In the months that followed the 2001 financial crisis, Bilinkis's company slowly recovered. Brazil, which had been widely expected to follow Argentina into crisis, avoided serious financial turmoil, and Officenet's sales continued to grow there. Just three years after his darkest moment in business, Bilinkis negotiated the sale of Officenet to Staples. Bilinkis won't say how much money he made, but he clearly did all right. He lives in a penthouse apartment in one of the city's ritziest neighborhoods, and last February, he took his kids to the Super Bowl in Dallas and cheered for the Packers. He left Officenet last year and is now investing money in local start-ups and mentoring entrepreneurs.
Bilinkis is a man who takes his responsibility to society seriously, but he admitted to me that when he sold the company, the thought of hiding the proceeds from the sale in a foreign bank account flitted through his mind. Every few years, Argentina's tax authorities, desperate for more revenue, announce a tax amnesty, allowing wealthy individuals who have evaded taxes to report their income and pay as little as 1 percent in tax instead of the standard 35 percent income tax. Bilinkis paid the full rate. "I felt like such an idiot," he says. "I knew at some point there was going to be a tax moratorium."
On the day that Argentina exploded, Bilinkis's co-founder, Andy Freire, was in São Paulo at Officenet's Brazilian headquarters. His wife called him and told him that a hundred or so looters had broken into the local supermarket and were taking everything. Freire decided it was time to leave. "I felt like the universe was against me," he says. "We had been ethical entrepreneurs building value in a market where no one was as ethical as we were. The value destruction we were going through was unfair. I wasn't going to put all of my risk in Latin America again in my life." At the end of 2002, he left the company and moved his family to Miami.
The following year, Freire founded Axialent, a management consultancy focused on leadership and corporate culture. He had imagined Axialent as a second act—a modern, global company with headquarters in the U.S.—but Argentina slowly pulled him back. For one thing, the cost of employing accountants in Argentina was a third of what it was in the United States. Freire began hiring back-office help in Buenos Aires and now has 40 employees in Buenos Aires and 110 in the United States. "I realized that this is what Argentina can do," he says. "We have amazing talent, but the market is not Argentina. The market is the world."
Freire splits his time among Miami, New York, London, and Buenos Aires, but he is a full-time booster of his home country, serving as an adviser to the mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri. When I met Freire in Axialent's Argentine office, he told me that his country's problems, while serious, were not intractable. "The reality is that people don't have to be unethical," he says. "It's the terrible power of the environment and the culture. When I'm in the U.S., I stop at every Stop sign. I come here and I say, 'What is a Stop sign?' " (Officials from the federal government's ministries of finance, industry, and justice did not respond to requests for interviews.)
American entrepreneurs are blessed in this way. Our country has so far escaped the cancers of uncertainty, mistrust, and cynicism. We may complain about taxes, but the vast majority of us pay what we owe. Our country has low inflation and sane regulations. The Argentine entrepreneurs I met see America as a model of efficiency and stability. They keep their money in U.S. bank accounts, buy apartments in New York City, and take their kids to Disneyland. Argentines see America as a country that works.
A few days after I return to the United States, I meet up with Patricio Fuks, who has come to New York City to pitch American investors on a $25 million real estate fund he is starting so he can build more hotels in Latin America. As we drink beer in a glitzy rooftop bar, he complains that American investors seem more interested in putting their money in exotic financial instruments than in tangible assets like hotels. "Every guy I meet is a hedge fund guy," he says. "A hedge fund guy is like an astronaut to me. I don't understand how they make money."
He tells me that if he were a reader of Inc., he would be trying to sell products to the developing world—Argentina or Brazil or Peru—where there is still demand for the basic things a society needs to function. You don't need to be a hedge fund guy to make money in Argentina; you just need to look around and see what's missing. Hotels, for instance. "Americans don't look abroad," he complains.
Of course, this was a self-serving suggestion, but it's one I heard a lot in Argentina, and I think the advice has some merit. If American business owners are truly worried about the long-term prospects of the U.S. economy, they should be doing what the Argentines do: looking outside their borders to find markets in which there is less uncertainty—or at least different kinds of uncertainty.
Later, we walk along Central Park South toward the Ritz-Carlton, where Fuks was staying, Fuks lights a cigarette and looks out on the park, admiring the view. "I really think the U.S. is a model society," he says. "Look at you: You're a journalist. You can't afford a private jet, but you can get married, maybe have kids. If you were a journalist in Argentina, you'd be making $1,000 a month, and the only way you could make more would be to write what the government tells you to. In America, anybody can be anything."
Max Chafkin is a senior writer for the magazine. He wrote about entrepreneurship in Norway for the February issue.
