(Jamaica Observer) American tech expert JJ Geewax has set up a business incubator in Jamaica that will invest in local start-ups and aspiring entrepreneurs interested in the global technology industry.
The incubator, JGX Labs, is based in New Kingston and will be officially launched tomorrow. JGX will inject capital and provide office space, legal support, technical and business mentoring to the start-up companies.
Geewax is a chief engineer at Invite Media, a New York City-based advertising display company that was acquired by Google for US$81 million ($8.2 billion) in 2010. He decided to embark on the project in Jamaica after noticing that the country is rich in software development talent. With proper guidance, Geewax believes many locals could have successful businesses in the global technology industry.
“I’ve been coming to Jamaica for quite a while, and there are some really smart people whom I have met who know how to build software,” Geewax told the Business Observer. “My argument is that the world is on this level playing field and that anybody can compete on this Internet-based playground,” he said, noting that JGX will be providing the start-ups and entrepreneur hopefuls with the “right mentorship and guidance on the technical side, and business side, to actually do something with all this knowledge and skills that they are getting in the tech industry.”
It is a standard venture capital model, but with a lot more hand-holding services, Geewax said.
“Financially, it follows the same model as a venture capital firm, where they get money and we buy shares, but we do a lot more hand-holding,” he noted. “We give less cash and more services.”
For instance, the start-ups won’t need to pay for attorneys, overseas designers or commercial space, as JGX provides all of that for free.
JGX Labs already has four local companies, owned by young Jamaicans, on-board: Blaze Payment Ltd, EduFocal, HireForge and Checkpoint.
Blaze Payment is a mobile payment tool allowing persons to “top up” their account, either with a credit card or by purchasing credit from a friend, and use this credit to buy meals and other items from the Blaze Network of merchants.
An online learning website, EduFocal is focused on training and test-taking to prepare students in Jamaica for GSAT and CSEC exams. The long-term goal of EduFocal is to tackle corporate learning which, according to recent estimates, is a US$56 billion market.
HireForge is an online application tracking and hiring pipeline system targeting small businesses.
Labelled as an “internal version of Twitter”, Checkpoint.io is focused on helping small companies or teams keep track of what members are doing on a day-to-day basis, using daily reminder and team summary emails.
The details of each contract are confidential, but the companies are each injected with capital of anywhere between US$5,000 ($506,000) and US$15,000 ($1.5 million), according to Geewax.
“These are not hard and fast rules, just guidelines to keep us on a path. If there is a company that needs $2 million instead of $1.5 million, we will give them $2 million, but we haven’t seen that yet,” he said, noting “We want to keep the money to a minimum because we want people to focus on being creative and make sure they are not wasting time figuring out how to spend the money.”
According to JGX, the tech companies are run by their own teams and they work on their projects as if they would anywhere else. The incubator helps people to turn their idea into a tech business or expand their existing customer base outside of Jamaica, by teaching them how to build software the right way, sell products to customers abroad and help them with problem-solving.
But aspiring tech entrepreneurs must not be detered if they don’t have an existing business, or even an idea. The basic requirement for joining JGX is technical knowledge, according to Geewax.
“At the very beginning, I think that you need technical people who know how to build software. I don’t mean experts who have 10 years of experience, but fresh college grads who understand the fundamentals of building any form of web applications,” said the tech expert, who himself has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Geewax serves as a mentor and a technical resource. He interacts with the developers remotely through a quality assurance process known as code review, which makes source codes available for other experts to review, with the intention of catching mistakes.
“The goal is for us to share as much knowledge and experience that we can so these kids don’t make the same mistakes that we made when we were younger,” said Geewax, who highlighted that he travels to Jamaica around every other week.
JGX’s directors are Imani Duncan-Price, JMMB Group’s chief strategy officer, and attorney Ashley-Ann Robinson-Foster.
The lab aims to have the start-ups exporting software and earning hard currency by the end of summer, and provide useful solutions to clients in the USA, Europe and Asia on a sustained path.
“There is a reasonably interesting imbalance where if your customers are in New York City, they are willing to pay New York City prices; if your production facilities and the people building your software lives in Jamaica, the cost of living are in Jamaican prices,” Geewax reasoned.
“You end up in a situation where you are earning money and being paid, to live and work in Jamaica, as if you are living and working in New York City,” he noted. “It’s an amazing imbalance and could end up being very profitable for everyone.”
