Earlier this week, I decided to leave the London-based Pre-seed accelerator programme, Entrepreneur First (EF). I was a member of the 10th London cohort. EF is a startup accelerator backed by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn), Greylock Partners, Mosaic Ventures, Founders Fund and Lakestar. Their USP is that they invest pre-team and pre-idea (truly pre-seed in every sense). I originally joined EF, because I bought into the opportunity presented that ‘EF is one the best place to find a co-founder and build a globally important company.’ It is important to
Welcome to intern life! Whether you are experiencing your first internship, your second or third the encouragement is the same, stay on your toes, expect good things, be flexible and learn as much as you can. The formula is completely different from team to team WITHIN the company. You are going to have to learn that for yourself. If this is your first time at a new company I am sure you are excited this summer. But heads up, almost no one knows how to host an intern exactly right.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do? I am Alex Fefegha, co-founder and head creative technologist at Comuzi. We are an experimental research agency working at the intersection of emerging technology and culture. We help our clients answer questions about the future and experiment with emerging technologies with the purpose to build a better world. We identify blind spots, coming up with high-quality research tangibles in order to develop real-world opportunities. How and why did you get involved in tech I got involved with tech because the
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do? I was born and raised in the Bay Area. I come from African and Indian roots with my family born in Tanzania and generations before originating from India. I love to write, I have journals dating back to when I was 8 years old. I always felt a sense of ease when I got my thoughts organized in writing. I graduated from UC Berkeley last May with a B.A. in Media Studies. I started working at Twitter after graduation, and
A long overdue article on the immense black entrepreneurial talent in the UK tech scene. Here we feature founders across sectors as diverse as beauty, event discovery, medicine, artificial intelligence, and IOT. Some have raised money, others are bootstrapping, some are running large agencies, others lean teams. Celebrate their stories. Sharmadean Reid @sharmadeanreid What more can be said about Sharmadean Reid? The founder of WAH nails an amazing salon in West London that integrates technology across the customer experience, she also is the co-founder of futuregirlcorp.com an events organization to support young female
Tell us about yourself and what you do? Talofa, my name is Pou Dimitrijevich I am a Product Designer, living and working in the epicenter of tech: San Francisco, CA. I was born in Pago Pago, American Samoa, but grew up in Southern California. As a woman of color and as a first-generation Samoan woman, where I would go ‘next’–after high school or post-college–wasn’t always so perspicuous. I never thought I’d end up in Tech. I was raised by a single mother, in a two-bedroom apartment with seven siblings and
On a trip to Uganda for a friends wedding, I took a random stroll through Kampala. I’d never been before and wanted to get a feel for the city. If I was hoping to escape work, the universe had other ideas. The first left I glance I see the familiar logo of Andela. Running POCIT, there are certain amazing companies and organizations you consistently hear about, Andela being foremost among them. With existing investors including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, and Spark Capital, their reputation proceeded them. I had to see
In FIVE days, I’ll be graduating from UC Berkeley. I’ll have completed 16 consecutive years of grade school. Knowing what I know now, here is a breakdown of what I wished I had learned during that time. On average, students in California spend 6.24 hours in school and roughly 181 school days per year — that’s 1,086 hours of schooling per year. Multiply that by the 16 years of schooling, give or take a couple hours here and there. I’ve spent 17, 376 hours of my life in school. That’s
A lot of founders and VCs give advice to startup founders after they’ve become millionaires and notched some wins, which certainly produces some helpful tips but also loads of success bias. On the other hand, some of the best advice I’ve gotten is from fellow entrepreneurs in the earliest stages of their startups, just like me. I can’t consider myself successful yet, but I can say I have some experiences worth sharing with other entrepreneurs. One of the most frequent things I get asked is “how did you raise the
Five years ago I was leading strategic partnerships for a World Bank agricultural research institution. I was “living my best life”, travelling all over the world and making an “impact” — at least that’s what I thought until I found myself on a rooftop in Nairobi, Kenya with a filmmaker, a designer, and a restaurateur who would change my life forever. That night, inspired by the courage, drive, and resilience of my peers I realized that disrupting the narrative on Africa in a way that did not involve “selling poverty”
