Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa Conference – February 2009

I had the distinct pleasure to visit my homeland, South Africa, to attend Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa‘s first conference after forming HPV’s ZAR350mm VC fund in early 2008. Andrea Böhmert, one of HPV Africa’s co-managing partners, invited me to participate on a panel discussing “Local entrepreneurs going international”. The panel consisted of:

• Herman Heunis – CEO of MXit,
• Willem van Biljon – ex-founder of Mosiac Software (now S1 corporation) and now founder of a stealth startup, Benguela,
• Brian Richardson – CEO of Wizzit and
• myself (Carel Bekker).

Other speakers during the one day event at the beautiful Webersburg Wine Estate in Stellenbosch included:

• Dr Andile Ngcaba – Chairman of DiData MEA,
• Mteto Nyati – MD of Microsoft SA,
• Kam Chetty – MD of EDS SA,
• Zunaid Mayet – CEO of Siemens IT Solutions & Services,
• Rakesh Wahi – Vice Chairman of CNBC Africa,
• Guy Lundy – CEO of Accelerate Cape Town,
• Martin Schirmer and Dr Herbert Heitmann of SAP and
• Mark Gevisser – author and journalist.

Chris Gibbons did an amazing job as MC of the conference as well as moderating the panels.I’ve attended numerous conferences over the years, and I have to say that the HPVA conference was unique in at least 2 ways:

1. The conference attendees were each given a silver money box as a gift and the first person to open it were given the opportunity to donate R5,000 to a charity.
2. Having James Durno as a graphic facilitator during the whole conference. James captured the day’s discussion in a set of cartoons. I think James played an important role in the day’s proceedings by keeping us entertained and informed.  Here is how he captured my contributions:

Photos, presentations, speaker bios and more of the one day conference are available here: Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa 2009 Conference.This was an exciting day for me. I met a number of very interesting people, I was educated regarding the current state of ITC in South Africa and Africa (did you know that Africa has 350mm mobile phone subscribers?), I was given a state of the union regarding South African politics and I played a small part in allowing South African entrepreneurs to think global.South Africa has some truly ground-breaking technologies to offer the world and if the entrepreneurs that were at this event is anything to go by, then I’m sure we will soon be celebrating more Mark Shuttleworths, Elon Musks and Vinny Linghams.