Wednesday the 18th from 7:30 pm – 10:30 pm I’ll be hosting another Start-Ups Buenos Aires After Office. The goal of the event is to meet people and make connections. If you’re looking for a job, to hire someone, find a business partner or just make some new friends this is the place to be. As always the event is free and this time there is a happy hour until midnight. Carnal also serves food in case you want to stay around for dinner or order something to snack on. If you show up within the first half hour or so I’ll even provide you with some free beer provided by our host Carnal.

Here are the event details

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
7:30pm – 10:30pm
Carnal (Palermo)
Niceto Vega 5511 (corner Humboldt)

You can see who is attending and more details on the Facebook event and don’t forget to join our Facebook group to receive announcements on future events.

So you’ve recently moved to Buenos Aires or your thinking about it and you want to get connected with the local expat scene. Getting to know people and building your network of friends and colleagues is one of the most important things you’ll need to do. Here are some resources to help get you started.

Entrepreneur and Startup Related Groups/Events

Start-Ups Buenos Aires – I host this free networking event every few months which is a great place to meet other foreign and local entrepreneurs as well as people looking to network, find jobs or just grab some drinks for friends.

Lean Startups Buenos Aires – If you haven’t heard about the Lean Startup you should definitely do some research. This local group meets about once a month with the goal of discussing Lean Startups. The meetings often are in English and are also limited to 30 people which gives you a chance to get to meet all the attendees and many plenty of opportunities to ask questions. After every meeting they head out to a local bar for drinks.

Palermo Valley – Is by far the biggest event I know of that meets regularly; about every two months. Often times they have speakers or host elevator pitches with a panel that provides feedback. They’ve recently starting hosting smaller morning events which I haven’t had the opportunity to attend yet. The events usually attract about 200 people and there are free drinks for an added bonus. It’s only in Spanish but you’ll meet plenty of expats or English speakers there.

Temporary Office Space

Areatres – Has desks and private offices for rent in Palermo Soho and Hollywood.

Urban Station – Also provides desks and I believe even rent them by the hour. Located in Palermo Soho.

General Expat Resources

The following are some good resources to network or find information related to living as an expat in Buenos Aires.

Internations – They host events every month or so and attract a large expat crowd.

BA Life – Also events every month or so. Gatherings tend to be a bit smaller with more mature attendees mixed between English speaking Argentines and expats.

BA Newcomers – Fairly active Yahoo! Group. Sometimes it gets bogged down in petty political fights or flames but in general it’s a great resource. If you search the archives you can also find a wealth of information.

BAExpats – Online forum dedicated to expats in Buenos Aires.

I intentionally left out blogs on living or relocating to Buenos Aires just because there are so many and this page would quickly become outdated. Please let me know if you know of any good general resources or recurring events that would useful for entrepreneurs in Buenos Aires.

One of the hardest tasks I encountered when I started EasyBroker was finding and hiring talent in Buenos Aires. If I were to hire someone back home in the States I would have gone through my network of colleagues and friends and ask for recommendations. When you move to a new country you lose most of your work and school related connections and creating a building a new network can take quite some time. So without a network to fall back on I ended up posting our job openings to every job based website I came across. These are the websites that I found most useful for recruiting and finding talent in Buenos Aires.

Craigslist is the first place I went to and it’s a great source for looking for expat talent but very few Argentineans use it. I did get lucky and find an excellent Argentinean software engineer but overall it generated very few referrals for local tech and design talent. I also hired a few executive assistants from this site, all expats, but overall if you’re looking for local talent and in particular software developers or designers, you’ll probably have better luck with one of the sites below.

ZonaJobs is my top choice for looking for local tech talent, from designers to engineers. The site by far generated the most amount of candidates and I recall hiring at least one software developer from here. It’s also free but only in Spanish which is also true for all the websites except for Craigslist. If you don’t speak Spanish, find a bi-lingual assistant with Craigslist and then continue your search.

I also used CompuTrabajo and UniversoBit which generated quite a few candidates and I hired a designer from a response from CompuTrabajo. I can’t say whether one is better than the other but they’re both free and worth the time to post your job openings to.

All my recent hires have been through connections so I haven’t used any of the sites in a while and I imagine there are some other great options available now. One that I would definitely try out now is OLX. They have a lot of traffic and definitely generate a lot of real estate leads for our clients so I imagine they could do the same for job candidates.

If you’re looking to hire and have the time you should use all the sites. They’re all free and have worked for me in the past. I left out 15 or so other sites that we tried that turned out to be mostly a waste of time. If you think I’ve missed a good job website for Buenos Aires, please let me know by leaving a comment.

Best of luck hiring!

Quick Update

I received an email stating that I should include Bumeran.com. I didn’t because the site didn’t work well for us. We paid to place our job posts and see the CVs of candidates in their database but I found that the other sites worked better and didn’t charge anything or nag me with sales calls and emails after terminating the service. I’m not sure if they still charge or not but at the time it didn’t work for us.

This Wednesday from 7:30 pm – 10:30 pm I’m hosting another Start-Ups Buenos Aires after office. This time I decided to host it at California Burrito Company (CBC) since it is a successful startup meaning it’s not so much of a startup anymore.

CBC opened their first store in 2006 and has grown into a successful business with six stores and a seventh soon to open in Santiago, Chile. Co-owner Jordan Metzner will be joining us and is also offering $10 margaritas and coronas during the after office.

The event is free and open to all that like to network and mingle with interesting people.

Here are the details for the event

Wednesday, February 24, 2010
7:30pm – 10:30pm
California Burrito Company (Palermo)
Godoy Cruz 1781 (corner Honduras)

You can see who is attending and more details on the facebook event and you can become a fan of CBC on their fan page.

Hope to see you there!

“So how did you end up moving to Buenos Aires?” asks the inquisitive local or traveler passing through. It’s a question that expats are assuredly asked way too often regardless of where there new adopted home is. I’ve been asked so many times that I entertain myself by trying to invent the most unbelievable stories, from entering the drug trade to arms trafficking to even exporting babies. It’s surprising what you can get people to believe if you remain serious and have a good back story.

So I guess it’s time I fess up and give the actual reasons for my move to this country, and more over this city, that I love to love and hate at the same time. So back to the beginning.

I came to Buenos Aires for the first time in January 2005. I wanted to learn Spanish and I assumed that Spain would be a great place to get started but my friend Tom wisely suggested that I go to Buenos Aires to get a taste of Latin America and Europe in one shot. I did a little research and a few months later arrived for the first of what would be several trips to Buenos Aires.

After Buenos Aires, I continued to travel for two years to see the world and to find a place to live and ultimately start a business. I narrowed my options down based on what I could afford and where I would enjoy living to three regions of the world: Latin America, Eastern Europe, and South East Asia. I realized quickly that Eastern Europe would be too cold for my tastes and there was also the language barrier. In South East Asia I thought that the Philippines would be a great option after ruling out Thailand and Vietnam. The Philippines has nice beaches, great food, is very cheap, English is spoken almost everywhere and there is lot of tech talent.

In South America I narrowed my choices to Panamá, Colombia, and Argentina. Panamá and Colombia were both close to the States and very easy to get to from Florida. Panamá, while offering great beaches and tropical weather, lacked a strong cultural or cosmopolitan environment by comparison to the other candidates. Colombia has the most amazing people and is one of my personal favorites but I thought the IT infrastructure was far behind Buenos Aires and I worried about the availability of tech talent; at least in Medellín which was my top choice for cities in Colombia at the time. Buenos Aires offered a cosmopolitan city, low labor costs, and a very lively real estate market which would complement my business well.

I convinced myself that the Philippines made the most business sense so I purchased tickets to Manila. My life could have been very different right now but I just couldn’t let go of the idea of living in Buenos Aires. I already had been there three times, I spoke the language well, and I even knew what neighborhood I wanted to live in almost down to the block. Buenos Aires also has a relatively large middle class whereas in Manila poverty was much more prevalent and the disparity between the rich and poor is much greater.

Ultimately I decided to give Buenos Aires one more month. I flew to Buenos Aires in January 2007 to make the final decision and the rest, as they say, is history.

I finally got around to organizing another after office for Tango Rails. If you’re in Buenos Aires and want to chat about Ruby on Rails or other cool technologies, join us at 7:30 pm on Wednesday February 17th at Sullivan’s on the corner of Borges and El Salvador in Palermo. It will be mixed crowd of Spanish and English speaking geeks.

For more information check out the Facebook event or join our Tango Rails Facebook Group.

You receive the Facebook message stating that you’ve been tagged in a photo. Of course you have to open it wondering whether that friend took some embarrassing blackmail worthy photo of you. You open it only to find to your surprise that it’s not a photo of you but an advertisement. You’ve just been photo tagged pimped out! Even worse a few of the 30 other tagged friends leave a comment or two asking questions about the annoying advertisement which causes more messages to flow to your inbox.

Tagging photos of your friends is an easy but mischievous way to get a message out to a lot of people. Not only do you grab the attention of the spammed friend but you pimp him or her out because by default in Facebook any photo you are tagged in will also show up on your wall, your photos and Facebook’s status updates. So now the friend spammer has potentially reached the 30 tagged friends and all of their friends’ friends. That’s a lot of people.

So how do you deal with your Facebook pimp friends? Of course you could just remove the pimp as your friend but what if you want to remain friends with the pimp. He or she might be a friend in real life. After all, other than their poor Facebook manners they might not be all that bad and you may want to continue to see their photos, status updates and invite them to events. You could write them and explain the malice of their pimp ways or even write a blog post such as this but I’m guessing most of you would prefer something less dramatic and time consuming.

Unfortunately their are no privacy settings in Facebook that allow you to limit specific friends from tagging photos of you in Facebook. Until Facebook comes up with a better solution you can take the following two steps.

1. Report the photo as spam – Open the offending photo and click on Report This Photo. Choose the Advertisement/Spam and hopefully the pimp will get a spanking by Facebook. It’s also anonymous.

2. Remove the tag of yourself – Click on remove tag so that the pimp wont be able to pimp you out to your friends.

I hope these tips help send a warning to the photo tag pimps of the world so that they clean up their undesirable Facebook behavior. Please let me know if you have any other tips on how to avoid Facebook photo tag spam.

Other Useful Links

• The Biggest Nuisance on Facebook – Photo Tags
• Tag Spamming Photo Apps Rampant On Facebook
• Urban Dictionary Definition of Pimped Out

Kudos

• Thanks to Wicho for the Spam photo

I’m hosting an after office at Carnal this Wednesday the 9th from 7:30 – 10:30 pm for entrepreneurs, professionals, job candidates or those who just enjoy networking. The event is free.

You can find out more details about the event at
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?ei…738233&index=1

and make sure to join our Facebook group at
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=37266779327

Look forward to seeing you there!

Start-Ups Buenos Aires After Office
When: Wednesday the 9th from 7:30pm – 10:30pm
Where: Carnal – Niceto Vega 5511