Failure is the default for start-ups, said Vinny Lingham.
Lingham gave the keynote address at the CSSA President's Awards in Sandton, yesterday.
A South African entrepreneur now living in the Silicon Valley, Lingham is the executive vice-chairman of Yola.com. He is also a co-founder of the Silicon Cape initiative - which aims to turn Cape Town into a global IT hub. As such, Lingham focused his presentation on the need to develop a healthy start-up ecosystem in South Africa.
“SA needs to stop digging stuff out of the ground,” he said, explaining that natural resources will run out eventually, so people are a far better investment in the long-term.
He emphasised the need for a paradigm shift regarding failure. “Failure is the default for start-ups,” he said.
Lingham's Yola (formerly known as SynthaSite), is a San Francisco-based Web 2.0 start-up that provides free Web site building, publishing and hosting services.
Outlining the key trends he's noticing in Silicon Valley, Lingham emphasised a drive towards hyper-local - the virtual corner shop. The three trends he's seeing are social, mobile, and local. Start-ups can capitalise on all three if they are not afraid to use some ingenuity.
The most likely candidates for this ingenuity? The youth, he stressed.
“We need to get youth with low overheads taking risks to create their own businesses. If they fail, we need to encourage them to try again, we need to look at failure as trying to move the needle towards innovation,” he said.
Lingham also stressed the need for a better investment ecosystem in SA. In order to drive this kind of innovation, start-ups need incubators, seed capital and angel investors, he said.
Click here to read CSSA president Adrian Schofield's address on leadership.
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