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Showing posts from March, 2014

Why Team Composition in Tech Startups Matters Much

Since 2011, the m:lab has organised PIVOT East - an annual competition for mobile startups in East Africa. Much has evolved about the competition since the inaugural edition was held as PIVOT 25. Some of the evolutions were aptly captured by Nicholas Friederici , a World Bank consultant then documenting the Tech ecosystem in East Africa in this article . MedAfrica (MedKenya) winning team of PIVOT 25 in 2011 Incremental Improvements One incremental improvement that PIVOT East continues to emphasize on is for participants to regard the competition as a platform for organizational development and business model refinement. Inasmuch as few participants may still see it as one of the many competitions where they could “earn” prize money, there’s many that are getting the geist of the matter and are taking their businesses more seriously with competitions. In the 2013 edition of PIVOT East, market traction was emphasized in the criteria for all selection stages. This helped to