Why Did The Founders Do It?

This article is written by Mohammad Eslim, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

At Startup Istanbul 2015, we had 3 panelists talk about startup founders and why they made the decision to put their startups together. These panelists include Ahmed Baya, Founder of Startup Mauritania, Nofal, Founder of Scorify, and Patrick Bosteels, Co-founder of Stage-Co & CoderDojo.

Studies would be more than happy and encouraging to tell people why to go for startup events, you know, the whole learn and pitch to win kind of thing. But what about the people behind the scenes or the people who made the decision of organizing startups and even go as far as founding startups in their own countries. What are the reasons they did so? 

After an interview with some interesting characters who were responsible of founding and organizing startup events like startup weekend events as an instance, we can for sure relate some of the reasons why did they do it on their own history. As in some way when they organize startup events in their own country, city or even region they see it as a chance to give back what good he/she received in this area, in terms of education, chances, experience, and support. 

However, we can also say it’s out of their own will to make entrepreneurship see what they can accomplish and how far they can go, it’s a bless for them to let people recognize that there is nothing standing between them and success in achieving what they want with just a help of mentorship and a little of how to do startups education.

With so many chances around the world to found your own company after a proper support to your ideas, it’s seen as a far, long journey for entrepreneurs to do their own startups as entrepreneurs have to travel abroad to find the support they need to build their own company. So now, with startup events’ culture rapidly spreading around the world, some people thought it would be better if entrepreneurs found what they need for a startup in their own country. This way entrepreneurs are encouraged to participate or at least gain the learning offered for their own startup.

Also people would benefit as more startups means people can be more creative to come up with ideas or help who have an idea to come up with solutions. What is more is that these events help people gain experience even if they don’t participate at that moment. They will start building up their knowledge and collect their ideas and plans for startup and organize it either to gain money just from promises or to turn it into from just a startup event into a real company someday.

Regarding the advantages those areas gain when starting to host and plan startup events is that it attracts investors from around the globe. The emerging markets might be risky and slow, but time is moving fast and so is the investment movement around the world. Data collected these days indicates that some really risky places in the world are expected to become competitive markets holding companies with strong marketplaces which is a factor of attraction to both entrepreneurs and investors.

The final advantage is the new thing to the region, the Middle East, called accelerators, as we know not all people doing startups can gain money or investment to found the company and build it only using an idea plus an MVP. Accelerators are now fairly used in order to give super help for these entrepreneurs to turn that magnificent idea of theirs into the companies they worked so hard to build.

https://vimeo.com/141892491