With young student entrepreneurs from the UCE Summer Programme looking on admiringly, six teams from ThincLab's 2020 Sprint cohort delivered their final pitch presentations like seasoned professionals. The event was the culmination of one evening a week invested by each of the participants over the previous three months, as they honed their business propositions and polished their pitches.
It was rather like a United Nations convention at last night's Sprint cohort graduation celebration at UCE ThincLab. The diverse group of budding business founders this year included participants originally hailing from Japan, The Philippines, Ukraine and Britain. To cap off the cultural fiesta, resident kaumatua Maaka Kahukuranui opened the event by calling upon the summer students to perform waiata that he had been secretly teaching them earlier in the week.
Mr Kahukuranui himself also graduated from the Sprint programme, having been working on his renewable energy social enterprise, Solar Maia. Other companies in the cohort included an online rental marketplace, laboratory management software, catering orders website, content management system deployment application and a phone based peer-to-peer payment system.
Sprint Programme Lead, Geoff Brash, said the startup cohort had made tremendous progress despite the many challenges facing everyone in the business world during 2020. Programme co-presenter Paul Spence noted that it was especially exciting to see so many skilled migrants continuing to step forward to set up new companies and become part of a vibrant ecosystem. Startup ventures tend to contribute most of the new employment opportunities in recovering economies, he added.
Sprint is an initiative of ThincLab at the University of Canterbury Centre for Entrepreneurship (UCE) aimed at equipping early stage founders with the fundamentals to take their emergent business ventures forward. ThincLab programmes are open to any business in the Canterbury region including offering tailored coaching for growth stage companies.
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