Venture Café Warsaw’s Thursday Gathering // Nairobi Connects

Venture Café Warsaw’s Thursday Gathering // Nairobi Connects

Nairobi Garage is excited to partner with Venture Café #ThursdayGathering #048.  The event dubbed Innovation Bridge: Warsaw – Nairobi will be connecting the two cities virtually. It event is hosted by Venture Café – Warsaw, the central innovation community event in the capital city of Poland. It will take place online this Thursday 25th March, from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm (EAT). Register Here.

Venture Café Warsaw is a foundation working to strengthen the innovation ecosystem in Warsaw. They are a part of the global Venture Cafe Global Institute (VCGI) movement initiated in 2010 by the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC).

The Innovation Bridge is hosted monthly with the aim to connect startup communities across cities for soft-landing opportunities, partnerships, and access to talent and investors. This month they are connecting with Nairobi, having identified it as a regional hub for entrepreneurial activity.

“We all know that collaboration requires trust and innovation does not happen in isolation.” Venture Café.

Kari Mruz – COO at Nairobi Garage is taking part as a speaker and has a special connection to the team. She worked with Venture Café – Warsaw to launch CIC Warsaw before moving to Nairobi. Also, taking part in this edition are Africa Yes Centre, Teach for Kenya, and Smart Sales who are all members of Nairobi Garage.

Other member participants are Richard Omunya of Brmaja, one of the leading world providers of IT products and services in the technology market who have an office in Kenya, and Sabrina Ejore, Founder & CEO of Precious Connections who are based at Kilimani.

They will be speaking about their experiences as innovators in the Nairobi ecosystem, and inviting connections with their counterparts in Warsaw. We look forward to more of our member and ecosystem players taking part in future sessions.

About the Event

Venture Café – Warsaw provides an easy-to-access ecosystem platform that is improving the social trust factor and making the community more diverse, inclusive, and better connected, both locally and globally. Attendees of the event enjoy interdisciplinary sessions with industry experts or get involved in creating content to share with the rest of the community.

The event is broken down into the following areas of interest & collaboration:

• Conversations are the central purpose of the Thursday Gatherings. It’s an opportunity to meet like-minded innovators to create meaningful connections, exchange ideas, and forge new collaborations. Solicitations are not allowed during these events so please no hard selling.
• Programming in the form of workshops, talks, forums, pitch events, hackathons, etc. Organizations seeking to host programming during one of the weekly Thursday Gatherings can request to participate in each community.
• Demonstrations of prototypes and new products. Thursday Gatherings feature local startups who want to share their prototypes and new products.
• Office hours with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and service professionals are available each week.
• Info tables are designed for partner organizations to share and promote information programs, competitions, and events relevant to the Venture Café audience.
• Volunteer and help us make Thursday Gatherings happen every week. We need greeters, bartenders, kiosk attendants, and really nice people to help make this happen each week.
• Sponsor Thursday Gatherings as a way to show your support for Venture Café and the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. Weekly, monthly, quarterly and in-kind sponsorships are available in each location.

About Venture Café

Venture Café started out first as a weekly gathering for the entrepreneurial community at the Cambridge Innovation Center.

The platform has grown to 10 locations globally, and there are plans for expansion to new places at an accelerated pace supported by Venture Café Global Institute (VCGI) who offer key training and resources and guide expansion for the Network.

Pre-pandemic, hundreds of innovators would be together at the weekly in-person Thursday Gatherings across the globe. However, Venture Café now brings its community together virtually for a one-day-long event across the world.

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Venture Café & SDGs

Venture Café believes innovation is a process for improving the human condition through leverage innovation as a way to move the needle toward the UN SDGs locally and globally.

They are committed to realizing the SDGs and convening people with purpose through:

• Economic empowerment through programming, helping innovators work to end poverty through building businesses, hiring, and implementing sustainable business practices.
• Modeling sustainable operations such as reducing the use of plastics and waste, promoting sustainable procurement practices and environmental safety, aiming to inspire our community with our actions.
• Mobilizing local communities around SDG actions, encouraging behavior change, and sustainable policies.
• Serving as a connector and educator for innovators to share their knowledge, ideas, and solutions to solve local and global challenges.
• Re-framing the narrative of innovation’s purpose to include social and ecological responsibility.

The benefits to registering and taking part are being able to get a chance to learn about Warsaw, showcase your innovation, organization & Nairobi. After the event, the Venture Café Warsaw team will create a LinkedIn group to keep participants updated, connected to conversations and opportunities.

Register today and be a part of the hundreds of people from every part of the global innovation community gather to enjoy, connect and learn from each other.