The South has gone Silicon

Last week a major meetup of tech heads, marketing geeks and digerati was held in Camps Bay to officially launch an initiative to turn Cape Town into the Silicon Valley of South Africa. The initiative is named Silicon Cape. The brains behind the initiative are South African born entrepreneurs Vinny Lingham and Justin Stanford. (more on them on www.google.com). The concept for Silicon Cape was very well received by both the provincial government and business community alike.

This is very good news for a variety of reasons:

1. This will make direct venture capital, angel and equity investment in South African born and bred intellectual property possible, so our entrepreneurs don’t have to run and ply their trade in foreign countries anymore.

2. Youngsters from the dusty streets of Cape Flats townships will no longer have to pay Pentech, Cape Tech, UWC or UCT fees just for tertiary exposure that’ll give them a cubicle at some blue chip company. They will have direct access to digital academies that were once the exclusive domain of the affluent and academically astute.

3. It creates a serious opportunity for an attempt to circumvent conventional secondary and tertiary education, whose curriculum has been developed to “create employees” and not nurture entrepreneurship and “outside the box thinking” in any way. Via empowerment centres that are based in and near townships youngsters can now have exposure to industries they might never know exist by any other means currently at their disposal.

4. The possibility of more incubation hubs to help entrepreneurs give their ideas legs while in startup phase. Many ideas have died a painful death because entrepreneurs are not receiving the necessary support, or the existing incubators have terms and conditions we just cannot meet.

5. Our ideas can now stay in South Africa because direct investment will decrease infrastructure and connectivity costs. Local talent can now also remain just that – local talent. The best part is that this will decrease foreign companies getting their talent from here and selling the end products back to use with huge mark-ups.

It is important that this initiative is supported by as many South Africans as possible. The two guys spearheading the project are both based in America. They both run very successful companies; SaaS and venture capital respectively. Therefore I believe that the success of the Silicon Cape initiative is in the hands of us who are in the country. We are the ones who can drive this thing and make it work.

To get involved log on to www.siliconcape.com and create a profile. Let’s strengthen the movement toward change

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