Paul Kim, co-founder at online education tool enterprise EDGE Campus, spoke to HumanIPO about clichés regarding social media, networking events and fund hunting.
HumanIPO: How do you approach business?
Kim: My biggest focus would be to create products which our users are loving to use.
Especially with Qurio, the name of our product, we don’t want users voluntarily to do assessments in any other way. Someone must put in a lot of convincing that they must use paper or anything else to come back to our product every single day.
How does EDGE Campus approach entrepreneurship as a team?
I think we are not a rockstar company. I shy away from that. I am not going to pretend that we are that. We want to build something that people use every day. Our members aren’t extroverted to the extreme so you won’t see us out there at networking events, living it up there, making a public display of ourselves.
I think we are all ordinary people that are driven to working hard and building up something that is able to be used by others.
Do you deem the acquisition of funding a distraction to product development?
It can be a trap. I think the best example of that would be the whole ‘techcrunch facade’ where, you know, you feature on there and it seems like you’ve made it once you’ve done that.
But that kind of puts your focus on the wrong thing. Because at the end of the day you want to build a reliable business or whatever for your customers to be using it. It is not about getting a mention, it is not even about funding.
You are kind of in a desert and funding is your backpack to get out of there. If you run out of funding you are pretty much dead. So the purpose of funding is a backpack, not about finding a backpack. So I think that businesses – the mentality for always finding a backpack is wasteful and even inefficient.
Do you believe the social media presence of a startup is risky as it can display an unreal image or is the need of exposure valued higher?
People must realise media and social media and all these things are tools. They can be used in a positive way or they can be used in a negative way. Those tools also have a general tendency or general behaviour that is imposed on you once you start using those tools.
Social media has a great place but I think sometimes the way people use that, it just results in a negative behaviour, for example the techcrunch issue.
They have a tendency to make heroes out of people and they are actually creating undue stress on those guys, the guys who are supposed to be these heroes but also on everyone else who try to be like this hero.
The only thing in the media can be said is positive. That’s the worry. It’s always positive. Because actually entrepreneurship is flipping difficult.
Do you think the mobile platform can aid in providing a solution to education in South Africa?
Someone along the line forgot about the teachers. You haven’t given tools to teachers to allow them to use mobile for learning. So all the learners do have mobile, but do you see them with the teachers? No. And that is why you see this big push in the classroom against mobiles.
It is not going to happen the way we are doing it. We are trying because we believe SA won’t get it right, full stop.
