11 ideas on developing a business mindset, self-improvement, and team discussions.

Edmond Sebetseba and his partner Nicholas Nyamhondoro are the founders of Alpha Innovate, which is a cloud consulting company based in Sandton, Johannesburg. Despite being a relatively new business, they have been seeing rapid growth, landing a couple of clients in the finance industry, including some of the large banks.

Edmond and Nicholas have a combined IT experience of 36 years. While Edmond had always known about his interest in business, Nicholas came from a computer science background, working with start-ups in the US before moving back to South Africa. The duo met during an innovation project at one of the banks in South Africa.

The main expertise of Alpha Innovate lies in consultation, cloud architecture, and migration of the on-premise hardware onto the cloud. They also provide service around computing at scale and helping companies to build competency around data science. Finally, they offer services in serverless computing.

So, it’s clear that Alpha Innovate is thriving in several fields with a continuous flux of projects and ideas.

Edmond and Nicholas gave us some valuable tips on developing an entrepreneur mindset and staying up-to-date with the latest technological advancements, during a discussion with a Civitas team member.
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‍Summary of the best ideas from the discussion:

• Gain experience and learn entrepreneurial skills through working at other companies.
• Always strive to learn more.
• Have round back sessions with your team regularly, and get everyone to participate.
• Follow as many reliable blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and courses as possible.

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Becoming entrepreneurs

1. “Working for other companies taught us a lot and helped us to work using the agile methodologies. These methodologies helped us to put ideas together and work with teams, where everyone had an equal say.”
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2. We learned to fail fast, pivot on ideas, and try different things. “We were not afraid to fail.”
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3. “We didn’t look at failure as failure but looked at it more as feedback.”
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4. Treat every day as a beginner and just keep on learning.
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5. “Leverage the network you have, whether internally into the company or the other networks that you have built.”

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Team discussions

6. Categorize and organize your ideas, things you want to learn, and those you want to discuss. “Everyone should participate in adding items to the list.”
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7. “Have round back sessions to share the things you have learned. It doesn’t have to be related to your current projects because it’s important to follow what’s happening in various other sectors.”

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Staying up-to-date

8. “Subscribe to a lot of technology blogs and magazines.”
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9. “Follow the announcements of cloud providers about their upcoming products.”
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10. “Some of the blogs and tools we follow include Microsoft, AWS, YouTube, Udey, A Cloud Guru, TechCrunch, Venture Pen, and Venture Beat.”
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11. “Subscribe to development meetups in your area.”

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