Seedstars Podcasts

Lupe is from one of the most remote places in the world: the Pacific island of Samoa. Coming from such a beautiful and distant place comes with its own qualities and challenges. When she wanted to buy goods online for her coffee shop she realized that her bank didn’t integrate with any online payment gate. It is impossible to use services such as Stripe or PayPal with a Samoan bank account. So, she decided to take matters into her own hands and started SmartPei [https://www.smart-pei.com/?fbclid=IwAR2nzxDZr1LC7MwSVrZ7xXuootoMuF2aIQpD0nIUS9YP03Wg60bpbtqiMsM] to solve the issue not only for herself, but also for other Samoan shops in the Samoan diaspora with the need to send money or buy goods. Lupe is just at the beginning, but she has big dreams of making the lives of Samoan business owners easier and leaving a legacy for her children.

In this episode, we meet Ann, founder and CEO of DataCue [https://www.datacue.co/], who not only launched her own company but did it with her husband as her co-founder whilst travelling across Central and South America for their honeymoon! I hear you... is she crazy ; ) Successfully securing investment from Startup Chile, despite being foreign nationals (learn how they did it as you listen) Ann and her husband Sharam, a former data scientist at Trip Advisor set about creating a solution that would give small and medium-sized businesses access to big data solutions normally available only to the Amazons of the world. Discover how they managed to work together 24-hours a day with a young baby along for the ride too, how they overcame some big assumptions they made about doing business in the LATAM region and how they overcame a potentially disastrous situation. With many more valuable insights about startup life across 3 continents - DataCue now has a presence in Chile and the LATAM region, Europe and Asia.

Lucrezia wanted to be an actress and started her entrepreneurial journey when she was 8 years old, selling items to give to those most in need. This multi-award winning Italian entrepreneur, and Forbes 30 under 30, is now living in Kenya for her company Kukua [https://kukua.me/about/], which has created an African child heroine called Sema who empowers girls and children with literacy and numeracy skills, and gives them the confidence to change the world! Lucrezia's parents and relatives approach to the failure taught her to face difficult situations like almost going bankrupt before pivoting and raising funds from prestigious Venture Capital investors. From the cover of international magazines to the small Kenyan villages, this talented entrepreneur has the ambition to impact millions of lives and create one of the most successful edtech companies on the African continent.

Kenza was born in Morocco but has quite a rich international experience: from France and Singapore, all the way to the USA. At some point, she found her calling and decided to go back to her home country. Kenza launched a regional fund to support entrepreneurs in Africa. She had some hesitations, but inspired by other entrepreneur stories, she managed to convince investors to contribute to her fund. Now, she is driven by  the growth of entrepreneurship in Africa, investing in impactul startups from seed to pre-series A, that are aligned with the values that she and her team in Outlierz [http://www.outlierz.co/] share. In this podcast, we discover those values and take a look into Kenza's eye-opening journey, the motivations and challenges behind it. Kenza recommends reading Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers: The Story of Success [https://amzn.to/3clSJnV]

After watching the US TV show "The Six Million Dollar Man" at the age of 5 in Colombia, Alvaro Rio, founder of Human Assistive Technologies [http://hatechnologies.org/], knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. It was his passion to explore how technology could support and enhance the human experience through the use of bionics. This wasn't a surprising choice of career given the path trodden by his lifelong hero, his father who dedicated his life to providing healthcare and housing to people in his home country of Colombia. Considered a thought leader and visionary in the healthcare industry, Alvaro clearly understands all the challenges physically impaired individuals, families and medical professionals in emerging countries around the world are facing. He and his team share a passion for creating solutions capable of transforming real-life healthcare problems for people with injuries. This is truly a journey of the heart.