Shipping Is Hard
Shipping is super hard. I think everyone in tech gets that. A shipped product is the culmination of so many different pieces of work, from legal to engineering. All of it needs to be completed, often in parallel as different…
Category Founder’s Ledger
Building Doc Bankman and, before it, boomering: real numbers, real decisions, mistakes included.
The MNO Business Model Trap
I touched briefly on this yesterday in my post. There’s a problem that inevitably faces many startups in Africa where a strategic decision must be made whether to work with an MNO or not. For most, that decision is closer to…
How To Negotiate Across Cultures
Countries do business differently. Some better than others. In my experience, there’s a range of cultural differences that are important to think about when doing business in a different country. It’s fascinating to me how an interaction based on one premise goes…
Agriculture Lending from Apollo Agriculture
There’s lots of innovation in the lending space in Africa. I’ve been in the lending space for 3 years now, but in the mobile space for over 8. I can say that the pace of innovation from startups is the…
Cape Town Start Up City
I moved to Cape Town in June of 2015, and settled here in October of the same year. I joined a start-up called Jumo, which was working on delivering mobile loans to phones in a couple countries. Fast forward one…
MNO & Start-up Collaboration
MNOs are the digital distribution network in Africa. They’ve invested massively in laying out cables and towers, and they’ve done a great job of it. Mobile penetration is increasing across Africa, and 3G is becoming more readily available. Read the…
Building Marketplace Platforms: Where to Start?
Why build a platform? That’s a question we wrestled with at Jumo when deciding between building a marketplace platform or continuing our successful mobile credit business. We chose to go platform because we believe it allows for better choices for…
Focus on Culture First
Since I graduated college, I’ve worked abroad my entire professional career. The countries that I’ve spent time working in include Tanzania, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and India. Each of these countries differs extensively in the work and personal culture. I…
New Year Goal: Math Fluency
Math is cool. It’s getting cooler as well. This year I’m giving myself the goal to become fluent in math. What that means is left vague, so that I have options to pursue based on what I enjoy. To start…
Retrospectives: Pivots
End of the year is here and our office is shutting down on Thursday. At the end of each year I run a retrospective with my team on our accomplishments and failures for that year. In a startup, it’s easy…
Visualizing a Morning
I’m reading Lean Analytics by right now and have found some absolute gems in the book. One of my favorite sections so far is called Empathy, and describes what founders should measure when they are setting up their MVPs. In…
Acquisition in Africa
Dave McClure has this pirate acronym (AARRR) which he uses to help founders remember five important pillars of growth for startups. They are: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue I’m a big fan of using it and have implemented it at…