UAE’s top incubators choose their best start-ups to win this year’s Pitch Please

Monday 16 October 2017
Dubai - MENA Herald:

The annual SME Beyond Borders conference unveiled this year’s Pitch Please competition involving incubators and accelerators for the first time under a unique concept themed, ‘The Incubator Challenge’.

Pitch Please invited incubators and accelerators from across the country to nominate their top start-ups to participate in the pitching competition. Attendees will enjoy live pitches by 10 start-ups representing the prestigious in5, Turn8, (Dubai Technology Entrepreneur Centre (Dtec) and Consult and Coach for a Cause (C3) programmes. This is the first time ever that these accelerators and incubators will be seen together on one platform.

Speaking on C3’s participation, Medea Nocentini, Founder of the programme, said: “At C3, we believe that the future of business is social: first, societal challenges provide entrepreneurs with exciting opportunities to make a change in the world through business; second, companies that positively contribute to society have better chances to succeed in attracting the new generations of socially-conscious consumers and investors.”

The unique initiative is being supported by the leading footwear and apparel brand K-Swiss in line with its commitment to up and coming entrepreneurs. Salman Basheer, Brand Manager, K-Swiss, said: “As a business with humble beginnings that has grown organically, we resonate with the challenges, trials and tests that every start-up has to go through. Even as we’ve scaled across borders, entrepreneurship has always remained in our DNA. We want to support start-ups from all around the world in any way we possibly can. We are therefore very pleased to collaborate with SME Beyond Borders, which perfectly fits with our mission as well as with our entrepreneurship-inspired collection Generation-K.”

K-Swiss is also endorsed globally, by entrepreneurial guru and self-made businessman Gary Vaynerchuk, who shared a few words of inspiration with the competing start-ups: “I wish all you youngsters understood the entrepreneurship landscape. If you want to win, eliminate the outside voices. As an entrepreneur so many more of us exist and there are so many more opportunities. It doesn’t matter what school you went to, it doesn’t matter what your grandpa’s last name is, it’s a market and if you’re good enough, you’re good enough. The people we all look up to didn’t listen to anybody, they broke the system, they didn’t follow the path. What they did was go the other way when everyone else wanted to go in a certain direction. They tripled down on their strengths against the narrative of society. Do you have courage to live it the way they want to, the courage to listen to the voice inside your head and take that step in the other direction to the rest of your life?”

Pitch Please will take place at the SME Beyond Borders conference on November 9, 2017 at JW Marriott Marquis. SME Beyond Borders is an annual conference that brings together different stakeholders within the SME ecosystem under one platform.

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