The Global Startup Movement - Startup Ecosystem Leaders, Global Entrepreneurship, and Emerging Market Innovation

Julius Odai is Cofounder and Chief Product Officer for Devless. DevLess is a platform that allows developers to easily build robust backends for your web and mobile applications by piecing together plug and play backend modules in as little as 10 minutes. Devless, has been in the MEST incubator since 2015 and is one of the very few African startups with a product targeted at developers.

Say hello to Ashwin Ravichandran, GM of MEST Accra. Ashwin is from India, and has been working with startups since he graduated with a Computer Science degree in 2011. He has worked with startups in the recruitment, lifestyle, education and data + social impact sectors. Ashwin has worked in almost every vertical in a company because he believes every single member of the team counts and their skills can be utilized in every way. His favorite being user experience/user interfaces and customer journeys. Ashwin fell in love with the African Tech space when he joined MEST in 2015. It showed him the true scope and potential of the space here. The challenges faced by Africa are many and each solution is extremely disruptive. He like's the simple fact that technology can be involved in every step in this solution. Be it in the financial, lifestyle or social sector, technology is going to be the backbone.

Neku Atawodi has extensive experience as a self-starter entrepreneur, having spear-headed the launch-to-market of companies in various sectors under her watch. She is also the founder of Malaik, an impact-focused approach to equity crowdfunding in Africa, which gives investors access to the continent’s opportunities, and mediates its risks through a very thorough due diligence process. Previously, Neku worked as a Technical Advisor to the Ministry of Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja, where she developed the FCT’s revolutionary File Tracking System. Neku is passionate about empowering African entrepreneurs through tech, and was a member of founding team for Africa’s pioneer Impact Investment Tracking Platform. Neku is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, an Associate Fellow of the Royal Commonwealth Society, and a Clinton Global Initiative Lead Mentor. She holds a Masters Degree in International Business from the European Business School, London, and is an avid equestrian in her spare time. She was recently named as one of Forbes Africa’s 30 under 30.

Meet Ammishaddai Ofori, CEO and Co-founder of Flippy Campus - a social app for tertiary students. Ammishaddai is excited about technology and how it can improve the lives of everyday people. He consult's for start-ups and companies on their branding and go to market strategies. His love for tech got gim co-hosting on Citi Trends, a weekly podcast on Citi 97.3 FM on technology trends from around the world. When He's not being a tech nerd, Ammishaddai write's and perform's poetry and MCs for weddings and professional events. Flippy Campus is a social application that helps students get updated on what is happening on their campuses. On "Flippy", students can get to know other people on their campus, department and halls, they can also discover trending hot topics as well as events happening on campus. Announcements from departments also live on Flippy Campus so students don’t need to visit any notice board for information. It also now allows students to interact with students from other universities.

Say hello to Kelechi Udoagwu, Head of Communications at MEST and Cofounder at Skrife. She's a mentor/coach focused on African graduates and young adults in transitional phases in their lives. Skrife is an online platform that provides brands, startups, digital agencies, entrepreneurs with quality written content by leveraging on an exclusive curated community of freelance writers and editors. In 2016/2017, Kelechi worked with 20+ startups/teams and over 60 individual entrepreneurs to launch and execute dig-marketing and communications strategies to build solid online visibility and grow into sustainable businesses. She contribute's career advice and thought pieces to True Africa, She Inspires Her, For Creative Girls and Bella Naija; and mentor's young entrepreneurs/professionals via The MasterCard Scholars Program and For Creative Girls.

Meet Chris Schultz the founder and CEO of Launch Pad, a startup community and workspace for entrepreneurs, creatives and professionals. Launch Pad was born in New Orleans and is on a mission to help people across the country be successful building their businesses and careers while working in a community where they feel like they belong.

Chris is an active angel investor through Voodoo Ventures, investing in a number of rapidly growing companies in New Orleans and elsewhere including Lucid, 86co, and Neighborland, and Niko Niko. 

On this episode you'll learn:

How can coworking spaces differentiate themselves in such a saturated market?

How did New Orlean’s tech scene help rebuild the city after Hurricane Katrina?

What is the most effective exchange of value between startup ecosystems?

What startup categories is New Orlean’s strongest in?

Say hello to Albert Stepanyan, founder of Develandoo. Albert is an A.I. Evangelist and Entrepreneur who loves code. He has an entrepreneurial mindset with a passion for coding. Currently, he acts as the CEO and lead strategist at Develandoo. Develandoo is a software accelerator that is changing the way companies build products. His experience includes acting as CTO of a Munich-based Startup accelerator, lead engineer at various enterprises, and lead engineer or technical co-founder on more than 50 high-profile projects. Albert Stepanyan saw two fundamental problems in the way that software products were being developed. 1. Companies were struggling to hire and build teams in house. And 2. Hiring an outside vendor was risky and didn’t always look good to key stakeholders. Albert created Develandoo’s new model to include mixed teams and the ability to hire your team as full-time employees after the project. This model was immediately adopted by startup accelerators and companies such as Kichink, MoneyPark, Swiss Startup Factory, WeLocalize and more. In the first few years of business, Develandoo went from an idea to a million dollar business receiving investment capital. They are operating globally with locations in California, Mexico City, Munich, Berlin, Armenia.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

What are the biggest differences in Western European vs’ Eastern European’s entrepreneurs?

Are AI’s current capabilities being over-estimated by the market?

Why has Berlin overtaken Munich as Germany’s startup hub?

Where in the world do the most successful companies in Develandoo locate to after the program?

Meet Dzenan Skulj, founder of Parttimerz. Parttimerz is a kickass freelancing platform featuring premium grade freelancers of diverse background and specialization. Unlike other freelancing platforms, they believe that less is more and are determined to give their clients the best in class freelancing service that money can buy. They've built a freelancing platform that’s unconventional and disruptive. While everyone who’s got something to offer in terms of services to their freelancing community is welcome to join for free, only the premium grade freelancers are guaranteed long and prosperous freelancing careers. In other words, they’ve designed a system which rewards top performers on monthly basis with a generous commission and at the same time weeds out the underperformers. This way they ensure their clients expectations are always met, if not exceeded.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

What is the story of Parttimerz’s founding?

How does Parttimerz differentiate from other freelancing platforms?

What was it like growing up as an entrepreneurial kid in war torn Sarajevo?

Current state of entrepreneurship in Sarajevo?

Meet Yat Siu, Director and Co-founder of Animoca Brands. Animoca Brands is a Game Developer and Publisher for branded content such as Garfield, Doraemon, Ultraman and others that went public on the ASX in January 2015. Yat moved to Hong Kong in 1996, where he set up Hong Kong Cybercity, the first free web page and email provider in Asia. In 1997 he joined AT&T Solutions' System Integration practice, but left in 1998 to set up Outblaze, which developed innovative web-based multilingual white label communication and collaboration services. Yat's steady leadership and vision steered Outblaze through the Dotcom Bubble and several subsequent crises. Outblaze became a world leader in white label hosted web services, winning numerous awards and accolades.Yat Siu was called a World Economic Forum Global Leader of Tomorrow and a Young Global Leader of Tomorrow. He has numerous awards for his contributions in business and society.

On this episode you'll learn:

What was it like navigating through the dot-com bubble in Hong Kong?

Why did IBM acquire Outblaze’s messaging platform?

With the hundreds of thousands of games on the App Store has mobile gaming hit a point of saturation?

What are Yat’s VR predictions over the coming years?

Meet Daniel Araújo, Daniel worked at Google for almost 5 years as an Analyst in the Branding Sector, where he studied Internet trends and consumer behavior. Attentive.us is building the first fully fledged information assistant for any professional. To do that, they first need to understand the right context of each one of them, their priorities and which companies would benefit most from their product at this point in time. Attentive is starting with one specific use case in mind: sales teams. Have you ever tried to keep up to date on all news about your leads and clients? Maybe you set up a Google alert or tried to follow people on LinkedIn, but that's a lot of manual work. With Attentive connected to your CRM, they can get all of those insights directly to you, effortlessly.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

In an interview with Small cap Nation Daniel said that as an Intelligence company, you must win the US market first? Why is that?

Does the incumbency advantage in AI with companies like Google and Microsoft owning some of the world’s largest data sets concern Daniel?

What is Daniel’s criteria and outside perspective on what areas in the US he finds the most enticing to locate to?

Does Daniel believe AI’s overall capabilities are being overestimated by the broader market?