Almost thirty years ago he turned the lights out on what he says was a professionally rewarding job as a Financial Analyst with Citi Bank in New York to build, over time, what, arguably, is the country’s most successful information technology business enterprises, Starr Computers. On Wednesday, the company’s Chief Executive Officer Michael Mohan told Stabroek Business that he is not concerned with “just selling the next computer.” He wants, he says, to “break the ice mostly between the younger generation of Guyanese and the technology to which they do not always have access. “For me the challenge ahead lies in leaving some kind of footprint that makes a difference.”
He believes that his business experiences in the field of information technology have positioned him to play a role here in Guyana that goes beyond “just making money.”
Part of the transformation at the company’s Brickdam complex that has emerged from a recent multi-million dollar renovation and expansion project has come in the form of an Innovation Centre, a ‘sanitized’ middle floor space that houses some of the latest gadgets associated with the global information technology culture. The drones and ‘next generation’ comfort-related and household gadgets like a quaint-looking robotic vacuum cleaner, elaborately designed educational toys and office-support technology housed inside the Innovation Centre are not, in the strictest sense, advance marketing of ‘things to come.’ It is, Mohan says, “Starr Computers’ window on the technology world.” That is a discourse which he is inclined to engage in forever and you have to make sure that he does not draw you into an animated dialogue on these ‘pieces’ that he has chosen for what appears to be a next generation technology ‘show off.’
The Innovation Centre is evidently what responds to Mohan’s personal fixation with helping to create the country’s pathway to the next technology leap forward. Simultaneously, it is one of the standout local private sector investments in pursuit of the all-important mission of keeping Guyana, and more particularly tomorrow’s generation in the global technology ‘loop.’ He wants, he says, to ensure that there is a continually upgraded awareness of the evolution of the global information technology sector available to Guyana.
His personal closeness to the company’s Innovation Centre is manifested in the fact that his own spacious office inside the Brickdam Complex is situated in pretty much the same space with the Centre. During his frequent visits here from his US base, the complex is where he can usually be found.
With the completion of the Innovation Centre some months ago, Mohan has thrown it open to the public as a whole, utilizing the space and the impressive array of toys and gadgets as a kind of theatre within which the company stages its seminars for the public and private sector on global technology developments and how these can advance workplace efficiency here in Guyana. Leaving to his staff the hustle and bustle of the commercial preoccupations associated with marketing in-demand technology like computers and cellular phones, he spends much of his time engaging groups of schoolchildren to share the space afforded by the Innovation Centre, engage in discussions on information technology and encourage them to become intimate with the various hi tech toys and gadgets.
Whilst there is no shortage of takers for Starr Computers’ open invitation to schools and Youth Clubs to experience the Innovation Centre and participate in the company’s ‘tech talks,’ Mohan is keen to establish a more formal relationship with the education system through the Ministry of Education. Accordingly, he will shortly be communicating to the Ministry of Education his wish that visits by clusters of schoolchildren to the Innovation Centre be factored into the country’s Education Month activities scheduled to take place in September.
“If the Centre can help to provide a greater appreciation among our young people of the importance of technology to Guyana’s future and if we can succeed in causing them to begin to consider IT as a longer-term ambition, then our efforts here at Starr Computers would have been well worth the while,” Mohan says.
These days, much of Mohan’s time is spent interfacing with some of the ‘heavy hitters’ in the global technology sector, talking up the “new opportunities” that derive from the imminent arrival of an oil and gas sector.
“Frankly, the name Guyana is on the lips of all of the major tech companies these days.” Mohan says that much of his time, these days, is spent ‘talking up’ Guyana’s potential and making cases for some of the global front runners in the industry. So far this year he has persuaded seven companies to send representatives to assess for themselves the prospects for doing business in Guyana.
Inevitably, his discourse with the Stabroek Business returns to the central role that the Innovation Centre now plays in the wider suite of services offered by the Company. Customarily an easy-going man, Mohan becomes markedly animated in the presence of the opportunities created for talks and demonstrations by groups of schoolchildren to the Innovation Centre. Then, he becomes an intense advocate for information technology and the role that it can play in fashioning careers and setting the children’s feet on paths to an assortment of related careers; and in those moments it is not difficult to tell that Mike Mohan is chasing a knowledge-sharing dream, which he says has become a personal mission.
