Kenya based entrepreneurs launch talk forums
Article published in The Exchange on 2019-04-02
Nairobi is expected to host a new series of entrepreneurial discussions and talks that will promote the growth of businesses in the region.
Kaleidoscope Africa is an initiative by four successful Nairobi-based entrepreneurs, aiming to create a forum for the entrepreneurship community of Nairobi.
The concept is centered around new, innovative entrepreneurship-related topics to be discussed or presented in an interactive session where they strongly encourage participation by the audience. Before and after the main content, participants mingle and network.
Havar Bauck, a Nairobi based perennial entrepreneur and the co-founder of HotelOnline, who is one of the initiators of the talk show notes that the aim to bring together entrepreneurs, investors, entrepreneurship enablers, and managers from international tech companies, and carefully select topics to appeal to those target groups.
“We believe that by bringing together the stakeholders of the entrepreneurship community, we can trigger the kind of interactions that may bring the whole community forward. At the same time, we believe that the content in itself must be so interesting and innovative that all participants can go home feeling they learnt something from the session,” notes Bauck.
Others who have partnered with Bauck to start Kaleidoscope Africa are Preben Wik, Jesper Hörnberg and Joram Mwinamo.
Kaleidoscope Africa is a non-profit initiative. Bauck adds, “We are doing this because we are all passionate about entrepreneurship, and because we have already walked down that path of blood, sweat and tears before we succeeded. We believe that by sharing our experience, and bringing people together to exchange their knowledge and ideas, we can help boost and promote entrepreneurship in Kenya. To us, that is a big goal in itself.”
Bauck notes that Kenya is one of the hottest investment destinations in Africa with young, innovative startups that are attracting investments at an unprecedented rate, while international Venture Capital (VC) firms are flocking to Nairobi like never before.
“Nairobi and Silicon Valley are far apart, though. Not just in terms of kilometers. Goals and mindsets are also widely different, and the approaches to building and scaling startups, may even be on different planets.”
Kaleidoscope Africa is organizing these monthly talks with the next talk show being at the Nailab with the tittle ‘The Understanding Gap: Kenyan Startups vs. International VCs ‘. The show will focus on how can Kenyan startups can better prepare themselves for the international VCs, and what do the Vcs need to understand before sitting down with their next prospective investment case.