Yeah, so we're here today to present our initiatives and also speak about how we can foster

Collaboration while driving or moving around and we just discussed earlier today during lunchtime So so how should we present this and we were saying we don't really know each other yet So why don't we just keep this as an open discussion discussion? So three of us are just going to speak with each other about Why we are doing what we do and what we do and then we also asking you to participate and ask your questions

Great. Hi, I put on high heels to be a little bit taller because I'm presenting with two tall guys. So I need to sit down Great to see so many people. Hello and

Yeah We're the smallest and not organized organizations. So Farooq hey, why do you do the thing you do? Yeah, it came across that I think that We all do the travel

for different reasons and sometimes you can come off the same but I think that the power is in the intention and I don't know why I'm going first But I think maybe it helps if I just say kind of what I do or what we do and Pass around and then I'll say why we do it now so, you know, I

Founded the organization called geese going global. It's not an organization. It's an initiative of a bigger organization called genius core but our Perp, you know, the what we do is we take people around the world other innovators for the innovators investors

People who have social conscious We also take professionals To meet like people other innovators inside other countries in the world Our goal is just to kind of cross pollinate the knowledge And increase the connections via those individuals and kind of let them come to their own conclusions once we put them together

So we do that in a form of four to six country trips that we do within two weeks and so we bounce around like Two to three days in each country and then we we have like three goals in each country and that's just to Figure out what the lay of the land is. However, the hell you can do that in three days

And then also to meet with the innovative people And then the last but not least is to have a hell of a lot of fun doing it so that They gel and they stick and the relationships last beyond our trips and where are you doing this? Why where Oh cities countries So we have the goal is we have geese going global 180 that lasts between 2013

2015 to go to 180 countries by the end of 2015. We've covered 20 And we have 27 will cover this year and then 2015 we're preparing for right now as to be the year of trips I don't think I'll see my kids the whole time. So

That is very impressive so so it's your turn it's it my turn now, okay I thought we were impressive already covering five can't four countries in five weeks I'm Vicki. I'm from Africa hack trip Africa a trip was a Just a thing that we did It started as an idea and it materialized into something really cool

It's nine hackers software developers and web designers Just going to East Africa to check out What's happening there because we read an article by Eric Hirschman from the IHOP who wrote for BBC about the tech hubs in the emerging boom and

Griego was like, okay cool who's coming? Let's check this out and a lot of people responded to that and at the end of the preparation phase we were seven boys two girls going to Africa and meeting Loads of people and we didn't know what to expect. They didn't know what to expect of us

so we just showed up there and we hosted bar camps and hackathons and Yeah, just had a really great time one of our taglines is also that we enjoy party mackin so we party a lot as well and Yeah, John is laughing in the first row there

Yeah, we we Just wanted to connect like we wanted to meet people get to know people make friends because you know We work in Berlin. Then we work in San Francisco. We go to Zurich to Amsterdam Sydney anything but no one ever thought about hey

I can also go to a co-working space in Nairobi or Kampala and just work from there and and our one of our goals was also to to bring our experience back to our communities and get more people from from our communities to just pack their back and stay in Nairobi for a month and During the last couple of days. I've been talking to so many people from so many hubs, so

It's not just Nairobi You can also go anywhere in the world and just work on your stuff there and do a lot of party mackin So yeah, that's us So Fabian, hey Vicky. No, you're you're adding something to that It's it's getting we're getting back to the hectic bit because they are also faster than us, right?

So I'm Fabian from Fauna bus Africa I'm from Berlin. I have a background in development cooperation, but also an entrepreneurship So I've been working in the startup tech scene since 2010. I've been founding two companies

I've been working for an investor and I've also been working in the for a big cooperation And then we thought hey, how about working on the intersection of these two worlds Development cooperation, but also entrepreneurship with a focus on ICT and this is how we came up with the idea of

founder bus which is a tool to enable Entrepreneurs in emerging markets to work on startups and realize their startup ideas who are ideally solving local issues So, how does that work? We select people from many applicants typically and we put a focus on three different backgrounds

Mainly hackers, so it's people who can code but also web designers and business experts We work on three different disciplines health care energy, but also education So we invite these people to our kickoff which took place last year in November in her hours in baba

and we would Take part of the opening of the first incubator back in Harare called hypercube So On the first day our participants 40 people from all over the world mainly Africans get on the bus pitch their ideas

so it's 40 strangers and One might say hey, I'm from Zimbabwe and I have an idea of an application a mobile app That is fighting bribery or I want to work on an SMS platform Connecting construction workers with companies or I'm

I have an idea for a company and I want to enable teachers in rural areas to Facilitate the process of giving homework to their students Yeah, so these three ideas are just three out of eight startup ideas, which have been built on a bus During five days while driving

2500 kilometers from Harare all the way down to Cape Town We have had electricity on the bus and also internet So would hack all day long Brainstorm ideas get feedback from customers So our participants would get out of the bus at night in the evening

And talk to the target group and gather feedback via landing pages on the internet We would also we had some companies or startups on the bus or you're launching their mobile apps after three days because if you have teams which are functioning like like real world startups consisting of Developers web designers and business experts you can actually build stuff and this is one of the goals we have

So we stop every day in a different city and we meet the local community So we would go to a tech hub invite the local community interact with them because we also want to spread the word about entrepreneurship and we want to

stimulate and enable young people to be more risk-taking and Go for the step to to realize their ideas Yeah, and this is what we do what we are doing after five days on a bus We typically drive to a tech conference where we have pitches taking place Anyways, and we just connect with them and ask hey

Can we stop by with a bus and have it's ours pitching and I typically say yeah, please come over Well, and then they pitch to a couple of investors and this is basically what we have been doing for the past three Years in Europe and then last year for the first time in Africa And as we are currently thinking of how can we adapt this model to the emerging markets?

We are gonna add a new initiative to the existing project which we are offering currently and this is a fellowship program So once our participants are graduating from the bus They have time to go back to their communities and think of what do I want to do next? And if they want to continue they can get back to us within three months and say hey

I want to continue to work on this idea We have been working on the bus or they can also say hey, I really like the idea But I don't think it's working. So I have a new idea and I might even have a new team So I want to apply to become a fellow of the founder bus accelerator and we offer three things

To these people who are accepted on our fellowship program first office space And this is why we are so happy to be here because it's a great opportunity To meet people around innovation hubs all of Africa Second we want to give them mentoring and this way we are glad that we met VC for Africa they have a great mentoring platform online and obviously also venture capital which might be very important in the future for our startups and

Then third obviously seed capital and we are not gonna invest the seed capital directly into their startup ideas because 90% of all our participants are changing their business models constantly and it's not about

Investing into particular business model it is more about investing into people who really want to make a change and Who have the capabilities to do so and this is why we are giving Yeah, we are giving the fellowship program basically to people directly and not to companies

Because if you have people who might have family and to need to survive it We think it makes more sense to help these people directly to to live their lives and pivot on the set of ideas they have Cool. Thanks. There was Fabian who was worried that half an hour is such a long time

Sorry So so you can tell that it's there's there's lots of common ground here and some some differences as well and One thing that's That I mean, it's really I met Farouk today in the morning

So I'm really when we decided we don't do pre discussion discussion So I really want to know that why why the hell did you start this? I mean, this is so hectic. You said yourself you don't see your kids probably next year So so why what drives you so I'm an interesting person period

My personal a little piece of my personal background is that I'm like, I'm a geek I'm a nerd for real I graduated high school. I was 13 and then I went off to Africa in the Khartoum and Studied at Jamia Tafrik learned enough Arabic to forget it

and But the the thing my why was a little different I was traveling around the world we started this consulting firm and We were doing work in developing countries and everything else and after Going and setting up our company in about 65 countries

And going after all the donor money and everything else and working on things. I just got irritated after a while I started seeing things I'd have a guy who was like the prime minister of the country put me in a car Drive us around the country to show us all the wonderful things they had and I think I hit my frustration point in Romania Actually, and we were being driven around Romania showing all of these materials that people had and you know

Look, we have all of this magnesium this carbon is blah blah blah and we wrote into one place And I remember it's a very famous place It has the largest deposit of magnesium in the world And they were trying to convince us to go back home to United States and bring people over to mine the magnesium But when we drove through there was this village of like 2,500 people

They were living rough their houses were very rudimentary Right, and I asked about the education level of the people there and it was very low And then when we rode after the magnesium space and we were told about how we needed to go fish for people to cough up Millions of bucks and blah blah blah. We rode into another place on the other side of the village

Which was this whole string of manufacturing plants from the Russian times and they'd all been shut down But what amazed me is that they had machines that made machines. That's what was in the place, right? So I'm like dude like you've got everything you need to solve any problem you can come up with and you have the nerve to bring my behind here and ask me what I

Can do for you and it I the guys were trying to redevelop the manufacturing plant I said, well, why don't you just educate the kids in the village to come to build some 3d printers other things like that You know an SLS process and 3d printing that your selective layer sithering Basically uses magnesium at its base in order to fire off the the carbon laser and you can build anything from that point

I said you've got the stuff right there the freaking river is yellow with minerals and you're and they look at me like But we need money and that's what kind of sparked the whole geese going global thing. Is that We're trying to solve a problem, right? We've kind of seen this trend amongst people who are

suffering from what we call poverty And it's because they focus too hard on money they think money is the resolution to it and Somehow we forgot that money is only a currency that's supposed to buy resources from those who have the knowledge to produce finished goods So the reality is is what happened? Why did we get there? Why are some people suffering?

Why are you going through that? And and when you look at the capitalistic system, we said, okay there was a process of stripping knowledge from people and When you strip knowledge and you took knowledge away from the folks that originated from that knowledge grew up somewhere else so now there's this huge responsibility to take these centers of knowledge and put them back around the world and then

Recollaborate so that people can do what they were doing when they were disrupted which was solving their own problems And so that's what the whole geese going global thing is about it's about going to every single country on the planet Earth with more than 200,000 people and Reinserting that knowledge and taking back some as well. So a collaborative a true collaborative event

That's why we don't try to over plan it. And you know what the joke that we had earlier was Fabian look we were talking about what we were going to talk about and I told Fabian That we had did this thing called geeks on the bus and he looked at me like what the hell?

And I said, you know Fabian I was just trying to get your attention when I did it and we've been a big hoopla About it But the idea was I wanted to work with founder bus To get something done because one of the things we do at geese on global is we realize we don't have the solution We instead know that there's great things happening everywhere and our sole responsibility

is just to attach those wonderful people to each other and then increase the amount of I Used the word hoopla a lot But the amount of excitement that's around it so that more people are drawn to it and and I don't want to extend myself Too long But the most exciting thing that I have I have happened is that when we go into a country We work from the angle of a lot of political type people sometimes because this is my former consulting life

But then when you bring the politicals The traditional people the traditional leaders and the innovative leaders all in the same room You force them to meet you in one place in the hubs They look around and say what the hell this this has been here all this time

You How Farouk how you come from this other country and you come tell me what's in my country? I didn't even know it was here The beauty of it is that we're just simply making people acknowledge the value of the of this space That people term as innovation, but in all honesty It's just people coming up with wonderful ways to live better to grow solve their problems with the knowledge that they have

So that's that's kind of the purpose behind geese on global. That's what we're trying to achieve at this moment. So I'm what but you know, it's not gonna skip you because you're trying to wake out of it I would really love what in the hell would motivate a couple of guys in Berlin Beyond just reading some cool stories about Africa

But literally to say I'm going and I have one of the comments one of the guys from Africa hack trip He said, you know, dude, I wish we could have stayed another three months What was the real like motivation the feeling internally to want to go down to Africa and and mingle and and you guys? That I don't think either one of us do you stayed longer and you went to the pubs and the stuff like that

What was the motivation behind that? I think mainly curiosity and this This drive you have to go out and meet and learn and share and I'm totally serious here It's we we all would have probably traveled and done something similar on our own

We do hacker beach we do we are those digital nomads and we just It's just that it's Africa and sometimes you're like, oh wow Africa And I don't know how many of us would have gone to Rwanda on our own And if you team up, it's like a little less work you think don't know if that's true, but

you team up and you find a group of people that are like-minded and you just Start organizing and it develops this drive for itself and and and and you get people excited like I

mean before we left we were really not sure how well this would work because we know that lots of corporates are coming through Africa at the moment in into the tech hubs and Someone someone said earlier they they sometimes feel like they are in a museum Because they're like showcasing themselves every day all the same lines all the same questions

yeah, and and so we try to be different and we actually I think succeeded and We just want to say hey It's possible and and we want to open up the world and and and put all these places that are like like Romania

I've never been to Romania and I Countries yeah, exactly. That's that's how this whole thing works and Zimbabwe hello tech hub innovation in Zimbabwe of all places That is awesome. I mean and and that is that is what drives us. We're curious and we want to connect and

That's that's about it I'd love to hear more about the bar camps. You're you're organizing when you're going to these tech hubs Because I have never been to a bar cam I always wanted to go and I'd love to hear more about this funny I have never been to a bar camp before Nairobi either so It was actually funny because I talked to Nanjira on Skype before we went and I was like girl

I have no idea what we need. We need like a board and pens and now talk to the guys, please I don't know and luckily Jan and Martin were on the Skype call too. So so there was they could do that But yeah, the bar camp

Was it's really cool. It's it's like a Non-conference and if you google that you find something cool too. So a conference that's not a conference Where you don't have a program in advance you just bring the people together Everybody very quickly introduces themselves and then they say what they're interested in and then you say okay

Hey who of you wants to host a session and then people do come up with that because it's it's that kind of people It's it's those people that do have something I want to talk about and that they want to share and you put it on a board you arrange it a little bit you sometimes put like topics together And then people spend the whole day talking about things they're interested in and teaching each other and asking each other questions

Like one of the and and we had a zillion topics like it's all on our blog But it's crazy much one of the things I really really liked a lot was the cultural aspects of UX design Like how how do you have to design things differently in different cultures what works here might not work somewhere else and

It was for many of the participants also the first bar camp that they they had gone to and I guess that They all do their own bar camps now Like they so many things just happened from getting those people into the like into physical proximity into the same room

They they started user groups. They they will do conferences by themselves now, and it's super cool And I mean obviously if you're sitting there saying hey guys, we were privately funded No one backs us and it's possible to do that. We're Africa hack trip. Then someone will say hey, that means I'm Euro hack trip and

it's actually it's happening and we're like super excited because Your hack trip is coming to Germany and the Netherlands sorry Switzerland and France in this year in the fall So far, it's only Africans

but they are pretty open to everyone and I just love it that that we spread this attitude and and that we have People who are feeling the same need to to spread this this kind of life. Yeah I've got a question for you Fabian though. I think we've got two things that happen every time we set out and travel, right?

so one is when you travel in a group the people you travel with are having this huge experience together and they get bonded in a Way that's you know, very unique and the second is that you Meet people and you bond with the people that you meet But it seems like the the founder bus focuses a lot on the bond of the people on the bus

Primarily what what do you what is like the the magic there? And how do you see the outcomes afterwards like the guys who've been on the bus? How are their interactions after after the fact? Yeah a great question. So it's a very hard challenge to sort of pick the right candidates So last year when we had our first bus in November

We received more than 250 applications for only 40 spots on the bus and we received applications from hackers 16 years old from Zimbabwe, but also from senior people, let's say the CTO of visa Africa who's 43 years old, but also Executives from Silicon Valley who wanted to be on the bus and we saw all these applications and we thought okay

What is our focus we want to help young people to build companies or enable them to build companies but these guys like the The the successful entrepreneurs who have built companies and maybe even sold companies before they also want to be on the bus

Mmm, so who do we put on the bus? So let's just mix them and we took 50% Africans and 50% rest of the world entrepreneurs and Then all teams have been not only multidisciplinary but also multicultural and this is a great experience because you have a global knowledge transfer, which is happening and

In the end you have a team which might be functioning on a global level and the fact that you have a very experienced person on board Might mean for you in the future that you have a business angel somebody with a network and a certain experience Yeah, and so it's a lot about

developing people on the bus because we say We live entrepreneurship, you know, you can't really teach it. We say hey, we put you guys on a bus You all have to build companies and Pitch them after only five days So it is a it is a real-life entrepreneurial experience and there's people who have not been found in companies before they've been on the bus

So this is something something we we also trying to do We want to give these young people the first glimpse of what entrepreneurship is about and then ideally after the bus They say hey, I want to quit my job now and I want to build this company with this crazy guy from this country Yeah, so this is the outcome and then in terms of the actual startups

We have built eight startups last year and three of them are still active Two of them have won several awards so That is some of the outcome. But obviously it's not only about developing people and building startups. It's also about

nourishing the ecosystem also putting the whole topic on the media because We think that Africa is still not as best height in terms of image So this is why we also do a lot of PR work. So we have been covered by most of the international broadcasters which we think is a great success because

we put the ICT topic and entrepreneurship topic in Africa on the global agenda and On top of that we highlight the particular countries We are going to so it is also some sort of ICT roadshow we are doing Should we open up the panel? Yeah

So any questions from anybody because this half-hour thing is really short and we all like to speak a lot. Sorry Any questions, I don't see much but Yeah, Nanjir. Thanks. Hi. I have a question. I mean

Mainly for Farouk, but I think all of you guys I'd be interested to know it has to do with it You know that the fine line between surfing Places and actually hunkering down and staying long enough to not only get more out of it, but do it How do you as a taking a strategic consultant approach? How would you how do you look at that?

And maybe you say well, we're here for a day because we're gonna go to the next country But somebody's gonna come back and stay for three months How do you look at that? No, I got you That's that's what we're challenged with anyway is a lot of people will always ask what am I going to get out is because Unlike a lot of other to travel things we force everybody to pay

One of the things that we do by forcing everybody to pay as we say Okay Look you if you want to go Then you'll pay to go That means that you have to have a specific interest plus I need to send a message to everybody we meet That they don't have to ask someone else permission to solve their problems. We came on our own dime They can go and do things on their own dime. They're strong enough But as far as giving things back

It is a very strategic thing when you go out if you think for the hunter-gatherer type concept It's very much a hunter type trip We're looking to go in Figure out what you can't figure out on land how what's going on touch it fill it squeeze it And then we leave like one of the key things we do is leave 80% of our schedule open

So the idea is that when we get there we want to connect with the folks we couldn't find online and have them Tell us what's up And then start moving around and do that kind of thing The idea is that the people who've come Will go back themselves as well as communicate to other people why they should go back that the real power of the trip is that the connection between those individuals even if they never

Even if they never have an idea what for root Connor a geese going global is and they forget that it exists That those two people maintain a relationship and the power of sitting down breaking bread looking someone in the eye You know, I connect with Willie online way before we started geese on global and just seeing him right here

I think we spent what 20 minutes with each other and I said, wow, that's Willie. Hey, what's up, you know, so There's nothing that can make up that power and if you want to say how do you write it down a sheet of? Paper and you say okay. It's the connection that will actually take us to the next step

Any other questions actually we don't we don't have time You guys are around Please give him a round of applause. Thank you so much. Thank you for this great. So we're gonna