends talked English, but if I wanted to enjoy the video games that I was enjoying when I was 10 and 11, I needed to study English. Back in those days, in the neighborhood where I was growing, Suba, in the very, very deep north of the city, there was this kind of stores where you could rent a TV and a video game console for an hour, or for 15 minutes, or for 30 minutes. I remember helping a lot of my friends from the neighborhood to do their homework so that they could pay me, help them, in exchange for money, so that I could go and play video games in these kind of places. I was 11, 12, and with that money, I was going to these video game stores where they rented time, like an internet cafe, but with video games. And I was going there with English to Spanish and in Spanish to English dictionary, so that I could understand the kind of stories that I was playing.