@asemota's Threads
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Nigeria’s poor will NOT be saved by the ordinary rich people. They will only be saved by those whom they believe in and who are unfortunately becoming rich at their expense. The religious leaders and the politicians are the problem of the poor. They lie to them about prosperity.
I just don’t think rich people can end poverty by giving away everything to the poor and becoming poor themselves. Another set of greedier rich people will only emerge from the current poor. It is a prosperity mentality problem. It is lacking, scarcity mentality rules.
The prosperity churches and others preach doesn’t come from doing what should be done, it is about “believing” it will happen without a clear plan. The prosperity politicians promise is actually for themselves alone.
The most brutal sandbox of ideas in the retail space is the supermarket. It is binary, it sells or it does not sell. Walmart and others have been able to extend this sandbox franchise all over America and beyond. It is why SharkTank investors get wet when they hear a Walmart deal
When you see a Walmart or any major supermarket chain, they are not just in the space renting business of real estate, they are also in the idea testing business. There is a reason they keep testing new products on consumers, it is because there will always be a better mousetrap.
Google and Apple also created that sandbox with their app stores. The most brilliant retail strategy for digital products till date. I am sure that the reason why Google acquires so many companies is because it can see how well they do. Apple should too but they are different.
I have come to realize that most Africans really don't grok the full potential of the Internet.
1. Some friends run a job search site. I asked what the #1 job search term was? They said "Hairdressing."
2. My wife goes on Instagram to search for a style with her hairdresser.
1. Some friends run a job search site. I asked what the #1 job search term was? They said "Hairdressing."
2. My wife goes on Instagram to search for a style with her hairdresser.
3. The said hairdresser has no Instagram account to showcase her finished works which are usually better than the once she copied. She is gifted.
4. She comes home to do my wife's hair and rides a bike. Made me see the true potential of motorcycles. it is not for carrying others
4. She comes home to do my wife's hair and rides a bike. Made me see the true potential of motorcycles. it is not for carrying others
5. I realized my stupidity in seeing everything she is not seeing and not building a model for her to easily adopt. She doesn't need Instagram, she needs a coach, mentor, and manager. She needs someone to close the gap she can't see.
England taught me to express myself freely. Going to school there was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It gave me confidence.
We should review the way we teach a lot of things in most of Africa. Give people more room to fail and learn from it. No class contests.
We should review the way we teach a lot of things in most of Africa. Give people more room to fail and learn from it. No class contests.
The needless competition in learning defeats the purpose. I didn't start learning until there was no pressure for me to always be in the first position in the class. The interesting thing was that in my early years, none of that mattered and I enjoyed learning more.
Over time, I became more conscious of the requirement to be competitive and it became something I did to please my parents and get a reward. This flows into our lives and people take it to their jobs and even where they live. They keep contesting and not learning or living.
Apple, Amazon and Alibaba probably have sold to over a billion people, iOS > 2Billion. Facebook and others sell their billions of members and NOT yet to them. Facebook has billions of advertisers who don’t pay. The only way to make them pay is to get them to sell and do business.
Sometimes it is not what one billion people can buy but what is unique to 1 Billion people that they can sell. Facebook is currently selling you on your behalf but they don’t even have a Billion advertisers paying them. One day, they will figure out something to sell to you.
The trick is to figure it out first and then sell and maybe they will acquire you like Instagram or try to kill you off like Snap. I am thinking Facebook will want to sell a billion VR devices for cheap once there is a revenue model in it. Don’t sleep on VR and AR. AR especially.
This is the last of the free stuff I will be giving here. Enjoy.
Education, Healthcare, and Government remain priority technology investment areas in Africa that can guarantee outsize returns.
I did this research for the IFC almost 20 years ago and nothing much has changed.
Education, Healthcare, and Government remain priority technology investment areas in Africa that can guarantee outsize returns.
I did this research for the IFC almost 20 years ago and nothing much has changed.
I have always advocated in the past that mentors, advisors, and investors should be friends with founders. Especially investors. I have also seen how that friendship can be abused with people taking things for granted. Friendship doesn’t mean entitlement.
I had a chat with two competing founders recently. One of them is closer to me than the other one. I had to be harder on the one closer to me because he was dropping his guard and expected magic to happen because “he knows people.” The other is hungrier and doesn’t know anyone.
The hungrier founder had done a lot more homework and seemed to know the business better. His vision was also greater. It is only a matter of time before his performance also allows him to have the people on his side who can be helpful.
The day I almost cried was when a friend said I was encouraging "low-quality subsistence businesses" with our agent network. I was sad because it was largely true. We have a subsistence economy in Nigeria because the backbone for a scalable one doesn't exist. It is governance.
Coca-Cola and MTN had to build their own infrastructure to be able to survive but they depended on the "subsistence businesses" to scale. The problem is that these businesses never really grew as the multinationals grew. To get better margins, they had to spread wider and thinner
Trading is a margin business. The bulk of the benefit goes to the owner of the innovation being traded. Value passes from layer to layer and hand to hand and it largely does not multiply further into new products and innovations. This is also the danger of cheap Chinese imports.
What if the Twitter team had actually found Nigerian companies to acquire instead of offering a job? Not diminishing their great gesture, just thinking and wondering why we don’t position such companies before Billionaire visits? Mark Zuckerberg actually said he was looking for.
@tadegbesan was the only one who publicly asked Mark Zuckerberg about the process of getting an investment or acquisition. The man responded that it was a great question and wanted to do more stuff like the Andela investment. Maybe he will buy Lifebank or 54Gene next time.
We should be quietly building companies and diligently seeking exits. I regret not taking the two M&A offers I got as a sign to look for better candidates. I just thought those people weren’t serious and I may have been right, but it showed me that we had built something valuable
Woke up at 3 am this morning thinking of something that's been bugging my mind and I've been unable to put a finger on it. The danger of the "African Problems" narrative vs "African Opportunity" both are dangerous extremes. I've been wondering why true innovation is hard to find?
Very few are talking about "African experimentation" or "African discovery" and "African exploration". We believe there are definite states existing with definite answers and that is where we are totally wrong. There is, in reality, a lot of "African Ambiguity" seen as negative.
Labels are dangerous as they doom people into a path. Outcomes have remained the same because nobody is asking really hard questions. Change doesn't come from the familiar but rather the unfamiliar. People with the real power to "let" change happen are within and not outside.
I must have watched this video almost 10 times already and the date 1997 jumped out. He started his company 3 years before that date, at about the same time we started in Nigeria. Same tech but he was internet and we were enterprise. He was in the future we were in the past.
The other thing that stood out was how there was an existing industry he optimized with tech. Most of what we are doing in Africa is zero based. This is why I keep stressing that tech should connect with the informal sector. It is much easier to build on what already exists.
Also about building with the future in mind, the African future is going to be drastically different. It could be exponentially better or exponentially worse. The power to make it better lies in what we can do with tech to alter future outcomes. African tech has much more power.
I started writing a blog post about “How we met @jack” and decided that maybe a short Twitter thread is better.
I remember when @OoTheNigerian replied to people who were aghast at the tech community gushing over Mark Zuckerberg when he visited. He told them Mark was our Beyoncé
I remember when @OoTheNigerian replied to people who were aghast at the tech community gushing over Mark Zuckerberg when he visited. He told them Mark was our Beyoncé
Jack is our actually more of our “Jay Z” of entrepreneurship and bigger than Beyoncé in many aspects. He may also be cofounder and CEO of Twitter but his most important accomplishment to me was starting @square. I am biased as that is my area but it was a profound paradigm shift.
Square not only made it possible for any merchant with a smartphone phone to accept payments, they started the concept of working capital finance for merchants based on receivables. It was this hardware innovation that led to other software based payment innovations.
#1 law of Accra traffic:
“Where two or three TroTro are gathered to pick passengers, they will cause traffic jams.”
I typically avoid bus stops like a plague until I moved away from civilization to the highlands.
I learn a lot of Economics while observation traffic patterns.
“Where two or three TroTro are gathered to pick passengers, they will cause traffic jams.”
I typically avoid bus stops like a plague until I moved away from civilization to the highlands.
I learn a lot of Economics while observation traffic patterns.
There is actually something like “The bus driver mentality,” someone observed it in Lagos and mentioned it here too. The ability for them not to see that a little patience will allow everyone to move and make progress. The bus driver mentality is shared by many including the rich
Anyone who has watched the movie “A Beautiful Mind” will remember how John Nash came about the “Nash Equilibrium” by observing his friends while they were out looking for dates with young women. It later won him the Nobel prize. I believe there is another Nobel waiting in Africa.
One of our fundamental delusions in Nigerian tech is that Nosa in Lekki thinks he is smarter than Gozie at Otigba because he writes software but Gozie sells computers and phones. Nosa doesn’t realize that he will not have customers without Gozie. I am perplexed by this disconnect
I blame it on the Internet making open source software now readily available. In the past, we depended on Chuma or Abiodun on the streets of Otigba for most of our software which was pirated and sold on CDs. We had respect for them until the Internet came to change the dynamic.
The current reality is that while Nosa is still dreaming of his imaginary market that will magically appear to make him rich, Gozie already has a market and they buy from him daily. The purchases can be direct or indirect as Gozie is part of a network which Nosa could gain from.
The first time I had to supply computers to a client, I had no money and no registered company or bank account. I went to my uncle and he called a guy called Eme Iheanacho who would give me the computers on credit but guaranteed by him. Then his wife allowed me to use her company
I supplied it, paid Eme and made a profit of 100k Naira. This was several times my previous annual salary and I was still in school doing my MBA. I learned more from that transaction than what my MBA lectures were teaching. This was how most business happened in Nigeria.
Supplier finance is based on trust. I later found out that Eme was also getting his computers from one of my old bosses at GICEN called Wembly Ukwa. I traced it further and found Wembly’s supplier. A doctor in Surulere who imported the computers. He became my supplier too.
A startup is a business that does not intend to remain a small business. All activities are ideally optimized for growth. Both the business and market have to exist for growth to happen. An idea is NOT a startup but can be kickstarted into one. There are many ways to do that.
You don’t need investors for equity at “Kickstart” stage. You just need investors who have faith and are willing to lose their money because of the faith they have. They come in different forms from friends and family to grants and even gifts of resources you would have paid for.
What differentiates a true startup from others is growth. If you are not growing, more money will NOT do the magic. It means that some fundamental parts of your assumptions and calculations are off. Growth is simple to discern, inbound requests must be more than outbound sales.
Privilege is good.
Those who have it should use it to their advantage. Let's not pretend that we don't want the best for ourselves always. Anyone using Twitter is at first privileged to have Internet access then privileged to have an opinion. Some like Sowore lost their privilege
Those who have it should use it to their advantage. Let's not pretend that we don't want the best for ourselves always. Anyone using Twitter is at first privileged to have Internet access then privileged to have an opinion. Some like Sowore lost their privilege
Privilege comes from a place of abundance and not scarcity. Some seem to think that the privilege others have is a vice when they lack the same opportunity. It is only a vice when it hinders others from progress. Nobody is entitled to share in the privilege of others. Find yours.
All privilege is not created equal. A lot of people work hard for their right to enjoy the benefits of their hard work. My family members did. I learned from them and did too. To come from inheriting only 2 shirts after your father died while you were 8 to billions is hard work.
When I decided on entrepreneurship against all family suggestions and inclinations, I had a mental block to all advice as I felt that "they didn't understand" because they were old. Until my cousin Lateef Belo-Osagie drummed sense into my head. He was also an entrepreneur.
He saw all the advantages and privilege I was throwing away because of "passion" and after listening to my pitch, he said the thing that was doing me was pride and pride is the last thing that fucks with you before you die. A line from the movie "Pulp Fiction."
It is amazing that the last people whom you would expect not to have pride are those who have it in abundance. I was broke, living with a relative who had created a major opportunity but my pride would not let me accept it. I had other reasons too but in the end still pride.
A partner with a foreign multi billion dollar investment fund called me to discuss Africa. I agreed.
Half way into the conversation, I realized what he didn’t know and what I was inadvertently volunteering. I twisted the conversation around to ask him more questions. He dodged.
Half way into the conversation, I realized what he didn’t know and what I was inadvertently volunteering. I twisted the conversation around to ask him more questions. He dodged.
A simple question about if he was willing to invest a portion of his fund committed to Africa for building up ecosystems without expectation of returns. He tried hard to change the topic and I insisted on knowing how they had helped their own ecosystem to grow? He didn’t answer.
There is a rush for Africa now that makes me laugh. If anyone offers you money, please take it and use it to learn. You are not doomed to one venture. Even if you fail, put it under your belt with pride. The pathetic thing is they go after the same usual suspects.
A common response by Nigerians online to posts indicating progress or wins of others is "God when?" A phrase that reveals a lot deeper than we fail to realize even when we think "it isn't that deep." It is an indication that we are only just waiting not actively asking "why not?"
Why not? Was the question I asked myself one day as I was jogging from Parkview into Banana Island while still living with my uncle in Lagos. I saw a beautiful new apartment block and was thinking that new occupants would be "lucky people" then paused and asked "why not me?"
It was at that moment I realized that I had defeated myself in the past by thinking that progress was linear and maybe one day it would be my turn. I was optimistic but there was no determinism in my optimism. I decided to have an agenda. I wanted to live in one of those houses.
I made a comment innocently to something on Twitter then got replies I didn't understand until I checked Nigeria Twitter trends.
This whole thing is just drama. It is hard on both sides but much harder being an entrepreneur. I fired 21 people once to survive and restart. Not new
This whole thing is just drama. It is hard on both sides but much harder being an entrepreneur. I fired 21 people once to survive and restart. Not new
It was, however, hard on a lot.of those I had to let go. I was sad when the last guy "Wilson" who was my best driver ever, tendered his resignation. He saw the handwriting on the wall. These were all humans with lives. I learned a lesson from that experience. Run things well.
I vowed never to let things get so bad that I would have to do it again. I became much more transparent with everything which was also with its own pitfalls. Fraud loves transparency, people can take you out when they know too much. It happened more than once. It was bad.
My longtime white South African friend invited me to his 50th birthday in Venice, Italy next year. He sent this invite 3 years ago. This was to allow all of us save and prepare. He does not plan to pay for us to come, we are going because we want to and value friendship.
This sounds absurd in the surface but it is something his wife (a renal failure survivor and kidney transplant patient) had planned for him and wanted to celebrate being alive. The best part of life to them are their friends as they decided not to have children.
At first, I didn’t even consider going. He reminded me again recently and I saw the sense in it. I have not seen him for years even though we feel that we are close because we communicate online. There is a HUGE difference between meeting people physically and doing it online.
@surambaya @mbuguanjihia I understand where @mbuguanjihia is coming from as I was on the board of @MAZAHealth providing ambulances for pregnant women in rural Northern Ghana. We realized the same ambulance services were used by others too and looked at the data especially for children, a vulnerable group
@surambaya @mbuguanjihia @MAZAHealth First revelation was that no child from age 4 to 14 needed emergency services. The most vulnerable ages were when they started farming and when they were very young. Diet and exercise were probably the reasons. The most important revelation was our understanding of poverty.
@surambaya @mbuguanjihia @MAZAHealth A large percentage of the women could not pay the token amount of 20 Ghana Cedis for the antenatal transport and ambulance service even after 9 months of pregnancy. The initial reason was thought to be poverty until we realized that they paid up even when they didn’t have to.
I once made a sexist and tasteless joke to an old friend who was working for a bank and had come to meet me to raise deposits. I asked her if they sent her out because of her curves? I forgot about it but she didn’t. Many years later in Wales, she reminded me of that statement.
What she told me was even scarier. She said she was praying that I have a daughter and she has a son and for her son to ask my daughter the same question one day or even worse, make her pay. That is how much the statement hurt her. I didn’t realize she was harassed daily.
She came to me because she felt safe as I had known her from childhood but that statement made her put me in the same category as her harassers. I apologized and tried to make her know that I really wasn’t thinking properly when I said it. It was normalizing a problem in banking.
