One of the first things Jorn Lyseggen, founder of the Ghana-based Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, will tell you is he did not plan to establish the school as early as he did, back in 2007.
“My original idea was to do this a little further down the road, when I was older,” the 44-year-old Korean-born Lyseggen said. “But a friend convinced me you can never take anything for granted. Tomorrow you could be hit by a truck. That’s why I decided I had to do this now.”
The school’s two-year program instructs 20 college graduates at a time to become software entrepreneurs. They’re trained in programming while learning to pitch business plans and attract investors. The $20-million program, sponsored by private investors, also invests in its graduates. If an idea is powerful enough, MEST alumni can obtain seed money from the Meltwater Foundation.
“Every year, we invest in those pitches we find the most interesting,” Lyseggen said. “If a pitch is strong enough, we give them anywhere from $30,000 to $200,000 in funding. Our program is a crossover between a corporate training program and an academic program. A lot of the learning is through hands-on training.”
The program is spread out over two years because it takes time for students to mature in their thinking process and get up to speed in a technological environment, he said.
“Even though they are college graduates, many of them have never touched a computer before,” he said. “So we actually teach them how to program. It takes time to become a proficient programmer. This school is to prepare them for the hardship of actually becoming an entrepreneur.”
Students making successful pitches move to an on-campus “incubator,” where they refine the scope and details of how to build globally successful companies from those pitches that will create jobs and wealth locally in Africa.
“In the incubator, which is a normal office building, we provide proper Internet and proper facilities,” Lyseggen said. “We also provide business consultants that will support them with advice to get them started.”
Students whose pitches do not receive funding generally have little trouble finding work.
“What we’ve learned is that if you’ve graduated from the MEST program you’re actually highly attractive in the job market,” Lyseggen said. “So a lot of our students — or entrepreneurs in training, as we call them — are already poached before they graduate.”
Lyseggen is optimistic about the success rate of business startups in Africa that have sprung from MEST such as online advertisement company AdsBrook , medical claims compiler ClaimSync, and messaging platform Dropifi, to name a few.
“We’re sending a strong signal that software can be created anywhere, even near a pig farm here in Ghana,” he said. “But we want our students to think globally. We want them to create software that can compete successfully in the global marketplace.”
