Earlier this month Google announced a new Incubator in South Africa called Umbono. You come to them with your world altering idea and in turn they give you office space, money, bandwidth and servers. It literally is the ultimate opportunity for any South African with the technical skills and a cool idea, but unfortunately Google got it completely wrong.
One day two University students named Adam and Steve made their way to Y Combinator to pitch an idea that they thought had potential, but Paul Graham who heads up Y Combinator thought the idea sucked and turned them down. A little bit later they received a phone call from Paul saying: “…listen guys we didn’t like your idea but we liked you, come back and lets come up with a new idea you guys can work on”. Adam and Steve are the founders of Reddit.
Google aims to change the start up landscape in South Africa with Umbono, but as long as they have a “good idea” as an entrance requirement they never will. First of all – who are the creators of Google Buzz and Google Wave to judge whether or not someone’s idea is good or bad? Picking people based on whether or not they have a good idea is a terrible way to filter people.
I know endless amounts of friends and family members that have awesome ideas everyday on how to make a better burger than McDonalds, or how to make a better car than Toyota, but none of them will ever create a McDonalds or Toyota. The reason they will never create it is because they don’t have the “right stuff”, and even with funding they will still lack the right stuff. This is why Paul Graham says they invest in people and not in ideas. So how should Google do it?
If Google wants to make an impact in the Silicon Cape, they should be hunting down talented people at Universities and Universities of Technology around South Africa. They should be inspiring and providing students in these institutions with resources and advice for them to build their products.
It’s really simple, let students form teams – and give each team a problem to solve using technology in a 3 month period. Now imagine how cool it would be if there was a Google App day at the end of it where all where the teams of students could show off what they had been building to the public? It would then be much easier for Google to pick a few of these student projects to grow into start ups, because they know the students and they know the product.
There is a hell of a lot of talented kids at University today, but none of them are being challenged to build their own products – they are instead being taught how to be employees. It is within Google’s power to inspire these kids and provide them with a platform to build great products.
Google got it wrong with Umbono, but maybe after this post they’ll be inspired to innovate again.
