We help displaced people to build a startup in Germany

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Transcript:

(AI Generated)

So how does that end up in a company that's called Public Value Hub?

During this whole journey I was getting furious on one hand about the state of the world and nobody giving a shit about it or not enough people. And on the other hand, I was really thinking like, okay, what can I do? So the first thing I did back in March was to offer my help to a couple of humanitarian organizations here. Just to make connections, to do their communications, help them with social media, the little stuff that I know about.

I got into contact with a lot of refugees, displaced people, just normal people who got bombed out of their homes. And it turned out that also my ideas about who they are and what they want are wrong. Because I thought they're in need and I need to give them blankets and a place to sleep.

Even though they needed this in the first days, most of them asked me about stuff like co-working spaces, about MacBook chargers. About good internet connections. Because it turned out that's normal people with normal jobs who just got displaced by someone else. And a lot of them were in the IT sector.

There's a lot of IT freelancers, so they just needed the place to stay. And in the beginning I helped them just to find co-working spaces. So we have a lot of wonderful people owning co-working spaces here in Leipzig that opened their doors and said you can stay here with eight people, six people, five people.

And so we just dispersed all these freelancers into the co-working spaces. And very quickly they asked me, okay, but what can I do? Can I find work? Can I start a company? You were at the business school. Can you help? So I started thinking about it and it struck me that there's so many hurdles to an outsider in Germany to start a company

Yeah.

that you basically need your private consultant to do it you know. And obviously I can't do it for 20, 30 people. So with a couple of my friends from university and the professor, we thought about how we can solve this problem. We said like, okay, if we just give them what they need to do it themselves. It would be sufficient. And we identified that it's basically specific knowledge about Germany and a little about entrepreneurship and then it's resources and networks.

And if you can provide that, these people are totally capable to do their own stuff. So we came up with this idea to start a nonprofit company that provides exactly this to displace people and other, what we call underrepresented founders. And then on top of that, give them the knowledge or the incentive to start not any business, but a public value or social impact business.

Because that's actually what they asked us for. They wanted to do something for society, give back. And that's basically what we started to do or what was the hypothesis in the beginning, that if we give them the capabilities, enable them to start their own business and give them the knowledge and the resources that they will thrive as entrepreneurs.

And also we as a society get much better companies because they will be profitable and also contribute to the common good.