YouTube founders root for mentorship to scale up ICT innovation

They have formed a company — i/o Ventures — that mentors IT entrepreneurs.

During their visit they will be shopping for start-ups to mentor and connect to venture capitalists.

Extensive experience

The quartet is made up of Russel Simmons, the lead architect and former CTO at PayPal and co-founder at Yelp.com Ltd, Paul Bragel, a partner at i/o Ventures, Jawed Karim, a co- founder of Youtube and Mbwana Alliy, an associate at i/o Ventures.

The i/o ventures, thanks to their extensive experience, incubates start-up businesses.

Since the setting up of Safaricom’s money transfer tool M-pesa, Mr Simmons said, Kenya got a rare perch on the international innovation map, winning the attention of venture capitalists.

“Mentorship from people who have experience and networking among the local budding IT innovators are important factors entrepreneurs should factor in,” he said. “From our experience at Silicon Valley, you must learn to build the culture of openness and collaboration.”

The group’s most recent graduates were exposed to 120 venture capitalists and angel investors; they all got funded.

Prof Henry Thairu, the Vice Chancellor of Inoorero University that organised the forum, said the visit was aimed at sharing experience between the investors and the students.

“We need to build an ecosystem in the learning institutions that encourages collaboration instead of working in isolation,” said Prof Thairu.

Trust and choosing a dependable business partner were identified as major threats.

Students said they were open to the idea and benefits of networking but feared losing part or whole of their creations to unscrupulous investors disguising themselves as mentors.

One of the ways of going round the theft menace, the panel told the learners, was embracing patents and copyrights as a way of protecting their intellectual property.

Commercial value

Kenyan students have, for years, complained about the tortuous route to patenting, which they say has left them with a pile of inventions that could not be turned into commercial value.

PayPal is an online payments and money transfer service using e-mail, phone, text message or Skype.

It was bought by eBay in 2002 at $1.5 billion. They offer products to individuals and businesses, including online vendors, auction sites and corporate users.

When eBay acquired PayPal in October 2002, the former had an online payment system Billpoint.

Billpoint was quickly phased out due to PayPal’s popularity, branding and technology.