In 2019, Eve Burton, Chairwoman of HearstLab and Chief Legal Officer at Hearst Corporation, knew that HearstLab was at a key inflection point for growth-with opportunities to take on additional capital and expand internationally. HearstLab is an incubator focused on early-stage, women-led start-ups innovating across media, business information, and technology, HearstLab provided capital, office space in New York City's Hearst Tower, and access to Hearst's resources, while taking an equity interest in the companies. The Lab was started in 2015 with the goals of increasing visibility and opportunity for women both inside and outside of Hearst, create value from investing in women-led start-ups, and continuing to bring innovation to Hearst.

CircleUp was founded in 2012 as a marketplace that matched accredited investors to emerging consumer packaged goods companies. A tool that the team developed early-on to reduce the friction involved in finding and evaluating new companies, Helio, gradually become very accurate in predicting the growth trajectory of early-stage companies. Ryan Caldbeck, co-founder and CEO of CircleUp, decided in 2018 to shut down the marketplace and focus the company on leveraging Helio's insights to directly provide equity and credit financing to CPG startups. This decision was followed by two difficult, significant discussions. First, Caldbeck met with the board of directors, where one investor reacted negatively and asked to sell his stake in the company. Second, Caldbeck presented the new direction to CircleUp employees, some of whom worried what would happen if the company became an investment firm instead of a tech company. By 2019, Caldbeck was on the precipice of another big change for CircleUp. The firm was raising a large fund to begin systematic investing, but finding investors for the disruptive offering was proving difficult. Additionally, as word spread about the power of Helio's insights CircleUp began receiving partnership offers from large, established companies. These offers caused Caldbeck to debate if CircleUp should further monetize Helio.

Nico Shea founded Cumplo in 2011 to enable peer-to-peer lending for consumers before changing the company's focus to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). Cumplo was a financial technology ("fintech") company that provided a platform for SMBs applying for a loan to be matched with investors willing to fund that loan. The platform further differentiated itself among SMBs by allowing companies to use unpaid invoices as collateral. Despite significant issues in the beginning with regulators, Cumplo operations in Chile grew to become one of Latin America's largest business crowdlending platform. Cumplo facilitated its first loan in Mexico in February of 2018, a month before the local government passed a new law regulating fintech companies. This enabled the team to work closely with regulators to create rules that would prevent bad players from damaging the industry and not be surprised by the rules that were enacted. While the team also faced challenges in establishing Cumplo's Mexican operations, after months of work they built a high-performing and motivated team. Having proven the Cumplo business model to be successful in both Chile and Mexico, Shea was anxious to begin more rapid expansion. Now that Cumplo had been successfully established itself in the largest Spanish-speaking market, Shea considered expanding to the second largest market of Spanish-speakers, the United States.

Entrepreneurs looking to launch start-ups in developing economies must confront numerous challenges that their peers in more developed countries may be less likely to encounter. Depending on the country in which they are operating, entrepreneurs in developing economies oftentimes lack access to human capital and professional services, sufficient sources of funding, large markets for their products, adequate infrastructure, and predictable legal and regulatory processes, among myriad other challenges. This note aims to explore these challenges in more depth-while simultaneously examining some representative countries and regions in which entrepreneurship is thriving. The note also serves as a complement (and informal update) to the 2013 World Economic Forum Report: "Entrepreneurial Ecosystems around the Globe and Company Growth Dynamics," as well as an update to our 2016 Teaching Note to include recent developments in select Asian, African, and Latin American entrepreneurial ecosystems. This note is intended primarily for current or budding entrepreneurs interested in starting a new venture in a developing economy, as well as investors seeking to fund start-ups in these countries. The note is also relevant for policy makers looking to encourage entrepreneurship in their cities or countries, universities wanting to support entrepreneurship, and corporations seeking a better understanding of their role in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of a developing economy.