A Bolivian student at UCLA said entrepreneurship in Bolivia is more difficult than in the U.S. where he has now co-founded a successful portable phone charger company.
Alejandro Rioja, a fourth-year computer science student, is the co-founder and CEO of Flux Chargers, a phone charging startup that now sells chargers in more than 80 countries.
In Bolivia, it can be difficult to secure funding, Rioja said. However, in the U.S. obtaining funding is easier; the Flux Charger team was able to get $5,000 in funding after being accepted to the Startup UCLA Summer Accelerator.
The chargers have a lightweight design and store enough power to fully recharge a phone up to two times without being plugged into an outlet. Flux Chargers can also power cameras, iPads and any electronic device with a USB, microUSB or lightning port.
By the time they joined Startup UCLA, the Flux team already had a prototype of the charger, which they developed with a $20,000 out-of-pocket initial investment, Rioja said.
Rioja said the biggest challenge for Flux Chargers was getting their initial sales.
“To get started, I actually went to Santa Monica with a box of chargers and sold to complete strangers in person,” he said. “It allowed our brand to grow overseas, because a lot of people in Santa Monica are tourists.”
Now the Flux Charger team, which includes Max Bronstein, Flux’s chief strategist and and recent political science graduate with an entrepreneurship minor, and Kate Anoufrieva, Flux’s marketing head and a second-year business economics student, has created a parent company called Flux Ventures.
Flux Ventures houses three companies: Flux Chargers; Flux.La, a consulting firm…