South Africa’s Seed Academy is offering entrepreneurial training in both Cape Town and Johannesburg and has more than $210k (R2,4 million) of sponsored training available for early stage tech and women entrepreneurs.
Just recently the firm launched South Africa’s first start up survey to get a national picture of startup entrepreneurs, what challenges they face, what issues relate to funding, what sort of additional support is needed to increase success rates and as well partnered with the City of Jozi and JCSE to launch Hack.Jozi.
The free training dubbed the Think Be Do Programme delivers success by helping entreprenuers to Think, Be and Do complete with practical sessions presented once a week over ten weeks between and 6pm and 9pm.
“We provide practical training by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, targeting their specific needs to help them realise their idea and grow their business,” Lara Rosmarin, CEO of Seed Academy said, “We want our participants to succeed, so our relationship continues up to 18 months after the course ends. We create course content around an entrepreneur’s specific needs. The material is neither theoretical nor academic and the training is carried out by entrepreneurs who have built their own businesses. They know what works.”
The Think, Be, Do programme aims to nurture, develop and train the skill sets mind sets, attitudes and behaviours of potential high growth entrepreneurs and provide them with access to their next growth checkpoints. These include personal and leadership development, sound business skills, a business plan and pitching skills.”
For those who have been at Seed Academy such Jermain Kallideen, CEO of Kallideen Technologies, Seed Academy helped her business dramatically and arranged for her to pitch to Microsoft BizSpark which she got into. Nonqaba Stamper of FundBabies who also completed the training says she met other entrepreneurs facing many of the same challenges that she faced.