Who’s Giraffe, the Winner of Seedstars Summit

Last week Giraffe was awarded Seedstars World Global Winner 2015. But who is Giraffe, and how is the South African startup shaping the labour market?

Giraffe is a mobile application that on one hand enables businesses to hire medium skilled staff faster and cheaper than any other recruitment network and that on the other hand connects job seekers to these opportunities through their cell phone.

Created in South Africa, designed for the world

Everything started when Shafin Anwarsha and Anish Shivdasani, two management consultants, were writing a white paper on entrepreneurship and innovation coming out of Africa, and on how many startups coming out of places like Silicon Valley were not addressing African specific issues. During that time the founders started asking themselves what could they do to help people and have social impact, and the answer didn’t take too long to arise: one of the major challenges that Africa in general, and South Africa in particular is facing is unemployment.

Even though African countries aren’t performing that well in a lot of metrics, their mobile penetration is extremely high, so Shafin and Anish decided to make use of the power of mobile to create an app and a service that helps people find jobs and decrease unemployment. This was the beginning of Giraffe.

The struggles of an African Startup

Even though Giraffe has the prospect of up to USD 500,000 in equity following their win at the Seedstars Summit, Shafin doesn’t forget how difficult it is to find seed stage investment in Africa: “a lot of local investors are quite risk averse and don’t want to put money into an extremely high-risk idea like Giraffe”.

It has also been hard to expand the team — the supply of developers is very limited compared to the demand, and to get someone with the startup mindset who’s ambitious enough to want to change the world and that’s willing to take the amount of stress and hard work behind a startup is like looking for a needle in a haystack. “If you were a university grad and you want to work as a software developer would you rather be on a high paid job at a bank or a relatively low-paid work in a high risk environment?”

Last but not least, emerging markets haven’t reached maturity yet. Mobile penetration is high indeed, but there’s still a lot to do in terms of technology creation and adoption.

Importance of Seedstars for Giraffe and South Africa

After receiving the Seedstars award, the team has been overwhelmed with feedback — they haven’t even been able to reply to all the congratulation messages they have been receiving on social media, email and over the phone, from both friends, family and even complete strangers. Shafin believes they’re just scratching the tip of the iceberg:

“The award has given us massive exposure, which is something we really need, and there are a lot of investors and potential partners contacting us in order to collaborate. But this award is not only affecting Giraffe, it’s also putting South Africa on the map”.

SEE ALSO: South African startup Giraffe is the Seedstars World 2015 Global Winner

We cannot resist to ask: Why the name Giraffe?

The team always gets the same question: why are they called Giraffe? And they just happily reply it’s because they sell giraffes.

In truth, they wanted a fresh and different name, not like the boring mobile stuff that says what the company does. But why was Giraffe the first choice?

“It’s cool, memorable, and its long neck allows it to look around and search for a job. And well, giraffe is a friendly and docile creature, and most importantly, it’s an african animal that can unite Africa under its symbolism.”

Biggest lesson learnt

If Shafin had to pick one lesson he learnt from the startup experience, it would be that nothing is as easy as you think.

“Every little change, every little idea that you might have will bring a million complications. Be patient, don’t be frustrated, there will be a lot of times when the right thing to do ends up failing and it’s all about being able to get back on your feet and fight”.

Plans for the future

Giraffe has set its sights on conquering the emerging markets since the beginning, and the international expansion is still the long term aspiration. But for now the team, who has been working from Johannesburg, is focusing on bringing the business to all South African cities and to iterate the product. Shafin expects Giraffe to have complete national coverage next year, and then scale up the idea to the rest of the world.

And how about the African startup ecosystem?

Shafin believes that the entrepreneurship culture just doesn’t exist yet, it’s still very young in most African countries. And even though there’s a lot of talent and people who want to create startups, there’s still a long way to go and the need of a cultural shift towards startups and towards being able to accept failure.

“This award will hopefully be a catalyst for a change in that culture and for promoting entrepreneurship a lot more within South Africa. I think it will do a lot of good things for the country and I’m really excited about that.”