Monday night was our October Heavy Chef Session with the CEO and Founder of Yola.com, Vinny Lingham. This event in Joburg was a repeat of an earlier Session held in Cape Town. Even though Vinny wasn’t feeling a 100% he still indulged us with his fascinating insights on how to raise capital for digital start-ups – Thanks Vinny!
Vinny’s presentation was practical, relevant and to the point. Vinny’s insights were based on his experiences with Yola Inc. Yola.com (previously known as Synthasite) is a website building tool for SME’s and was launched in 2007. It raised $25million in funding from Johann Rupert’s LXE & JSE listed Reinet Fund.
Our sponsors were a hit! Thanks Corona and Glaceau Vitamin Water for providing us with great drinks. We would like to thank Liezl de Graaf and Andre Hugo for providing us with a gorgeous venue at the Deloitte building in Woodmead.
It was great seeing so many new faces such as people from The Endeavour and other VC folks. And of course, we were delighted to see our regulars there (you know who you are!). Thanks guys for coming! Also, special thanks to Colette and Gavin for coming from MBAconnect.net.
We loved chatting to you all and we’re happy that everyone benefited from our bit-size chunks of information on digital marketing.
Here are some helpful links from the Heavy Chef team for those who are interested in learning more on the topic:
A recommendation from Vinny: www.venturehacks.com
Experiences from local entrepreneur Eric Edelstein: http://ericedelstein.com/2009/08/24/venture-capital-funding/
Advice from a worldly entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/venture_capital/
A comprehensive list of funding sources in SA: http://outthink.co.za/index.php/2009/07/funding-for-startups-and-new-ventures-in-south-africa/
Read more posts by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg
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Hey Louis, sorry I missed this one as it was sounding like a great evening. Are there any sources of content from it that we can see?
Thanks for the link too, glad you found that post useful.
Hey, hey Darren – yup, thanks for your post; I find resource lists relevant to SA always valuable.
Re Vinny, unfortunately he’s playing his cards close to his chest and asked us not to publish his slides (read: secret recipes!) on Heavy Chef – sorry… however, he’s always keen to share his experiences face-to-face