#nfrnds

Lecturing on common startup mistakes and the role of failure in startup culture.

Recently, I had the very exciting opportunity to speak at the 2014 Pivot East Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. During my time in this upcoming startup hub, I gave a lecture on failure, mistakes, and startup strategies. I also mentored startups, judged their pitches, and visited the Accelerators and Incubators where they are building East Africa’s startup ecosystem one product at a time. Additionally, some may know that I've begun working with a startup called nFrnds, which builds highly innovative mobile technologies to connect the 5 Billion people at the Base of the Pyramid to internet services, affordably and immediately. I took advantage of the trip to share nFrnds with local entrepreneurs and investors, and to explore one of the fastest-growing markets for the product.

As a neophyte to the African Startup Ecosystem and a new member of the nFrnds team, a few interesting experiences stood out for me, and I drew a few conclusions worth sharing.

East African Entrepreneurs are Coming Up – FAST

Fellow judge and Director of Engineering at Facebook said it best – “when I told my colleagues in Silicon Valley that I was headed to Nairobi for this conference, most of them were unaware that there were even startups in Africa.” Though Matthew and I had a few good laughs about the Valley’s nearsightedness issues, the reality is no laughing matter. Despite having considerable experience in the two top startup ecosystems of Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley,  I was nonetheless blown away by the absolute hustle of these entrepreneurs from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia; one of the audio technicians even cornered me in the men’s room to ask me for advice on incorporating his own side venture! These entrepreneurs seem to have very little concern for the decreasingly relevant gaps between their home turf and Palo Alto. They’re hungry, they’re innovative, and they follow The Lean Startup, TechCrunch, and Hackernews just like you and I. If you’re an entrepreneur in San Francisco, Tel Aviv, London, New York, Berlin, Río, Austin, or anywhere else for that matter, be prepared: East Africa is here, and as far as entrepreneurial talent goes, they’re catching up fast.

Home Field Advantage: Building Products That Matter

As Asana’s Justin Rosenstein, Bill Gates, and many others have noted, many of the more developed startup ecosystems are currently suffering crises of relevance, building startups that are fundamentally, well, silly. Not so in East Africa. While entrepreneurs in SF & TLV are building apps to better share pictures of your dog or send a flirty message to the girl sitting next to you on the bus, entrepreneurs in East Africa are connecting tens of thousands of farmers to powerful agricultural markets, making transportation more safe and reliable, and providing affordable health solutions for prenatal care. In many ways, I believe this is the advantage of East Africa as a market; the relevancy problem is simply irrelevant to an entrepreneur who grew up on a 90 square meter farm, and the innovations he builds can spread like wildfire to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of new consumers.

Unlimited, Affordable Connectivity Will be a Game-Changer (for Both Innovators and Individuals)

Founders from two startups, in awe at the seemingly miraculous data-free email.

Within 3 days of my arrival in Nairobi, I had exhausted about $25 in credit. Despite the fact that smartphones are becoming more and more accessible, connectivity is still wildly expensive in the developing world. Imagine my surprise when my cab driver admitted to spending as much as 3,000 shillings ($33) per month on SMS and voice calls, on his simple phone with no data! This might not sound like a huge sum of money – but it is. When I lived in France, my €15.99 ($21.70) per month provided me with Unlimited SMS, Unlimited voice calls to 100 international countries, and 20 Gigabytes of 4G data. This doesn’t even take into consideration the median income differences between France and Kenya.

The point here, is that on a relative scale, even basic use of your phone in Kenya is exponentially more expensive. Compare my cab driver’s 3,000-shilling-a-month bill to the average cost of an unlimited nFrnds account: 90 Kenyan Shillings. Though nFrnds can’t replace all of his voice calls and SMS, it can easily replace 60% of it by switching his SMS usage to unlimited, free chat. He can also access email and Wikipedia for the first time, without having to pay for an expensive internet cafe. Perhaps most importantly of all, nFrnds’ open platform could one day theoretically be adapted to host unique and innovative solutions for coordination and dispatch of fares, similar to what we are currently doing for farmers and agricultural traders. In order to understand the magnitude of the impact nFrnds’ technologies, one needs only show the technology to any mobile phone user in Kenya. After showing the technology to one or two entrepreneurs during the conference, I observed a recognizable pattern. There’s a specific moment when the proverbial “ball” drops; that moment when a person realizes that the email they just received was sent with no data, no sms, and no airtime usage. In that moment, their faces light up with a mix of excitement and disbelief, and they blurt out a response ranging from “What kind of voodoo is this?” to “But… that’s not possible!” Of the entrepreneurs I showed nFrnds to, the majority of them couldn’t help but explain what a massive impact the platform can have on their product and on their user experience. A few of them demanded full-stop that we partner with them (see above remarks on hustle). All of this is quite exciting; nFrnds’ true potential will be realized not by our engineers, but by the need-knowers in the field who dream up innovative ways to harness it in service of their users. I traveled to Kenya with the suspicion that nFrnds was on to something big.