We recently connected with Tuduetso Masire and have shared our conversation below.

Tuduetso, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s go back in time a bit – can you share a story of a time when you learned an important lesson during your education?

It may sound cliche but the sky really is the limit and I properly learnt that this was an honest and accurate cliche when I got to University of Southern California (USC) for Grad School. Being in an environment where so many of your peers and alumni have accomplished the likes of FedEx office, Salesforce, Box, Riot Games, MySpace, Photoshop, Tinder etc you get into a mindset that pushes you to realise that the fact that you’re in the same classroom means you can achieve the same and more.

I was definitely a D student growing up and became a C student in undergrad, academics were never my thing but something changed when I got to USC; first of all the application process was mostly practical, it wasn’t really an academic exercise; they had us pitch business solutions that we thought we could make work and had us explain it in 90 seconds. The rest of the application was more about talking about ourselves. Once you moved to the final round there was an interview process and I remember prior to the interview they sent us sample questions and I remember freaking out because one of the sample questions was “If I saw an alien what would a ask it” I couldn’t wrap my head around this question and automatically thought I was going to fail the real interview. However, when I got to the interview, the questions were pretty straightforward, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years etc” and it was in that moment where I realised that those crazy alien questions were purely for the purpose of pushing me to think out the box as I prepare for the interview which I found brilliant.

The lesson here was that your brain will go as far as you want it to and my grad school was the only thing that ever pushed me that far.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am Tuduetso Masire newly Masire-Modise. I am the founder of MatchAPro, which is a healthcare software that matches international surgeons looking for probono opportunities with patients in public hospitals in Southern Africa. My clientele so far has been public care in Botswana, South Africa and Malawi where the expectations differ from country to country.

The basic purpose is to reduce the surgical backlog in the public health systems in Southern Africa, so our platform constantly identifies surgeons who are available to travel to knockout a couple of procedures in public care as well as identify local surgeons who may be available to do a procedure in a different town which then allows us to facilitate the patient’s referral to the next town or hospital.

I love how much support I got from my professors and still get to date, It always felt like I had a team working on the business with me. I loved how I was surrounded by peers who were working on other tech related businesses so I always had support. For example my friend from class built my website for me, my other classmate did the graphics on the site for me, my professor built out my template for financials and my advisor helped me with the licensing given the visa I was on in the US. It was all hands on deck just by virtue of the school environment I was in.

My business is woman led, woman of color and African decent I strive to change the healthcare game in Southern Africa, in a way that has never happened before. I have built a large network of operators from different sectors of the Southern African economy to ensure that this concept works seamlessly and in sync with what other stakeholders are doing e.g tourism operators, airlines, insurance entities, government ministries of health, departments of technology etc.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I started working on MatchAPro in my second semester at USC in a class called venture initiation, where we were tasked with building a scalable business as our final assignment. Most masters programs will have you write a dissertation that you need to submit by a certain time, with us we had a business to build and have a demo by the end of the semester. In between that we had a competition called New Venture seed where we could pitch our businesses to investors on campus and have the founder of the entrepreneurship centre give funding to our businesses which is where MatchAPro was selected for funding and received $16,500 which I used to formally start the business. I was able to pay for the business to be registered, pay for a development team that was able to build the platform for me and follow me through the entire building journey. Through USC I also got funding from the Blackstone LaunchPad on campus which furthered my development process.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I went to undergrad for Communications with a minor in International business. Initially I was doing communications purely because it was the only program I could get into with my grades and later added international business when my grades got better in college. Upon graduating I kept getting PR and Marketing roles which I never enjoyed, I don’t like being on TV or Radio, I don’t enjoy blogging, writing, scripting or anything media related. I’m not really in touch with pop culture, truly I just enjoy reading/watching medicine and healthcare related things, but was never academic enough to be a doctor. I then got a marketing job at De Beers Group which is a Mining company which is in partnership with Stanford Graduate school of business, thus in that role I was responsible for building the program and marketing it to business leaders and learning about different businesses and their innovations and giving feedback on how the businesses could expand or be more innovative which is when I decided to completely cut the narrative that I am in the Marketing or Comms career path and went to do a Masters in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and completely pivoted and went into healthcare technology and innovation where I feel fulfilled every day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://matchapro.org/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuduetsomasire
• Youtube: https://matchapro.org/schedule-a-demo/