YouthHackstart-up Challenge kick starting entreprenurship
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The YouthHack start-up Challenge was a two day event for high school and university students to dive into the local start-up scene.The programme, which was conducted on August 6 and 7 at the MAS Innovation Centre and Edulink, saw a range of innovative ideas come through, of which a team from gurupala.lk won the award for the best pitch.
The two day conference functioned as a platform to introduce youth from schools and universities, to entrepreneurship, technology and the local start up scene.
The organisation was founded in 2014 by David Ongchoco, who was an 18-year-old high school graduate at the time in the Philippines. Having just come back from Silicon Valley,USA, David was inspired to foster this culture of tech, start-ups and entrepreneurship in Manila.
Since then, YouthHack has gone on to run programs and events in several cities and countries around the world including Singapore, Hong Kong, Philadelphia, Nigeria, Thailand, Australia and recently, Sri Lanka. It constantly aims at empowering the youth around the world.
Their first event in Sri Lanka was held during the weekend. It was similar to a ‘Hackathon’, although unlike a Hackathon, where a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming, in this instance the students were very focussed on learning as well.
On the first day, students heard from speakers and went through workshops in ideation, prototyping and pitching. On the second day, students pitched their ideas to a panel of judges.
Both individual students, as well as teams of four were facilitated for the programme. The hacking was more focussed on ideas and learning key skills from Industry start-ups like Katha, PayMedia, Foodie Global, Layup and many more.
The event kicked off with a panel discussion featuring Madu Ratnayake, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Virtusa, Jeevan Gnanam, CEO of Orion City and DulithHerath, Founder and CEO of Kapruka.com. It provided a valuable opportunity for participants to learn from the experiences of these exceptional individuals in the Sri Lankan tech sector.
The start-up challenge had a total of eight speakers, who conducted specific workshops on a particular area. For example foodieglobal.lk spoke about bootstrapping which is essentially, starting a business without external help or capital. Such start-ups fund the development of their company through internal cash flow and are cautious with their expenses.
The workshop hosts included, Mahen Ratnayake, Co-founder & Chief Executive of ‘Katha’ , Sheran Corera, Co-Founder, Chief Architect of ‘Layup’, Kanishka Weeramunda, Founder of PayMedia, , Mike Soertsz, Founder / CEO of Foodie Global, Chandika Jayasundara, CEO of‘Creately’, Hiraash Thawfeek, CTO of ‘Creately’, Udara Jayawardena the Founder of Tidland AIESEC Colombo Central, who spoke on Social Impact Startups.
Furthermore, the conference also had other workshops which took on topics such as communicating ideas in a short period of time etc. The participants were urged to address global issues through developing their ideas and showcasing them to experienced business leaders in the Sri Lanka Start-up Ecosystem.
Sanjula Weerawardhena, the chapter leader of YouthHack, Sri Lanka tells us that the organization conducts star-up challenges, code weekends and ‘skills boot camps’ to help high school and university students learn more about startups, technology and entrepreneurship.
“We also plan to run a fellowship program that connects students with actual start-ups they can intern in,” he says adding that they hope to be able to create a global community of youth entrepreneurs that solve the world’s different problems using technology and entrepreneurship.
(JS)