One Giant Leap to announce “South Africa's next tech hero”

Ntando Shabalala

Amongst the panellists are Llew Claasen (partner at Newtown Partners), Clive Butkow (CEO at Kalon Venture Partners), Professor Barry Dwolatzky (founder at Tshimologong), and Stephen Newton (ex-head of Google).

The current “South Africa’s next tech hero” programme was launched on 8 June 2017 in Johannesburg. Entrepreneurs from both Johannesburg and Cape Town were invited to pitch “a tech idea that will disrupt the African continent”. After a rigorous selection process, both on- and offline, the eight entrepreneurs were cherry-picked for their promising business acumen, resilient entrepreneurial spirit, and savvy technical insight.

Selected startups

They are Alex Gabriels and Jade Venter from Spritzed: “The Airbnb for office space”, Patrick Machekera from Ispani: “A brand activation agency focused on township communities”, Aubrey Nyaguse from Skills Gorilla: “A talent matchmaking platform”, Anthony Bruce from Flippen Clever: “A textbook rental service for students”, Tannon Balanco from Bazinga Services: “On demand transportation services”, Thomas Hart from Rover: “A personalised travel platform” and Ntando Shabalala from Graft House: “Tinder for job seekers”.

The purpose of the programme is for the startups to take their wild idea to a validated business model, with their prototype created and their first customers on-boarded. The focus is on the lean and agile: how to onboard your customers, which can usually take over a year, in the space of just 12 weeks while not spending any money?

One Giant Leap has a secret recipe for this: it offers a combination of weekly bootcamps by its mentors who are highly successful entrepreneurs and investors, field trips to partner organisations such as Facebook Africa and IBM Research, weekly one-on-one mentorship by both business and tech experts as well as product development.

“The word ‘business incubator’ suggests a nurturing approach to growing startups, but it’s still quite rare to run a business in a nurturing way. Ours is a 'conscious incubator'; our philosophy is to focus on building people so that their businesses will be built. We do this by providing an opportunity to get up close and personal with successful entrepreneurs and investors, who - besides sharing their entrepreneurial insights and achievements - share their mistakes and personal struggles in an honest way. This human-centered approach creates an open environment for people to connect and learn, and that’s where the magic happens,” says Moniek van Erven, head of One Giant Leap.