November 13th, 2012 BOGOTA (Colombia Reports) – As Bogota‘s business climate warms up, a feisty cohort of entrepreneurs is struggling to develop a thriving startup ecosystem in the Colombian capital even though challenges still loom.

“I would say we are at the beginning of a wave. I’m sure it is a great wave coming for entrepreneurship here and I’m ready to surf it,” Camilo Jimenez, an entrepreneur who rents a co-working space designed to connect entrepreneurs, told Colombia Reports.

But the surf is rough for Bogota. Getting entrepreneurs to trade insight, experience and resources is one of the greatest challenges that the emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem faces.

“It’s hard for Colombians to share their ideas,” observes Juan Tejada, an aspiring entrepreneur and organizer behind Startup Criollo, an event that incubates university students’ startup ideas.

Young entrepreneurs like Tejada are trying to change that mentality by building a culture of networking events modeled after the sort of mentorship culture that characterizes more developed startup scenes.

“Building community is a must for Bogota,” adds Fernando Hurtado, another Colombian entrepreneur with an early-stage startup who was inspired to contribute to building up Bogota fledgling scene after he attended an Entrepreneurship Immersion Training Camp hosted by YouNoodle’s CEO, Rebeca Hwang, in the Silicon Valley earlier this year.

Another rough patch for entrepreneurs around the city is a scarcity of funding. Only a few angel investors and venture capital firms have chosen to turn their attention toward the Colombian capital’s nascent startup scene, and therefore young entrepreneurs find trouble accessing later stage funding.

But in spite of the challenges, the World Bank’s Doing Business 2013 report on regulations for small and medium-sized enterprises casts optimism on Colombia, reporting a more efficient and friendlier business environment for startups since 2003.

Doing Business reports that reforms cut out lengthy registration procedures, reduced the cost of starting up from 28% of income per capita to 8% and shortened the time needed for starting a business to 14 days from 60 in 2003.

And Colombian entrepreneurs are not the only ones who are growing attracted to starting up in Bogota.

Gustavo Maggi, an engineer-turned-entrepreneur from Venezuela, says he is impressed by the support and opportunities that he discovered when he came to Bogota, such as entrepreneurial development programs with Bogota Emprende, Innova, and Unidades de Emprendimiento.

“Bogota is an emerging market with many opportunities,” says Maggi, drawing the comparison to his native Caracas. But he acknowledges the trickiness of the Colombian market’s uncertainty too. “Colombia isn’t a market that adjusts itself easily to your initiatives. You have to adjust your initiatives to her.”

Bogota’s emerging startup climate has even grown friendly enough to the extent that Startup Weekend, a Seattle-based incubator supported by the Kauffman Foundation, chose Bogota as one of its November destinations.

Ana Carolina Pereira, an organizer behind the event, is determined about Bogota’s entrepreneurial flicker when she says, “we think we can turn our self into as much of a success story as the tech entrepreneurship communities in Singapore or Israel.”

Fifteen years ago, Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, resembled a diabolical sort of place. Business was corrupt. Violence was heavy. For Conrad Egusa, an entrepreneur who has practiced success in the Silicon Valley and in New York, Medellín might have been the last place on earth where he would choose to spawn his latest idea – a start-up incubator. But instead, Egusa thinks Medellín is ideal.

Along with his local partner, Edinson Alberto Arrieta Aguas, the two are hopeful about Medellín, which is the city they chose to cradle their recently launched Espacio, a start-up incubator that offers a community-driven brand of marketing, technology, and PR support to a mix of Colombian and foreign entrepreneurs. According to TechCrunch Espacio is backed by .CO, a digital enterprise web domain, and the Founder Institute.

“Medellin is unlike any other city I have been to, and the only region I can compare it to is Silicon Valley. When I arrived in the city, the more I became involved in the entrepreneurial scene here, the more I learned about the great government initiatives (from Ruta N, iNNpulsa), and the active startup scene,” Egusa told Pulso Social.

But if Espacio wants Medellín to be the next Silicon Valley, it faces some stiff competition for the title. Chile’s government-backed Start-UpChile aims to have 1,000 fledgling firms and has already established itself. And imitating the pearl of Chile’s strategy, Brazil also wants to lift prohibitive immigration laws that will make its cities more attractive to foreigners for testing their ideas in institutes like Rio’s 21212 Digial Accelerator.

Medellin And regional competition isn’t the only challenge. What Espacio has to figure out is how to lure Angel Investors – a hot matter The Economist talks about in its recent article about Latin America’s entrepreneurial climate. The final key that successful tech entrepreneurs need for solving the start-up labyrinth is private venture capital for investment in their projects. According to The Economist, even Rio and Santiago see difficulty luring angel money away from America’s innovation hubs in Silicon Valley and New York.

Egusa, however, sees the challenge from a different perspective. He says that what he perceives to be one of the most fundamental challenges is a mere lack of success stories in Colombia and even greater Latin America.

“Latin America needs to have a number of entrepreneurial success stories, which will not only catch the eye of foreign venture capitalists, but will also serve as inspiration to the next generation of entrepreneurs,” said Egusa, in an interview with PulsoSocial.

Indeed, he has now made himself into something of a ventriloquist with the power to tell those stories. And if he and Espacio don’t tell success, Medellín might watch the Angels fly right on by.

UN Habitat recently released a report that paints Latin America as the most urbanized region in the world, with a projected 90% of its population living in cities by 2025.

The question of whether or not this is a good thing attracts mixed opinion. The Agence-France Press (AFP) points out that the gap in income is widening. Just as much as it is the most urbanized region, Latin America suffers the most from income inequality.

Erik Vittrup, UN-Habitat head for human settlements, is more optimistic. He told the AP that,

“We’re at the end of an era of urban explosion, with few exceptions,” said Vittrup. “We’re seeing a reduction in poverty, indigence in urban areas; unemployment is going down.”

Overall, he said, Latin America is primed for “a new urban transition to quality of life, equity and sustainability.”

Even though the region might be prepped for a seminal social and economic leap, it still faces the struggle of lifting an estimated 124 million people out of poverty.

That is why Latin America’s budding centers of entrepreneurship that have come with the region’s storm of urbanization should feel as though there is more opportunity for creating new wealth than there are obstacles to stand in the way of its thumping innovation.

According to Techcrunch, a new wave of TechnoLatinas have emerged in certain cities, (think Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Santiago, and Mexico City) where start-up “ecosystems” have already been scrambling to dig in. The Santiago-based Start-up Chile duels with the Silicon Valley for investment. Professionals with business and engineering talent are in abundance since more than half the population of Latin America is 30 years old or younger.

The ingredients to flatten out Latin America’s ugliest wrinkle – its income inequality – are all there. Now its Technolatina entrepreneurs need the sort of angel investment that descends on San Francisco’s hottest entrepreneurs. And maybe a dash of belief as well.