My Brilliant Career: How death of an internet cafe gave birth to a business
Jake Willis is the CEO of Lulaway, a company that helps young people find work
What does your company do? Our goal is to create a more streamlined and efficient entry-level recruitment environment. The objective is to get to a place where hiring is merit based and allows job seekers to find jobs that are suitable for them in a dignified and affordable way. We do this by providing job centres throughout the country that allow young job seekers to create profiles, get assessed and access many opportunities in a streamlined way. We also work with various government and other funders to address labour market inefficiencies and create incentives for large-scale employment projects. How did you end up doing what you do today? After failing to find a fulfilling job elsewhere, I started a few internet cafes. As bandwidth and smartphones got cheaper, the internet cafe business model came under pressure. However, job seekers kept coming in looking for jobs, so I started looking for ways to assist them. We partnered with a few co-founders, and we converted the internet c...
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