The highly improbable but somehow compelling StartupBus has been stopped off in Johannesburg for the last couple of days, letting its passengers off for a tour of some of town’s top tech spots on its journey from Harare to Cape Town.
Forty young entrepreneurs are riding the bus, and their trip coincides with Global Entrepreneurs Week – a time for all investors and inventors to reflect on the importance of the small business and celebrate all that is good about the self-starter in every field. Half of the passengers are from a coding and development background, a quarter have skills relating to design and the other quarter have been picked for their expertise in one of the three themes of this year – mobile, healthcare or energy usage.
Split another way, half of this year’s cohort – for it is an annual event – are from African countries and half are from Europe. The bus, or at least the idea of the bus if not the actual physical vehicle, itself originated in Scandinavian climes, and now appears as far a field as the US and Vienna.
The basic idea is that the 40 ‘contestants’ get on the bus in one location full of hope and promise, and finish up 72 hours later with eight ideas that are good enough to pitch to investors in a Dragons’ Den-style finale.
The obvious question – wouldn’t spending time in a conference room with a decent internet connection and tables that don’t bounce be more conducive to hard work – is met with an enthusiastic rebuttal.
“It’s all about the immersive experience,” says Magnus Petersen-Paaske, one of the Danish organisers of StartupBus, “They start pitching as soon as they get on the bus… and no existing code is allowed.”
Yes, it’s a gimmick, but after chatting with the organisers we’re pretty much convinced that it’s a useful one rather than an excuse for a fully funded safari across the Kalahari. As well as helping to foster a kind of camaraderie among the participants – although a 72 hour journey by anything rarely leaves me well disposed to my fellow travellers – the StartupBus is also used to help make local connections as it passes through towns. In Joburg, it stopped off at the Branson Centre for Entrepreneurship in Braamfontein and Seed Engine‘s offices in Sandton, where visitors from overseas got chance to learn about their South African peers and vice versa.
Apparently the bus journey has been so successful that it even cleared customs on the Zimbabwe border in lighting speed, shepherded through by one of the heads of tourism in a mere two hours.
There’s no cash prize for the best idea the end of the journey, but there will be investors present at the demos in Cape Town tomorrow. There’s also a Google Hangout with Virgin boss Richard Branson which anyone will be able to watch here, in which bus riders and members of the hubs they’ve visited will be able to pose questions to the Caribbean-based billionaire and Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann live on air.
