A Venezuelan Steve Jobs

By Gonzalo López Martí @LopezMartiMiami

We Latinos are great at fooling around with balls.
Fútbol, pelota, that kind of thing.
Music?
Don’t get us started.
We are also great at producing loud delusional semi-literate political leaders.
However, when it comes to science…
Crickets.
Tech doesn’t seem to be our thing either.
We love to consume it, mind you.
Yet one rarely sees a Latino on the board of directors of a Silicon Valley start-up (landscaping start-ups don’t count).
Did I say rarely?
Change that for never.
Try this exercise: name three Latino players in the world of technology.
Crickets.
Any pharmaceutical company owned or operated by Latinos?
Any Latino Nobel prize winner in a category other than literature or peace?
We are 13% of the US population and just 4% of university faculty.
If this is not underachievement please tell me what is.
Univision, for God’s f***ing sake, is owned and operated by an Israeli dude!
And now el Chapo Guzmán, the one drug cartel baron who made it to the Forbes ranking of billionaires is in jail awaiting extradition.
Why?
What’s wrong with us?
There are 500 hundred million of us on the face of the planet.
Is there something in the water?
Is it our food?
Are we so overwhelmingly lavished in praise by our saintly Latina mothers that we reach adulthood with nothing left to prove?
Is it possible that Catholicism bogs us down?
Thank God & the Virgin, there are a few outliers out there though.
The Mas family runs Mastec, a big engineering contractor in the energy and telecommunications sectors.
It’s a start.
Few people know that Marcelo Claure, allegedly the richest Hispanic person living in the US today, founded Brightstar, a colossus of the mobile industry.
Brightstar is a huge company based out of Miami.
Really huge, a behemoth, possibly the global leader in logistics for the cell phone racket.
Chances are you never heard of it because it is strictly a B2B operation.
Mr. Claure did indeed get some media exposure as of late as the money man behind David Beckham’s push to start an MLS franchise in Miami.
Speaking of which.
Enter Luis Sosa.
Luis Sosa is a crazy Venezuelan dude in his early 40s.
He grew up between Miami and his homeland.
Mr. Sosa woke up one morning and decided that he wanted to create, develop & manufacture his own cell-phone brands.
Next thing you know he was in China, haggling with the big suppliers that provide the big cell-phone brands with their key components.
They laughed.
His orders were too small.
His designs & specifications were too ambitious.
He didn’t have the scale.
Any other guy would have just said f**k it & flown back to sunny Miami.
Not Luis.
He kept insisting until his first original brand was born: Blu.
An inexpensive, entry level handset unlocked for usage with any carrier.
With the ability to hold two SIM cards.
Yes, two SIM cards in one phone.
Two phone lines in one single handset.
It was a massive hit in emerging markets where consumers own more than one phone number and try to stay out of long term contracts.
Then came other brands like Parla, Niu and the tour de force: Yezz.
Yezz’s lineup consists of a series a high end double-SIM card Android devices with sexy design, crisp sound and state-of-the-art cameras that can give any of the leading brands a run for their money.
At a fraction of their prices.
Meet Luis.
The Venezuelan Steve Jobs.

Watch him here: