Bridging the digital divide in Mexico
In 2000, I invested and got involved in a startup founded by a friend from Berkeley who had been a youth volunteer in Mexico. He had lived and traveled in multiple regions of Mexico and was deeply familiar with the language and culture. This company combined ambitious business goals with an education and social justice angle, bridging the digital divide for a new generation.
The big vision for this company was to become the Starbucks of internet cafes in Latin America, at a time when internet service was very expensive and not widely available there, in the decade before the dawn of the smartphone era.
A public-private partnership model
The founder had just inked a deal with the Mexican state of Sinaloa to create a pioneering public/private partnership model that would place a free computer lab in every public school, that would then be opened to the broader community for a modest rate in school off hours. Students hanging out after hours would have adult supervision in a secure, safe place with refreshments. The idea was to build a self-reinforcing revenue stream to fund organic expansion, starting with seed capital. The electricity and A/C (vital in Mexico) would be provided. Schools had ample facilities that were well-sized, well-located, well-known in the community, and underutilized.
I had always felt inspired by Steve Jobs’ beautiful vision to give an Apple computer to every public school in the early 80s, the Kids Can’t Wait campaign, and I remembered reading how its expansion beyond California got stymied by politics, which had made me mad when I was a kid. The universe was now presenting me with a chance, in some way, to right that wrong.
At the time, there were almost zero computers in these schools. There might be one, in an administrator’s office. I went down there, and we toured around, and it seemed over a decade behind the USA in tech exposure for the general population. I knew that the incredible opportunities I’d had, with computers at home and in school from an early age, had been vital to the trajectory of my life. The teaching I had done was at a fancy private prep school, followed by an Ivy League college. I wanted to do something with social benefit for a broader and larger population. I’d had some success, and wanted to give something back that had real and lasting value. The kids in my neighborhood at home didn’t need help.
What we accomplished
We raised money in the US and opened 25 computer centers, many but not all in schools, with unified branding. We opened the largest Internet cafe in the country, bigger and better than anything in Mexico City, a huge facility right on Culiacan’s central square in the middle of the biggest city in the state. It became a major destination and burgeoning cultural center.
We exposed over 12,000 Mexican youth to computing and the Internet through the schools. We lined up federal funding for adult computer literacy education and made that happen. I met with governors and staff, and even got to meet President Vicente Fox, who came to speak about the program. We explored joint ventures with AOL Mexico and a Spanish-language web portal. The company built its own furniture, did all the IT work and staffed everything. There were billboards, radio ads, local TV and news coverage. The founder of the company became a local celebrity. Even I was interviewed on Sinaloan TV.
In hindsight, the birthplace of the Mexican drug cartel system was not the best place to get this started. The extended drama of how this venture got off to such a bright start and then went so far south from there is tangential to this narrative, but it is a story full of colorful characters and spy-movie-like intrigue in exotic locales that really should be told… someday. Maybe not in this form. A producer in the film industry suggested I turn it into a screenplay. Whenever I’ve conveyed portions of it in a quiet restaurant, jaws slacken and nearby conversations come to a halt.
I’ve got such a wealth of amazing, dramatic material, it’s almost painful to leave it out from a storytelling perspective. But there are many good reasons to do just that in this case, so it’s time for us to move on.
In the end, this project did not pan out as an investment, to say the least. But it did have a real, sustained, ground-level impact in breaching the digital divide for a generation of kids in a troubled area, with safe places to socialize and learn, and I feel good about that.
Who knows what all those kids have accomplished by now.