Google Launchpad Accelerator is a six-month acceleration program designed to rapidly accelerate the best start-ups from emerging markets. The program starts with a two-week all-expense-paid program in the Launchpad space in San Francisco.
The start-ups face an unrelenting barrage of mentorship sessions, presentations from Googlers and mentors, and topics spanning from goal-setting to artificial intelligence.
I had the chance to be one of the mentors for these start-ups, being in daily contact and observing their progress. The air in the Launchpad space is filled with the wanting to learn new things. The start-ups are picked as the best from their region and immediately subject to questioning everything about their business. The first two days are the most brutal; as a mentor I could see some of the start-ups being deconstructed and having to start again from the beginning.
The one thing that separates all the start-ups in Launchpad from all the others is their drive to solve problems and learn new things. By the third and fourth day of the first week, the teams are already adjusting their strategies and measurable improvements can be seen.
What’s clear from the whole experience is that start-ups, around the whole world, face similar challenges. The camaraderie and connection you see among the start-ups stems from the entrepreneurs being very similar people.
Launchpad is primarily a two-week onsite activity in San Francisco and the following half year support. Launchpad is not asking for any equity in the start-ups. Other accelerator programs, such as Y Combinator and 500 Startups, are longer-term programs which focus on getting investment after going through the acceleration process and connects the start-ups with more external partners. Launchpad picks the best start-ups from emerging markets with existing traction and functioning product and tries to expose them to the Silicon Valley approach as well as the access to Google directly.
For African start-ups, this is invaluable.
“The biggest struggle for our business is in getting the resources needed for business success – people, finances, and enabling infrastructure,” says Lanre Oyedotun, Co-Founder and CEO of Delivery Science, the start-up that developed FieldInsight, an app that helps organizations obtain data, visibility, and control over everything going on in the field.
“It’s a big struggle to build the right partnerships needed to start and grow the business. When you’re small, it’s quite difficult to partner with bigger organizations,” says Shola Akinlade, Co-Founder and CEO of Paystack, which helps businesses accept payments, from all channels, from their customers.
Organizations don’t get much bigger than Google.
“Google is an iconic company and it has managed to build a reputation for solid technology tools and infrastructure, while maintaining world-class people operations. No organization in the world epitomizes scale more than Google. We want to learn how Google did that, how they managed rapid scaling and how we can apply those lessons to our organization,” says Iyinioluwa Aboyeji, the Managing Director and CEO of Flutterwave, a technology and infrastructure platform for processing payments across Africa.
A large proportion of Africa’s recent economic growth comes from investment in technology. Tech start-ups are important for the development of the continent.
“By 2025 Africa will have 800 million people below the age of 25. Humanity is faced with a potential catastrophe of epic proportions unless they receive adequate capacity development,” says Adetunji Adegbesan, the Founder and CEO of Gidi Mobile, a start-up that uses mastery learning to connect Africans to economic opportunity at scale.
To help Africans make the most of this economic opportunity is JUMO, the largest scale, lowest cost financial services platform for emerging markets.
“In the emerging markets, the vast majority of people have no access to good financial choices. We are creating access at an unprecedented rate. We help people to borrow and save at the lowest price and with products that help them improve their lives. JUMO is a multi-bank marketplace where banks compete to give customer the best deal on their phone using only behavioral data,” says Andrew Watkins-Ball, the CEO and Founder of JUMO.
“Launchpad is an incredible opportunity to work with hugely experienced people from a broad array of disciplines, helping us to solve the big challenges that we are experiencing as we scale our company. We are being given incredible access to the Valley eco-system of investors, large businesses and potential mentors. It is great to connect with start-ups from all over the world that are solving really big problems,” says Watkins-Ball.
Africa has many problems to solve and, with the help of Launchpad, these start-ups are doing their bit to provide some of the solutions. – Written by Jan Beránek, Google Launchpad mentor