Re: Startup scene in Mauritius

From: Sten Tamkivi <sten.tamkivi_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2015 14:26:37 +0400

Thanks you so much for reaching back out to my twitter inquiries, S!

As a quick way of introduction, I’m a co-founder and CEO of Teleport, a startup where we build software for people to move to their best place to live and work.
In my past 15 years as a software entrepreneur, I’ve also served for 8 years as an early executive at Skype, entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz, advisor to President Ilves of Estonia on the topics of innovation and entrepreneurship, etc.

When I travel to new places, I always try to get somehow in touch with the local startup scene. As it happens I am in Mauritius now, on holidays with my family. As this trip was quite rapidly planned and I understand it is the middle of the summer, I don’t have too high hopes, but nevertheless — if anyone knows of any upcoming tech gatherings or would like to set up a meetup with even a few of the local budding entrepreneurs/angels, let me know. If lack of inspiration and network are the local issues, very happy to talk about those. Estonia is the size of Mauritus by population, and we had virtually no startup scene until about 10 years ago - and it is now bustling with 400 companies. So cool things can happen in small, faraway places.

I’m around until Jan 5th.

BR
Sten

On December 28, 2015 at 2:02:02 PM, S Moonesamy (sm+mu_at_elandsys.com) wrote:

Hi Sten,

Rumour has it that you have been asking about the startup scene in
Mauritius. I am copying this message to a mailing list and three
organisations which seem interested in startups.

Here's a quick overview. Most of the business is about call centers
and software or business process outsourcing. Is the software part
anything out of the ordinary? It depends on whether an organisation
considers that installing and customizing a popular CMS is a
technological achievement. The startup scene is still waiting to
happen. One explanation for that is that there isn't any success
story to inspire other people on the island. There are other
explanations, e.g. the value of the network has not been leveraged.

Let's see whether anyone is interested in discussing about startups.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy
Received on Mon Dec 28 2015 - 10:26:54 PST