When I watched this, my mind flashed back to Jamaica, the Caribbean’s Silicon Valley…a Silicon Caribe in effect and why our dot com industry has not grown as much as we’d like to in the past years. Randy Komisar, an American venture capitalist speaks to a culture of entrepreneurship and an attitude towards failure we are yet to achieve here in the Caribbean. Regardless of this, what I personally have been seeing and experiencing in the past 10 years- meeting, listening to the entrepreneurs who have created, launched and failed; the ones who have created and are growing slowly or stagnating because of lack of venture or angel funds, partners and expert guide- I salute you all.
You’ve been the ones tilling the soil, adding your ideas to what is invariably growing, maybe not as fast as we’d like, but nonetheless growing that culture of entrepreneurship, an understanding that technology has made it easier for us to create, launch, test,fail…earn our stripes and the right to try again and again.
We should embrace that, encourage that in each other. Funny, this was the very reason for me starting SiliconCaribe the blog 4 years ago(previously known as techwatchcaribbean) and then Kingston Beta– Caribbean entrepreneurs are just as bright and full of ideas as the next dude and girl in America or Europe, but our culture of entrepreneurship and attitude towards failure is not there yet. In my mind however, our shoes are pointed in the right direction. What do you think?