Welcome to Emerging Markets explorer 🧭! You are about to read a newsletter on doing Business in Emerging Markets and to have a chance to navigate a more unusual environment than the typical Silicon Valley innovation, with interesting stories, stories of failing, and authors to read from to dive deeper.

And who will be your guide? My name is Amaia. I am a 24-year-old consultant, with a business background, and Emerging Markets explorer 🧭 is my pet project / passion project.

To be clear: this is not Emerging Markets 101. My main goal in writing this is to learn about a topic that is not so common, by researching and showcasing stories with the highest possible rigor. I will explore and investigate so that I can find and tell secret gems in the form of relevant stories. By writing Emerging Markets explorer, I want to make these stories known and approachable.

I have given myself permission to make mistakes, and thus, you reader, feel free to criticize my content in a constructive way, rebut my stories, and point out at angles that I missed but are relevant.

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To be clear, taking the definition of Emerging Market from Investopedia, I will understand it as an economy that is in the process of becoming developed. But when reviewing a market in the grey area, my priority will be to hit publish if the story is worth telling.

The structure of a newsletter is as follows:

A relevant story. It can be up to date, it can be old, it can be extremely popular and it can be unknown. I have given myself the freedom to explore, and as an explorer, it is my duty to share the treasures I find on my way.
Some of the stories will just demand a longer analysis. For those I’ll use the deep dives, which will be longer posts that will be solely based on substack. I’ll include a summary of those in the newsletter, with a link for you to read the post.
A failure story. Surprise! No best practices! Those are everywhere and have become so frequent that we have forgotten about the survivorship bias: the logical error of focusing on those who won (the survivors) and ignoring the casualties. By doing so we have a flawed understanding of cause-effect relationships: we stop being able to differentiate success and failure. I bring these back because those who failed at least tried, and even if they did not end up with a pile of money, they did retrieve a lot of wisdom that we can take advantage of.
A source. There is a gazillion of sources for technology and startups on the Internet, but when researching how to do business in EM I did struggle to find many. And so, when I find one, I made the commitment to share it with you. As a reader, you will gain insights that are not so easy to retrieve from experts; and the creators of the sources will get the reach they deserve.

That’s it from me! Feel free to share, comment, propose new stories, and discuss any of my points publicly and privately. By hearing your feedback, my exercise of learning will be multiplied (and your exercise of reading will improve by reflecting on the content you read).

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