Hypercube community looks for recovery manager to bring failed Zimbabwean hub back to life

A little over a year ago, Hypercube Hub, Zimbabwe’s first tech hub and co-working space announced that it would be shutting down for good having been in operation since 2013.

The team cited the tough economic challenges plaguing the country plus a failure to secure the funding the hub needed to continue its operations as reasons for shutting down.

Its closure had a notable impact on the community of startups, community developers and social entrepreneurs that had relied on Hypercube Hub as a centre for events, meetings and sharing ideas.

Now, a group called Hypercube Community appears to be working on bringing back Hypercube Hub back to life.

In an email from Hypercube Community circulated to different stakeholders in the tech startup space the community has shared an advert for a Recovery Manager who is supposed to salvage the failed Hypercube Hub project.

According to the email the Hypercube Community (which looks like an ensemble of people who were involved in the running of Hypercube Hub), 

Hypercube Community recognised that there was a major problem with Hypercube Hub. Therefore the community has made a commitment to fix the problem by establishing recovery guidelines that include the immediate appointment of a Recovery Manager.

This manager is expected to audit the project and lead with crafting and executing a solution for the project. The candidate is also expected to be a neutral individual without any previous ties to Hypercube.

Seeing that the manager is supposed to engage with the project’s initial sponsors and project team, plus the fact that the specifics for the old Hypercube project are set to be maintained, the job advert looks like the first step in Hypercube Hub 2.0 albeit with the same faces and modus operandi.

Interested candidates can get more info on the Hypercube Community Facebook page

Hit or miss?

No doubt the idea of having another centre for tech startups and everything else that Hypercube was trying to foster sounds positive.

It’s the same sort of value that other local hubs like B2C and Moto Republik have been delivering to fill the space for this that exists in the local ecosystem.

However, considering some of the hub operational faux pas that resulted in the closure of Hypercube in the first place (eg an unclear revenue model to meet expenses, cost management issues) it’s hard to not look at this skeptically, especially with the looming presence of a “community” that was part of the failed entity in the first place.

One question is what happens after the recovery manager brings back Hypercube and leaves the hub under the same sort of influence that led to its failure the first time around?

Questions around this can only be answered as the process unfolds in 2017.

image credit – Hypercube Community