La Paz, Bolivia

rian Reale has just pulled his dirty, 1986 Toyota Land Cruiser to a stop on the edge of the single-lane road that the Inter-American Development Bank has named "The World's Most Dangerous Road." It is nothing more than a ribbon of dirt notched out of the mountainside, winding narrowly around tight, blind curves. To use this road, drivers must register with the police as they enter and depart, so that authorities can account for vehicles lost over the edge.

	An Intern in La Paz
	Setting Up Shop in Latin America

Six inches to the left of Reale's front wheel, a cliff drops more than a half mile to the jungle floor, or so it's said--the night is so dark that we can't see anything outside the beams of our headlights. Keeping a steady eye on a large truck muscling its way up the mountain toward us, Reale breaks a tense silence: "Like I said, this is best done at night. You can see the headlights approaching, which gives you plenty of time to pull over." As the truck lurches toward us, there appears to be no room for it to pass, and even the cocksure Reale white-knuckles the wheel. A bump will likely send us over the cliff. The headlights flash brightly and finally the truck barrels past, missing Reale's bumper by what seems a microscopic margin. "Okay, let's roll," says Reale, as casually as if we had just stopped for sodas. He executes this heart-stopping maneuver a dozen more times en route to the Bolivian jungle town of Coroico.

A day later, Reale (pronounced reel) is back home in the heart of downtown La Paz--at once a modern Latin American city and a global backwater. Its handful of tall buildings jut from the city's center, which occupies the lowest point of a bowl whose rim is formed by the spectacular Andean peaks, including the 21,000-foot Illimani. La Paz, unlike most of Bolivia, does see at least a trickle of Hollywood films and European fashions. But at the same time, the capital is a fine place to shop among countless competing vendors for cultural vestiges like desiccated frogs or llama fetuses, which are believed to bring good luck.

Colosa together: Vernon, left, and Reale Photo: Lelis Vernon

Walking the Prado, or main boulevard, to work, Reale weaves through streams of well-groomed businessmen, politicos, and longhaired students. A billboard with SONY in sleek, blue letters vies for attention with a crude portrait of Che Guevara painted on a bed sheet and hung from an iron fence. Reale stops to chat with business associates in effortless Spanish. Shoeshine boys, their faces hidden behind cloth masks, hustle him for business. Everywhere the scene is punctuated by cholas, indigenous women of Bolivia, in long, full skirts and wool bowler hats. Many carry babies slung across their backs and swaddled so completely in colorful, striped aguayos that only a head or, occasionally, a foot is visible.

It is against this unlikely backdrop that Reale '93 and childhood pal Bobby Vernon M.B.A. '00 have launched a new software company, Colosa, Inc. A young firm with only seven employees and two primary software products, Colosa is crafting a new approach to survival in the beleaguered high-tech industry. The two directors are rethinking not just where on Earth to plant a tech firm, but also how to use a combination of flexible products and inexpensive labor to streamline the way industries get work done.

The idea for Colosa was born in 1999, in Buenos Aires, where Vernon was living and working as an executive in the insurance industry while simultaneously earning his M.B.A. through the Fuqua School's Global Executive program. Reale, living even then in Bolivia, made a trip to Argentina to visit his friend. "We were jogging in a park near where he lived," Reale recalls, "and he was talking about how inefficient the insurance industry was, how it would be easy to cut out the middleman. And then he asked me, 'Could you build an application to address that?' As if I'm some kind of specialist!"

The pair decided to take advantage of Vernon's business education to flesh out their idea. As a Fuqua project in 1999--still the height of the technology-sector boom--Vernon wrote a business plan for a company that would offer a software tool enabling insurance and reinsurance companies to make transactions securely, online, across continents. Nearly four roller-coaster years later, the project has metamorphosed into a company that offers a range of highly adaptable software based on two core packages--SegurosMarket, which facilitates risk-sharing and the sale of policies between insurers, and FLUID, which allows myriad businesses to upload bureaucratic paperwork to the Internet. Colosa has targeted the small- to mid-sized business that needs quick turnaround and cannot afford a Microsoft solution. Remarkably, it is working. Colosa broke even at the end of last year.

Inside the company's two-room office on the twelfth floor of a boxy building just a block off the Prado, Reale checks in with the company's graphic designer, Tom Barnett, a New Zealander and former backpacker. Reale diverted him from his globetrotting and persuaded him to settle in full-time at a computer monitor, putting a user-friendly face on the company's new software. The office has the seat-of-the-pants feel of a Silicon Alley start-up circa 1999, minus frills like Aeron chairs and video-conferencing systems.

At the only other desk in the office sits Bolivian Carlos Gili, senior programmer. It is Gili who translates the brainstorms of Colosa's non-programming directors into functional code. His salary of $700 per month, about what a programmer in the U.S. earns in three days, has a buying power here roughly equivalent to a $40,000 annual salary in the United States. Physically absent from the office is Vernon, who lives and works in Miami, handling Colosa's finances and hustling to expand the business.

The office windows look directly across the street to the building that houses Reale's other company, an Internet service provider called Unete, which he started in 1997 and still runs. Eleven stories down, looping just above the traffic, hundreds of loose, black telephone cables run out of Unete's building and across the street into Colosa's. Eyeing the primitive cable system with an undiluted air of incredulity, Reale says, "That's how you get the Internet to the people in Bolivia."