From Talk Radio To Tech Hub Founder

Monday 9 November. 12:00 Johannesburg / 10:00 London. Sixty minutes, live on Zoom.

The transformation of Kieno Kammies.

For close to 30 years Kieno Kammies was a voice in South African media, first at 702 and then on CapeTalk, where he hosted Today with Kieno Kammies. In 2021 he walked away from the microphone and into the unknown.

Later that year he and Stephan Ekbergh co-founded Innovation City Cape Town, a hub where startups, scale-ups, investors and corporates work side by side. Kieno calls it a business enablement hub, not a coworking space.

In this session I am going to ask him for the founder's story. What Innovation City is and what it is trying to do. How well it is doing, and how it has changed since 2021. Why he left a daily talk show to start again from zero, whether it was as stressful as it sounds, and what he would tell any founder about to make the same jump.

We'll dig into:

- Why he left a daily talk show for the unknown, and what the first months were really like

- What Innovation City actually is, and why it is not just another coworking space

- Building it with Stephan Ekbergh, and what was borrowed from Epicenter in Stockholm

- How it has grown and changed since 2021: what worked and what didn't

- Stress, money and doubt: the honest version of starting again

- Advice for anyone weighing up their own leap

Bring questions. The last stretch is live Q&A.

Hosted by Colin Iles. Presented by Silicon Overdrive, as part of the AWS Founders Series, produced in partnership with Silicon Overdrive and Amazon Web Services.

Please note: the event organisers may use the above information to send communications from time to time about their offerings.