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

On this episode, you'll meet Simon Cant of Reinventure, and Danielle Szetho from FinTech Australia. Simon is a Co-Founder and Managing Director of Reinventure Group. Simon has spent his career working on innovation, both through venture and corporate innovation. As an innovation specialist at CANTT Associates and before that, WhatIf! Innovation, with a focus on disruptive innovation, he advised clients such Tennis Australia, UBS, NAB, Suncorp, AMP, Fairfax, News Limited and APN News & Media and Transport for NSW. Prior to that he worked with entrepreneurs, in both commercial startups, at TiNSHED Angel Group and social ventures at Social Ventures Australia. Over Danielle's 12+ year career she's cultivated a diverse set of skills from leadership roles in functions such as Strategy/Transformation, Business Development, Product Management, Data Analytics, Advertising/Marketing and Design/UX. Her career goal is to lead innovative, high performing teams to deliver projects and products that improve the way people live, work and play. In doing so, be a strategic, collaborative leader that drives transformational change - and has fun along the way!

On This Episode You'll Learn:

How are Australia’s banks approaching innovation?

Where in the Fintech Stack from Mobile Device to Bank Account do Simon and Danielle think is the most defensible position?

What gaps in Australia’s financial services industry are currently being pursued by Fintech startups?

How have Australian banks evolved since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis?

Say hello to Hillel Fuld, Co-founder and CMO of live broadcasting app ZCast. Essentially ZCast is a new way to host a Podcast. You can broadcast your unique message to the world with just a tap with no need for designated rooms or fancy equipment. Simply choose a topic and invite friends to begin live streaming your audio. You can also tune in to live podcasts from other users, and use the live chat feature to join the conversation with the hosts. You're able to go through the landing pages of your favorite casters to catch up on their previous content. With ZCast, it’s easy to access live, recorded and upcoming casts. When he's not focusing on marketing for ZCast, Hillel blogs for many influential sites including TechCrunch, Mashable, The Next Web, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, Venturebeat, and others. He also mentors startups across Israel in different accelerators including The Google Launchpad, the Microsoft Ventures accelerator, Techstars, The Junction, and more. Hillel has been named Israel's top marketer, has been featured on CNBC, Forbes, and many others and was recently added by Google to its marketing experts program.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

Out of all the companies Hillel advises and mentors, are there any common struggles that he finds Israeli startups face while scaling to other markets?

What’s the best vetting process for entrepreneurs to find value add advisors?

How should founders think about compensating strategic advisors?

What is the most important factor in Hillel’s opinion to attribute to Israel’s tech explosion?

Meet Jane Lu, CEO and founder of Australian online women's boutique Showpo. Jane founded Showpo back in 2010 from her parents’ garage. She previously worked in accounting and corporate finance, but after returning from a year abroad, was inspired to ditch the “cubicle life", so she quit her job to start her own business. With much enthusiasm for entrepreneurship, she set off to start her first business, which failed spectacularly. However, Jane was undeterred and got right back on the horse, starting the online fashion brand, Showpo the following month. What started off with a laptop and two shelves of clothing is now an online global fashion empire, shipping to 45 countries. Through being disruptive in the retail space and capitalising on the use of social media, Showpo now boasts a cult social following of over 1.6 million. Jane is a keynote speaker, is heavily involved in Australia’s startup scene and has been nominated for numerous awards, taking the title of Cosmopolitan’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015 and Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2016. Jane is extremely passionate about promoting entrepreneurship and women in business. She co-founded the group "Like Minded Bitches Drinking Wine", a business group that promotes and encourages girl bosses around the world. Since its inception in August 2015, the group has experienced enormous traction with 14,000+ members and meet up events in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, LA and San Francisco.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

Jane has been ignoring traditional advice regarding funding and how to scale. What specific advice about raising capital and scaling does she disagree with and why?

Focusing on the future of online fashion, where does Jane see the future of technology integrating with fashion?

ShowPo has 1.1M followers on Instagram, 850k like on Facebook what has Jane executed on at ShowPo to gain such a large and engaged following?

Jane has said that new businesses should focus on one social media platform in the beginning, as a new business how do you decide what social channels are right for you?

Meet Blake Larson, Head of International Growth for Hong Kong based same-day delivery service Lalamove. Blake has spent his career leading teams and overseeing operations during periods of high growth for both Fortune 500 companies and tech start-ups across four continents. In his current role, Blake oversees Lalamove’s business outside of Mainland China. In the past Blake served as the managing director of Rocket Internet’s Easy Taxi in Hong Kong and oversaw Business Development in the region from 2013 to 2014. He graduated from ESADE Business School in Spain and NUS in Singapore with an MBA, and University of Iowa with a BBA in Finance and Marketing.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

As Lalamove scales throughout southeast asia, has Blake found that they’ve been able to replicate their Hong Kong playbook in other countries?

What are some of the biggest challenges in same day delivery logistics in china?

How does Lalamove encourage referrals with their product experience?

How has Blake seen the Hong Kong startup ecosystem evolve during his time there?

Meet Marie Chevrier, CEO and founder of Sampler. Marie is a young entrepreneur originally from Montreal, Canada. She started her career in advertising at J. Walter Thompson in Toronto. From there, she had the chance to work at a venture capital firm in New York City. After a few years there, Marie came back to Toronto to merge her passion for marketing and technology. Marie started Sampler with a vision to transform the way consumer packaged good companies distribute promotional offers. Sampler is an offer management and analytics platform that helps brands and their agencies distribute product samples and coupons more effectively online. The Software as a Service platform helps marketers target consumers and measure the effectiveness of their campaign in a way that's revolutionizing traditional sampling strategies like in-store demos or experiential marketing. Sampler helps marketers integrate their strategies into their own re-marketing channels, gather deep insights about their potential consumers and continue the conversation with them past trial.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

What’s the best way for a startup selling to an Enterprise or SME client to get their first initial pilot programs?

Do companies typically use sampling as a lead generator to an upsell or are their goals brand awareness and word of mouth?

What is Sampler offering the Sampling industry that wasn’t available before?

Marie founded Sampler back in 2013, can she walk us through the evolution of Toronto’s tech scene since then?

Meet Nav Athwal, CEO and founder of San Francisco based startup RealtyShares. RealtyShares is an online marketplace for real estate investing that is transforming the real estate investment landscape. RealtyShares offers investors access to pre-vetted real estate investments and an ability to invest for as little as $5,000 from the convenience of their laptop or tablet. Nav has over a decade of experience in real estate as an attorney, broker, and investor. He lectures at UC Berkeley Law School and the Haas School of Business, and is often featured on CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business. He holds a JD from UC Berkeley Law School where he was class Valedictorian. Nav also writes about online investing, real estate, crowdfunding and fintech for Forbes, LinkedIn, Pulse and his work has also been featured by TechCrunch, Tech.co and Inman.

On this episode you'll learn:

Why does Nav think the Series B is usually the toughest round for companies to raise and what lessons did he learn going through that process?

Besides crowdfunding software, what other opportunities does Nav see in real estate for software companies?

How does Nav see machine learning fitting into RealtyShares platform and how does it give them a competitive advantage?

How was Nav able to solve the chicken and egg problems that every marketplace faces so quickly?

Say hello to Patrick Muhire, Co-founder of Rwanda based startup VugaPay. VugaPay is a Payment gateway system whose goal is to create a cross-boarder mobile money platform for the Unbanked individuals from emerging markets. This will enable mobile money users to 'transfer money' using any GSM phone locally or to other countries with mobile money services needless of queuing at banks or via Traditional wire-transfers. The product has been designed to meet the needs of this special customer segment.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

How big of a market is Rwanda for VugaPay?

Is Patrick still focusing on growth in Rwanda or has he already gotten to the point where he needs to start launching into other markets in Africa?

Before VugaPay Patrick started RwandaTV on which he had almost 100k users. How did that come into existence and is he still working on it?

How has Patrick been able to build a money transfer system that works across networks?

What are VugaPay’s best user acquisition channels?

What social media platforms are most popular in Rwanda?

Meet Toyin Umesiri, Senior Manager of Strategy and Governance at Walmart. Toyin has leveraged years of Global ERP implementation in driving strategy and designing IT governance frameworks at Walmart. She's collaborated with C level & market leadership to design multi-year roadmaps across multiple domains. Her main focus is on leveraging Walmart's scale and global talent footprint to drive a faster, better, cheaper model of large scale implementation. She's embedded in driving the strategy of Legacy to ERP transformation efforts, and facilitating partner relationships as it relates to designing the most effective Resource framework for global markets. Toyin was also responsible for guiding the implementation strategy for Global Vendor Sourcing to Payment areas: Source to Contract (S2C), Procure to Pay (P2P), Real Estate Facilities Maintenance (REFM), Indirect Procurement (IP) & Inventory. She works with cross functionally at the leadership level to gain alignment and ensure solution delivery is Best in Class.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

How can Africa best engage their Diaspora to further catalyst economic growth on the continent?

What major trade gaps currently exist between US and Africa, and how we can we best close them?

What advantages do you feel you have being an African immigrant in the US?

How would Toyin describe the Nigerian Culture?

Meet the CEO and Co-founder of BitPesa, Elizabeth Rossiello. Elizabeth has lived and worked in Kenya since 2009 and knows financial services from the Mara to the Board room. BitPesa is a Pan-African FinTech Start-up that offers fast, efficient, and low-cost B2B payments to and from African bank accounts and mobile money wallets. BitPesa has operations in six African companies in East, Central and West Africa and a license from the FCA in the UK. BitPesa was the first company in Africa to offer digital FX brokerage and is the largest market-maker in the sector for African currencies. With offices in Nairobi, Lagos, Dakar and London - they have local teams that understand the difficulties of making payments to and from the region. They work with brokers around the global, settling in real-time between Africa and Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia.

On This Episode You'll Learn:

What’s the cost of operating in Nairobi relative to Lagos or cape town?

How does BitPesa simplify B2B payments across the African Continent?

What does the seed funding landscape look like in Nairobi?

What’s the criteria for launching a new African country?

Meet E Aboyeji, co-founder of Flutterwave. E considers himself an impact entrepreneur who is passionate about building the future of Africa. Over the last seven years he has been a youth activist at the United Nations, President of a student owned media company and a serial entrepreneur who has started, grown and sold angel and venture backed companies in the impact entrepreneurship space. He also contributes significantly to several efforts to build sustainable impact enterprises by bringing together financial, social, political and human capital together to support other impact entrepreneurs as an Entrepreneur, Angel Investor and Advisor. In May 2016 E founded Flutterwave. Flutterwave is one simple API for processing payments across card, bank account and mobile money platforms in over thirty African countries. Flutterwave has processed over $20 million in transactions to date for clients that include Paystack, Page Microfinance Bank, and Access Bank. The founding team has several years of experience working at global technology companies like Google Wallet, Andela and PayPal as well as several African Commercial and Central Banks. Flutterwave is a US company, headquartered in San Francisco, California.

On This Episode You'll learn:

What was it like meeting Mark Zuckerberg and what in particular interested him about Andela?

What does E see as the best role for African governments to play in allocating public resources to further catalyze innovation?

When founding Flutterwave E mentioned how it was a solution for major challenges you witnessed building Andela. Walk us through your experience going through those problems.

Through E’s work with Flutterwave, what does he see as the future for blockchain and bitcoin to play in the African economy?