facilitated Namibia’s first ever participation in the AMPION Venturebus,
building local and international partnerships,
getting this blog populated
gaining clarity on long term goals
and coding on our product.
We would like to thank the following entities for their partnership at some point or another in 2014:
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In the following year, prototyping our product will be our paramount agenda as well as strengthening current initiatives and engaging the budding startup community in Windhoek.
We hope to meet you all again in 2015 along this long walk to freedom from gravity ;-)!
The StartupBus programme was founded in 2010 in the US by Elias Bizanneson the premise that “Entrepreneurship cannot be taught but we believe it can be learned”. The idea is to put around 40 multi disciplinary entrepreneurs on a bus in a given locale and have them build a company in three to five days after which they pitch their business models/ ideas to a panel of judges and one company gets chosen for funding/acceleration. The big payoff is the networks created by participants who go on to utilize their skills and new found connections back at their respective places of residence and/or business.
Companies started by StartupBus alumni.
Alumni of the StartupBus competition have spawned some notable startups amongst them Instacart which just recently secured 8.5 million USD in funding from famed Silicon Valley tech VC, Sequoia Capital, Branch which was recently purchased by Facebook for 15 million USD and Sterio.Me which has already partnered with schools across Africa to roll out its pilot programme to help students access educational content over mobile.
Fast forward to 2014 and StartupBus competition is now present on three continents with over 200 participants, but we would like to home in on the StartupBus Africa programme. The first StartupBus Africa competition kicked off in 2013 with a southern African leg touching down in Harare in Zimbabwe and Joburg, Bloemfontein, Cape Town in South Africa. This year the competition is aggressively expanding, enlisting a whopping 160 entrepreneurs and will include the following countries on the bus routes:
West Africa:
Lagos
Benin
Togo
Ghana
Ivory Coast
East Africa:
Kenya,
Uganda
Rwanda
Tanzania.
North Africa:
Morocco
Tunisia
Algeria
Southern Africa:
Zimbabwe
South Africa
Botswana
Namibia
The Buspreneurs on last year’s trip.
Last years StartupBus Africa competition spawned Workforce a mobile construction labor hiring platform, funeral.ly a funeral management app and Sterio.Me a free educational platform to help teachers engage more with their students through an SMS activated audible quiz. With this years expanded bus routes and many more entrepreneurs there should be many new exciting startups coming from African soil.
On top of their outstanding entrepreneurial skills, the participants bring sound knowledge in IT, web design, new media and business development. They will form interdisciplinary teams and work on different projects during the journey, with focus in 3 key areas: energy, healthcare and education.
The StartupBus process.
At least half of the buspreneurs come from Africa and because we believe in the entrepreneurial energy of young women, we strive to have 50% of female buspreneurs on each bus.
Namibia!
To make sure that the bus reaches Namibian roads we need YOUR help. There are several sponsorship options for your organisation or company to become partners in StartupBus Namibia. Please click here get into contact with us or send an email to [email protected].
