Standard Bank Incubator partners Startup Grind

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Startup Grind is designed to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. The initiative hosts monthly events in 200 cities and 85 countries, featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors who share personal stories and lessons learned on the road to building great companies. Globally, they have featured founders such as Reid Hoffman who founded LinkedIn, Mike Krieger from Instagram and Biz Stone who started Twitter.

The newly formed partnership will see these monthly events hosted in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. Similar events are also held in four other African cities, including Nairobi, Lusaka, Khartoum, and Eldoret.

“As a company that believes in supporting entrepreneurs with their business growth and development needs through our various incubation programmes, Standard Bank is proud to partner with Startup Grind to help the startup community in South Africa, as they continue to take their rightful place in the South African economy,” comments Jayshree Naidoo, head of the Standard Bank Incubator.

Informally running since 2010

Founded in Silicon Valley, Startup Grind has hosted thousands of fireside (informal) chats since its founding in 2010 and, to date has helped many entrepreneurs find mentorship, connect to potential partners and networks, pursue funding and reach new users. Startup Grind has been running in South Africa since 2013.

The format of the monthly meetups starts with an hour-long networking, helping like-minded individuals to connect with each other, followed by a 45-minute fireside chat where a successful entrepreneur is interviewed to tell their business journey and any success (and failure) stories that formed part of it. The questions are structured in a way to inspire the entrepreneurs in the room on how they managed to make their business a success.

A 15-minute Q&A session, during which the audience can informally interview the main guest, is followed by another networking opportunity to solidify relationships that have been established.

Guillaume de Smedt, global community director of Startup Grind, mentions: “The partnership with Standard Bank is very welcomed and I believe it will take Startup Grind's Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg chapters to new levels.”

“The Standard Bank Incubator has already achieved much in the start-up space in a short amount of time, and has built value in the startup ecosystem in South Africa. We look forward to working with our new partner in order to impact more entrepreneurs locally and to help them to think more globally,” says De Smedt.

Success story

A local success story is that of SweepSouth, the Cape Town-based, on-demand cleaning service. In 2015, Startup Grind was approached by leading startup accelerator 500Startups to recommend successful startups from around the world. In turn, the chapter director of Startup Grind Cape Town approached SweepSouth, and after working a few sleepless nights to complete the application, they got into the programme and learnt incredible lessons to expand their network during the 500Startups programme in Silicon Valley.

Startup Grind Johannesburg will be re-launched in June 2016 by co-directors Guillaume de Smedt and Mohamed Chohan. These events will be taking place in the Standard Bank Incubator space in Rosebank.

By attending one of Startup Grind’s South African events, entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to hear the success stories from the following speakers:

• Lynette Ntuli from IgniteSA.com and Innate IS - Johannesburg, 21 June
  
• Yair Shimansky from Shimansky Jewellers - Cape Town, 27 June
  
• Justin Clarke from Private Property - KwaZulu-Natal, 12 July
  
• Franz Struwig from iKubu and Garmin - Cape Town, 25 July