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24 November 2022 17:00-18:30Innovation City Cape Town

Is Y Combinator Worth It?

Y Combinator is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stripe and Twitch. 

YC is kind of like the Harvard of startup accelerators. Basically, once you get into Y Combinator, everything changes for your business. YC is not at all like school or college or anything that you’ve experienced before. 

Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups, and twice a year they invest $500,000 per company in a large number of startups.

They work intensively with the companies for three months, to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors. Each cycle culminates in Demo Day, when the startups present their companies to a carefully selected, invite-only audience.

But YC doesn’t end on Demo Day. They and the YC alumni network continue to help founders for the life of their company, and beyond...

Come and hear South Africa's young and dynamic entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Cerebrium Michael Louis Jr speak to us about his own experience of YC at Innovation City Thursday 24th November at 5pm.  

All you need to know

What: The Y Combinator Experience 

When: 24th November 2022

Time: 5pm - 6:30pm

Details: Come and hear South Africa's young and dynamic entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Cerebrium Michael Louis Jr speak to us about his own experience of YC at Innovation City Thursday 24th November at 6pm.


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Speakers

Michael Louis Jr
Founder and Director of Cerebrium

Michael Louis is a 26 year-old South African Tech Entrepreneur co-founding and being involved in some of South Africa's most innovative businesses. Michael studied a BSc in Mathematical Statistics and Computer Science at Stellenbosch University and while studying co-founded Sxurriel, a peer-to-peer platform to connect those with spare space to those who need storage and parking space. 

Sxuirrel raised over R5m in venture funding and was voted as the Best Student Startup in South Africa by the Southern African Startup Awards. While still at university, Michael developed a blockchain application for his final year project that allowed universities to collate academic transcripts and share them with businesses to find the right graduate candidates. The technology was driven by data analytics, machine learning and blockchain. After much interest from universities and corporates alike he formed Registree with fellow students at the University of Cape Town; a startup that worked to commercialize this technology. 

2020 saw Registree raise a R5 million+ investment from the University of Cape Town. After leaving Registree, Michael worked as the CTO of OneCart an on-demand grocery delivery service that delivers from multiple South African retailers within 2 hours. With the help of his stewardship, it grew from a small startup to over 1000 people with revenue up from R2 million a month to R2 million+ per day, in less than two years and achieved triple digit YoY growth since inception. 

Six months after Michaels departure, OneCart was successfully acquired by MassMart in 2021. Currently, Michael is the Founder of Cerebrium which was recently part of Y Combinator’s W22 batch and is backed by some prominent VC’s such as Sequoia Scout Fund and Authentic Ventures.

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Organized by

Innovation City Cape Town@innovationcitycpthello@innovationcity.co.za

Innovation City is an invitation-only community of digital start-ups, scale-ups, corporates, entrepreneurs, world changers and innovators. It is a world-class network that helps accelerate digital innovation in Cape Town through fostering co-creation. Through partnership with Epicenter Stockholm and its 500+ membership companies, Innovation City can help fast track Cape Town’s digital ambitions.