South African Start-Up winners love Tel Aviv
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South African Start-Up winners love Tel Aviv

  • 11/30/2015
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  • Kennedy Kitheka, Funda , Director writes on his experience at the DLD Tel Aviv Festival

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    I’m finally settled back in SA after a lengthy set of trips in Europe and Israel. As you can imagine it has been an intense couple of months filled with back to back meetings and pitching.
     
    I can comfortably say that if the DLD Tel Aviv Festival is an accurate indicator of the state of the Startup Nation and its place in the high-tech/Startup world, then it is outstanding how the Start-up ecosystem in Israel has developed.
     We arrived on the Sunday morning after quite a lengthy flight, to 80% humidity and 35 degrees heat and that moment we realised we were in the Middle East! But I was at least taking comfort in it being a Sunday and thinking it would be a slow day and we would have some time to recover in our apartment:) But of course, Sunday is the first day of the week in Israel! So the entire first day was filled with meetings and workshops. Devin and I fought through and after some of the presentations, particularly from Startup Central; we knew it would be a special week.
     
    The panels, meet-ups and office visits made up the official conference schedule, but much of the action was really happening behind the scenes in our informal meetings between entrepreneurs, investors and other fellow entrepreneurs from around the world. We received an incredible amount of support and positive feedback from potential partners and investors who were all very willing to have further discussions and we are in touch now as we continue to grow our business and open a formal series A round of Funding next year. These contacts are invaluable to us and made the trips extremely worthwhile.
     
    I think even more importantly was the network of 23 other start-ups and workshops led by local companies who actively participated in critical feedback and workshop sessions on our business. The wealth of knowledge we shared about our experience, market knowledge and contacts connected us at a much deeper level than most conferences usually provide and we’ve already began opening business relationships with some of the other startups from different parts of the world.
    The organisers were also great ambassadors of the City. We were welcomed by Talia Azoulai and she helped us organize personal meetings and made introductions that were specific to each startup. She was just an incredible ambassador for Israel.
     
     I feel so blessed to have been given the opportunity to attend the DLD festival and experience first hand what has been well written about the Start-up Nation. I learnt so much during my stay there and it was just incredible. Tel Aviv's startup and innovation ecosystem is rivaled only by Silicon Valley and it was easy to see why, its environment is thriving, accessible, supportive and I think SA could benefit tremendously from a cross boarder collaboration in order to develop/improve our own ecosystem (But I’ll leave that to the people at the Embassy to try tackle that).
    The whole trip was simply amazing and again thank you for the support you have given to us.
     
    Incredible city! :):)
     
    NET SAVVY: Kennedy Kitheka, left, and Kumbirai Gundani of Funda say technology can help solve SA’s education problems. Picture: TREVOR SAMSON