After living in East Africa for 3+ years he is now based in Copenhagen where he runs a business setting up and running podcasts for companies around the world.
While in East Africa he started the The East Africa Business Podcast which is a podcast about the business environment in East Africa based around interviews with entrepreneurs, investors and organizations looking to help the region grow.
We Talk About
- What are some of the challenges that Entrepreneurs face in Kenya?
- If a Westerner were to move to Africa to start a business. What does that person need to know to be successful?
- Where are the opportunities in Africa in both the countries and tech in the next 5 years?
Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfloy/
Email sam@samfloy.com
Website https://theeastafricabusinesspodcast.com/
CONNECT WITH SHAWN
- Shawn Flynn’s LinkedIn Account
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- Email Shawn@thesiliconvalleypodcast.com
Shawn Flynn 0:00
You’re listening to the Silicon Valley podcast. On today’s show, we sit down with Sam Floy after live in East Africa for three plus years. He is now based in Copenhagen. While in East Africa, he started the East African business podcast, which is a podcast about the business environment in East Africa, based around the interviews with entrepreneurs, investors and organizations looking to help the region grow. Today we talk about what are some of the challenges that entrepreneurs face in Kenya? If a Westerner were to move to Africa to start a business? What does that person need to know to be successful? Where are the opportunities in Africa? This is much more Don’t forget, write a review on iTunes, and share this great content with your network. All right. And now let’s start the show. Enjoy.
Announcer 0:47
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech. Learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 1:04
Sam, thank you for taking the time to be on the Silicon Valley podcast. Now. We’ve had venture capitalist from Africa before we had Nicole Yembra venture capitalist from Nigeria and Thelma Ekiyor. We haven’t had any entrepreneurs haven’t had anyone from Kenya yet. And in fact, your story is absolutely fascinating. So, can you give our listeners a little bit of background of your career, your journey up to this point?
Sam Floy 1:28
Originally, I’m from the UK, which you might be able to guess from my accent. After finishing university, I worked at a startup for about four years, and then decided that it would be a bit more interesting to go and start a business somewhere else in the world. I was looking for a mix of somewhere developing but still dynamic. And I thought East Africa seemed like quite an interesting place to go. I went and did a try before you buy tool, where I spent a month living in Rwanda, a month in Uganda, a month in Kenya a month in Tanzania, before finally deciding that I wanted to live and start a business in Kenya. I was then there for further two and a half years. During that time I started a podcast where I interviewed a number of East African entrepreneurs will perhaps talk about some of the stories that they had later in the show. But then I was there in East Africa till about September 2019. And then I moved back to Europe, where I’m calling you from now, I think that I by no means an expert or sort of a seasoned professional. Should we say that However, what I have done is I’ve come at this from an outsider’s perspective and try to get a grasp of what are the key moving parts in the East African business ecosystem. And I myself have played a part in that to some degree. And I can very much hope to share with the listeners a lot of the exciting opportunities that exist there
Shawn Flynn 2:47
You arrived in East Africa. What was your immediate impression of the business community, just the ecosystem in general?
Sam Floy 2:57
The main thing to say is that when I was when I got there, there was a lot going on. Initially, I when I decided to go to East Africa, I thought well, I don’t really know anything about what’s going on in the business scene there. There’s no point me being sat in London, doing some research online and deciding I’m going to do a solar company in Uganda without even going there and understanding what’s happening. So, I had a friend who was based in Rwanda. So, I thought, right, I’ll take a one-way flight to Rwanda, and I’ll stay with him for a month. And then I’ll spend a month in Uganda a month in Kenya a month in Tanzania. And I’ll basically try and figure out, is there space here for me to do a business? And if so, what ways can I fit invest into the business ecosystem? If I get to the end of those four months, and it’s not them, I’ll call it a holiday, I’ll come back to England and I’ll get a proper job. So thankfully, or thankfully, in April, yeah, I got there. And there was actually lots of felt both lots of opportunities, and also lots of places where I could sort of fit in as somebody who has learned about startups and sort of worked in companies in the UK. So, the first thing was, yes, lots of opportunity. Lots of people talking about businesses, lots for lots of people saying you start up by doing these are the opportunities that I’m seeing, but it was also relatively finite. In terms of the people who were in the entrepreneurial scene. You could get introduction to most people a lot of social life. And indeed, business life in East Africa happens on WhatsApp, or lots of WhatsApp groups in various different countries and across the region. And use of sort of got in with that it was quite easy to sort of understand and sort of get introductions to people that
Shawn Flynn 4:38
so, you’re getting their deductions to people being engulfed in the community. And while this was happening, what were some of the challenges that the entrepreneurs were facing that you discovered?
Sam Floy 4:49
What I think the there’s probably a little step in between. So, I think when you when I sort of first arrived in the region, it’s not necessarily immediately obvious how everything works and how Everything fits together. For me personally, I was very interested in how can I learn as much as possible about the business ecosystem. And so when I arrived in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, I would quite easily go to a social event, get chatting to people, oh, you run this type of business, you run that type of business, and that sort of thing, when I’d love to get to sit down with you go for coffee with your chat for 30 minutes and pick your brains about how you do business here. But understandably, you’re talking to busy entrepreneurs. And they would say, Look, I’m really sorry, a lot going on with the business maybe in a few weeks’ time, or maybe sometime in the future. That didn’t quite work for me, because I was there for, I basically had four weeks per country to evaluate whether what was going on there, and I was trying to think, Okay, how can I balance the exchange? How can I even out How can I give back something back, rather than simply stealing some 30 minutes of someone’s time? So, I mean, like you, Shawn, I sort of thought, Well, I’m enjoy listening to podcasts when I first was thinking about moving to the region, wide search, Africa business podcast, and nothing came up. So, I thought, Okay, well, how hard is it? A few weeks of googling and testing out, etc., I thought, well, maybe I can start a podcast. And what I can do is go back to those same entrepreneurs and give them publicity to people around the world. Because if I was sat in London, searching African business podcasts, maybe there are other people, too, that then became my pitch to local entrepreneurs, is, would you like to promote your show, and it’s going to be listening to people around the world. I then went and arranged these conversations with these entrepreneurs, and basically had the same conversation that I would have had if I was going for coffee, but there was a microphone in the middle. And so, once the recording was done, I then packaged it up and turned it into a podcast. The reason I sort of explained that is that it only took it was only after 10s, dozens and dozens of hours of speaking to lots of different business owners in lots of different areas, irrigation companies in Rwanda, or radio appetizers, in Uganda, all kinds of businesses in Tanzania and Kenya, that you really actually begin to understand what are some of the common threads all the challenges that exist? Now, of course, some are specific to just businesses. But after a while, you begin to see, okay, there are certain characteristics that emerge, just even until the day that I left Kenya, being in East Africa for over three years, I was still learning. Okay, this is another bit of nuance to how business is being done. In answer to your question motion, I’d say the two main challenges that I see are, some of them are perhaps more because they structural, which is, it’s generally a low trust environment. And so as a result, the ways that I was used to operating in the UK, you have to have, for example, additional checks and balances for the types of work that you’d be doing. For example, if you were to have a remote sales team, in the UK, you might just say, Okay, well, here’s your sales material. Let’s catch up. Yeah. And we’ll have a weekly call to catch up on how you’re doing in Kenya, a lot of the remote sales team was working with, if especially if you’re being paid on commission, there’s lots of checks and balances that were needed to make sure that kickbacks weren’t happening, for example, kickbacks, basically being low level corruption, the buyer and the seller, do some sort of deal which swindles the main company out of the business. The other main one, for being quite frank, there is a lack of local demand, when we’re comparing the addressable market, for example, of particular businesses in the US or the UK, you might be able to say, Okay, well, I, dog food delivery services, okay, there are 10 billion dog owners in the UK, they spend an average of 30 pounds a month on dog food, okay, suddenly, we’ve got quite a nice market size, if you’re looking at the types of businesses that are based on middle class consumers in Nairobi, in Kenya, you maybe have 100,000 or so and so straightaway, those calculations that you’re doing, make the size of the market a lot smaller, a lot smaller. And then generally, that sort of filters through to local businesses. So, I think the two main things are sort of low trust environments, and welcome local demand.
Shawn Flynn 9:15
I love how you mentioned having a podcast get you in front of people, from my experience, this has been the greatest way to sit down with people and get their time that in most situations, I wouldn’t have had that opportunity. Now, with these companies that you sat down and you interviewed, can you share some of their stories, what they’re working on and enlighten us a little bit about what they’re doing?
Sam Floy 9:39
Absolutely. So, I should say that in total, I think I’ve interviewed about 80 different companies. And I think with a lot of them, you sort of can sort of sit down and be like, Okay, this is I kind of get this this is a job platform, but for slightly localized to East Africa. Those were definitely interesting or manufacturing companies like okay, this is interesting and there are certain bits of Yes, and aspects do sort of strike you as always interesting what I hadn’t really thought of it that way, what I’ll have to do is go over some examples of companies where the business model has almost had to be invented by scratch. Or it’s something where there’s a, it sort of highlights a bigger sort of theme underlying, for example, the first one I might talk about is a company called Flare. The short version is they are Uber for ambulances. If you are in Nairobi, and you want order an ambulance, or you break your leg or someone you know, has a heart attack, and you need to order an ambulance. In the UK, at least there is one number you call 999. And that takes you through to the government run ambulance service. And they then send out dispatch the nearest ambulance. In Kenya, there are 45 different private ambulance companies, which basically means if you are a company, if you have, you can buy an ambulance van, and you can have some trained medical staff, I think you haven’t, you might have to get a license. But either way, there is not one number to call, friends having a heart attack, you might have three or four different ambulance numbers that you call the first one, they say that to the nearest one is two hours across town for the next one, you end up haggling over the price. What Flare does is they basically aggregated all the different ambulance providers, and then they’ve done some incredibly smart technology, which basically allows you to, for example, if you’re having a cardiac arrest, it will inform the ambulance driver that they should just go to this particular hospital, which has space for a lot of times before all this information was just kept in people’s heads. And obviously though, when you’ve got emergency health care, there’s not much margin for error. And so, this is just for me just a phenomenal way of formalizing this informal structure, or sort of a situation that was going on. And so, they have they started off on the ambulance side of things creating that ambulance dispatch platform, it also added the consumer angle now, where if you have the younger friend is having a heart attack, you call Flare, they have a trained medical professional to talk you through some first aid. And then in the meantime, using your phone’s GPS, they can relocate, they can allocate the nearest ambulance to get it. So that to me, it’s just like a fantastic business model, not the sort of thing which I would have ever really considered would be an opportunity for. The next one I’ll sort of talk about is a company called a lendable. A short version for them is Big Data lending. So, they’re all about how can they make it more attractive for international hedge funds or wealth managers to invest in Africa, a lot of the time, there is a lot of uncertainty around thing around how it works. So be the short version is that they do a heap of data analysis and predictions and all sorts of wonderful buzzwords to basically get the validity of effectively risk, what it’s like to do investments. And then they can go to their partners in London or New York be investing $25 million into a motorbike leasing company. In Kenya, for example, that type, if that motorbike leasing company was to go to the bank, they wouldn’t be able to get that level of funding, because the bank would need, I’m going into the need to the fact that they lendable have done a big data analysis means that they are able to sort of deploy this capital.
Shawn Flynn 13:20
So, with all these companies that you’ve mentioned, so far, the companies themselves, how are they getting the funding the capital to start to operate?
Sam Floy 13:29
I think when it comes to companies in East Africa, at least and I imagine in other parts of the continent, there’s a there’s working describes a layer of impact investing. So there historically, this would be philanthropy or charity. And more and more it’s been trying to the focus is trying to shift away from straight handouts and more into STEM impact investing, which is to give money to businesses that have a social impact a lot of companies Well, they’re saying, well, through doing this, we are improving the environment, there will be grant money available for people to basically say, so an NGO or a fund would say, we’ll give you this money, but you must promise that you’re going to improve economic empowerment. So, you’re going to give people employment, or you’re going to do training, or you’re going to do something which is more than just the financial return. But a lot of companies if they’re doing something, which is quite good, there’s quite a lot of grant money available. Also, this impact investing money, you’re beginning to see as well, local Angel network, this is typically investors who’ve had some welfarist investments, and they’re beginning to sort of dip their toe into startup investing in sort of a slightly more sort of venture capital angle. And then occasionally there are maybe this comes a little bit later, but there are options for international funding, so a few companies have been able to raise large amounts of money from the US in terms of getting started. grant money to local investors or friends and family. They’re sort of standard.
Shawn Flynn 15:01
Now I’ve seen a couple of companies from Africa pitch here in Silicon Valley, a startup in Africa wanted to access Silicon Valley or the US market, how would they go about doing that?
Sam Floy 15:12
I think it sort of depends where is the focus of the market. So where is the focus of the business, like, who are the end consumers that that company is serving, if they’re serving African consumers, and I basically recommend have a knockout proposition for how this business that they want investment in is going to offer a route, or Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley investors to prosper from Africa’s development. So, the continent is set for incredible growth. This is a huge booming population. I think a lot of people intellectually get the idea that okay, in the next 20 years, Africa is going to be developing, there’s going to be some business opportunities. And so, if I was a company that was focusing on the African market, and I was pitching for money in the US or elsewhere, I would 100% have that as the narrative like, this is the big change that we’re going to see in the world. And then basically follow the standard procedures that you’d have when doing a pitch. But basically, I’d be saying the key message would be, if you want to benefit from the hopefully inevitable growth of Africa, then investing in this business is the way to do it.
Shawn Flynn 16:22
Okay, and how are the relationships between the startup centers in Africa and those in the US.
Sam Floy 16:29
I can probably speak more to Europe, when it compares like to Europe, and I guess a little bit to the US, but the main sort of thing to understand about the business ecosystems in Africa are that it’s more or less split into north, south, east and west. So, Cairo, in Egypt, in the north of Lagos, Nigeria, and the West, already Kenya, in East Africa, and Johannesburg in the south. And so, you’ll generally see a sort of concentration of some sort of business activity in those regions. Now, of course, that’s not where all of the work happens. There’s lots of lots of things happening in Lusaka, in Zambia, or in Kampala, in Uganda, and in Accra, in Ghana. companies may choose to launch in a second city before they then go to the bright lights of Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, or Canonsburg. But generally, that’s sort of where the concentrations of power and my sense is that there’s quite a sort of congenial field between things. So, there are so I’ve been, for example, for tension in Nairobi, where somebody invited along their friend who’s running a business in Lagos, or somebody visiting him from Johannesburg. And it is quite, everyone’s very interested now. What’s it like here? What are some of the challenges you’re finding, you know, any sort of good investors, etc. So, I think it’s generally about sort of how it all fits together.
Shawn Flynn 17:45
I interviewed a couple of venture capitalists from Nigeria, I mentioned from earlier, Nicole Yembra. And they talked about the mindset of starting a business there and the culture and how Nigeria is a lot different than Silicon Valley. They’d both been to Silicon Valley. They really talked a lot about the issues, the problems that the entrepreneurs face in Nigeria. I mean, one thing that really surprised me was there’s no consistent electricity there. And they said, everyone’s got their own generator, things would just shut down for sometimes days. What was the feel in Kenya? What were the problems that people were facing there? Was it similar different?
Sam Floy 18:20
pre festival address the mindset aspects of it. So, I think this is something which did strike me when I went to East Africa and Well, perhaps less so in Rwanda, but more so in Uganda and Kenya, there’s a lot of entrepreneurial activity, and you speak to almost anyone, and they can talk to you about a business that they’re doing. My sense is that, in general, a lot of people are aspiring to have a steady job. So actually, they would love to have a nine to five, where they can get steady income, predictable income. Entrepreneurship is often the default position that a lot of people need to have, make a living or put food on the table. That said, even if somebody does have a job, they’ll almost always have a side hustle. So, another way of generating income. I think this is hustle mindset is something that almost everyone, in least Uganda and Kenya, that I spoke with, had, because I was always looking for this next opportunity. How can where is it possible to sort of earn a bit of extra money saying that’s very much that’s somewhat different to the UK, at least, where people kind of bored of having a steady job and they want some sexy things being entrepreneur sort of a slight change, but also people aren’t necessarily innately entrepreneurial. So, for example, if they were to go traveling abroad, go on holiday, they might not, for example, buy 10 extra blankets from India, and then come and sell them back to friends and family in the UK, or even Kenya. My sense was a lot of people would do that, if they were abroad, this sort of a deal, buy some stuff out, bring it back, and then sell it locally. In terms of the sort of challenges again, it’s sort of depends on the types of company that you consider So in Ethiopia is pretty common, the power and internet can just be shut off for several weeks at a time. So I know there been some protests on the internet, which were switched off for two or three weeks, very difficult to do that when you’re running an internet business. And the power goes out coming having to come up with strategies to get around as a business risk. few other things which sort of seem like challenges, which again, for example, I’ve never come across is the idea of addresses. So, like, where does someone live, there isn’t really a postal service, because a lot of people don’t have a, if not an official address, and a recognizable address, and just the cities in the country. And I’m really grown up with this idea of, okay, we need like a specific address to send something to certain startups who have emerged to sort of want a better phrase to address the problem, people not having addresses. And so that’s quite interesting. Again, another like little thing to kind of overcome, which might not be a bit which you wouldn’t think twice about in the UK or in the US. And I think from an infrastructure perspective, yes, there would be power cuts, and a lot of other places have generators. A big thing is traffic, which again, you might not think about as sort of a big thing. But especially if it rains, there’s not a great drainage on a lot of roads in Nairobi, fixity just goes to a standstill, I’ve literally spent hours, same time in traffic after a downpour. But on the flip side, something that Kenya does have is very good phone coverage. And they also have mobile money, which is very prevalent a 90%. Plus, the people will have a mobile money account. And so, you could meet a goat herder in the middle of the savanna, and pay him with mobile money. And that would be totally legit. So, I think other aspects of it are Yeah, again, a little bit different.
Shawn Flynn 21:44
So, with everything you mentioned, or something that wasn’t even mentioned, if you could change anything, which would increase opportunities for startups, what would it be?
Sam Floy 21:55
I think that the common answer, the common response to some of this would be to say, you know, to give startups more funding, but for me, at least, that feels like a bit of a short-term fix. I think, if you think about investing, Now, the reason you invest, is to get a return on your money, even if you’re doing impact investing, ultimately, you want to be getting some type of return on your money, which means the business gets paid, which means there’s some underlying purchase or consumption of goods or services that’s happening. So, the short answer is, I’d say things that stimulate local demand. Yeah, a very straightforward way of doing this is direct cash transfers. And so, we’ve seen one of the big the largest UBI, universal basic income experiments is happening in western Kenya at the moment. So, we’ll sort of see what are the results of that things that are going to stimulate demand. Another way is getting more international firms buying from Africa, that will then hopefully allow the money to sort of trickle down into the hands of employees of those companies who then become consumers, the more they start consuming the money circulates around the economy, and then suddenly, demand for ancillary services begins to spring up, as well as two main ways that I can see.
Shawn Flynn 23:03
And what about the different business models in Africa? Could you go into a little bit of detail about those Can you go into if someone from the west wanted to go into Africa and set up operations of business, the best way to go about doing that? I’m really curious from that entrepreneur’s point of view and your journey.
Sam Floy 23:20
Often when people are thinking about doing business in Africa, who’s been in there purely for the financial potential financial reward that might come from it, often there’s something else which is, which is at play, two main things that people might go into it is to provide a product or service that isn’t currently being used, thatthey think should be. So, for example, this could be electricity in rural homes, or education, or affordable transport or transit or something where there is a local product or service that’s been missing. And the other motivation is to improve the livelihoods of people living there. Sometimes that is done by having access to electricity, but also it can be it can be done by giving people an income. A big distinction that I like to think about is where is the supply? And where is the demand is where most people think about doing business in Africa? They’re talking about the demand, saying, Okay, how can we create products and services that are going to be for the next billion consumers, this is okay. But it means you there’s, there’s typically there’s going to be a long lag, where you might not have or you almost certainly won’t have good revenue coming into the business. So, if you look at Profit and Loss here, that’s not going to be a lot of top line revenue coming into the business and hence, you’re going to need to have long term investors who are willing to plug the gap and keep things going. Or the business goes bust. Personally, I’m more interested in the improve the livelihoods of people living there through giving people an income. And so, I like Western demand and local supply. me like the number one impact thing you can do is to give people give lots of people a steady income and that way they can buy more things. Local demand. And that sort of thing helps the local economy. But also, it means people can buy medical services and lots of things that when I was in Kenya, I was working for a b2b company, where I was selling internationally. So I sort of sold in eight different African countries and combination of European and US companies it is so much easier cause I’m sure you can, doesn’t take too much logic to get to this conclusion, it’s so much easier if you can pitch your client and pitch your business to Western clients who are going to be fine paying $20,000 for a service, because to get an equivalent amount of revenue locally, it’s possible but it’s a lot harder. I therefore like to sort of decouple these two ideas of a bear to provide locals are you having local demand? Are you trying to get it locally, if the main thing you want is to increase the incomes, go and sell elsewhere in the world, and then funnel that money back into the startup into Africa, in whichever way seems best, either through employing local people, or through buying local suppliers, or anything that can be getting international money into the economy. So that sort of generally how I think about business models, you have one, if you’re able to run a business where you can start having clients that pay $20,000, you can do that from day one, and you don’t need investors, and you can still be paying a lot of people in East Africa, a lot of money to do that. And it’s a sort of cyclical way of getting things going in terms of thinking about what types of entrepreneurs or people well placed to run a business in Africa, I think, the ones that I can sort of see succeeding, have a combination of long-term horizon, on the ground expertise. And also, they have an international worldview. All these points are flexible. And but I think if you can find some category of people or person who has been an overlap with those three-battery good if we sort of think through this logically, first set of people you might think about are experts. So, people who, like myself grew up in the UK or grew up in America or Europe, I don’t particularly have any roots in Africa. But I’m very interested in sort of being part of the development and seeing what I can do. So, you know, to me, I’ve got the international worldview, but I’ve lived in different places, it’s possible to get the expertise by partnering with people on the ground. But often, there’s not a willingness to save, let’s say, for 10 years, you’re probably going to need to commit to 10 years living on the ground in Africa, in order to have a long term, sort of x, that’s a good but there’s a sense of sort of coming in and going, which again, it’s not bad, it’s good to get those sorts of injections of insights, it’s not necessarily sort of a long term solution, you then might look at your local teams. So here people have got the long-term horizon, because they live there, and they have the on the ground expertise. But sometimes it can be difficult to have the international perspective. Now, of course, this can be addressed by somebody from the country going and studying abroad, that’s often enough to get an international worldview or to some degree consuming content online. But there is just sort of reality is from speaking to different companies, it would be very obvious when there is somebody there who has the international worldview and just how different businesses operate compared to somebody who’s just sort of thinking in local terms, the category that I think is probably most exciting is the diaspora. So, a lot of people I know, have, for example, family ties in Africa, but grew up in the UK, or elsewhere. And, and often they want to invest back home. So, he sort of this is typically maybe second generation in the case of the UK and went to UK schools or move their kid but they still got you know, aunties and uncles and grandparents who live back in in East Africa or in Africa. So, I think he was great as you have this, this international perspective, there’s often this long-term horizon Because ultimately, a lot of people want to sort of go back and help develop their own country. And often they’re got good connections to people on the ground to make it happen. One trend which I really hope to see more and more of is people his dice, Bora, or have which way you want it to find it, but people who have roots in Africa but have been living abroad, and are looking to use their wealth and insights and opportunities in a way that can develop businesses into the economy.
Shawn Flynn 29:09
Let’s go into even more detail. If I’m a startup here, or in Europe, and I want to go into Africa. What should I know? What research should I do? What are the first steps moving forward?
Sam Floy 29:22
The first thing that I’d be thinking about is to really do your research and spend a few weeks, maybe a month or a couple of months, and just trying to suss out the local business scene, and just sort of really understanding how you can best solve the problems on the ground. It’s almost as if you’ve got a good opportunity and you’ve got a good company and it solves the universal human problem. Chances are but it will also in some form, apply in plaintiff or parts of the world. For example, with Uber is quite popular in a lot of East African cities. It’s been a big area of growth, the core app remains, I read, if I open my Uber app in Nairobi, it’s the same. It’s basically it feels the same as if I’m doing it in London or in New York, but the Uber Kenya team have had to modify it a bit. So for example, with payments, they have to allow cash mobile money to be done on that, because a lot of people who were using it didn’t have a debit card, for example, they had to include in app calling, because drivers don’t necessarily trust the location that comes up, it can be really quite strange. Or somebody who’s just arrived in Nairobi, to open the Uber app, they can see sort of set that they’re starting to set the location of where they are, we enter their location of where they want to get to. And then they match with the driver. Within five seconds, they get a call, and the driver asks, where are you? Where do you want to go? And it can be a bit strange, because you’d like literally just put this in here. But because there are going back to this idea of sort of addresses and perhaps not trusting the quality of the devices, or it’s just easier for people to drive us to pick up and call. And so, having, I don’t know if it’s been modified specifically for East Africa, but that’s definitely a feature that I saw evolving over time. Which, again, if you’re saying Silicon Valley, then you’re like, Well, why do we need to have enough calls? because everything’s done open yet all the routine, etc., happens, happens automatically. And so yeah, a few things like that is not so there’s not the opportunity. But I’d really just be thinking, Okay, we’ve got what’s the core idea? Let’s take the first principles approach to building out. And I think the other main thing is to say, treat each country differently, you know, when people talk about Asia, Afghanistan, and Malaysia, are both Asian countries, a lot of difference and diversity between countries. And the same applies in Africa.
Simply having a, this is going to work here. So therefore, going to work in these other 53 countries, we won’t work as much as it would be lovely. If it did, if I was the, the international company coming in, I’d be thinking, Okay, can I get a fixer in each country to sort of understand the local land? Again, hopefully, there are going to be some commonalities in how it’s done. But it shouldn’t be Yeah, should be given in that way.
Shawn Flynn 32:06
So where do you see the opportunities in Africa, in tech, in the next few years,
Sam Floy 32:12
the main area of interest that there is so far has been in FinTech, that provides the biggest sort of pan African opportunity where you can pull together local demand, and you can sort of consolidate it, so you get a decent addressable market. So, if you’re sort of payments company, if you look just at the Ugandan market, or the Kenyan market, or the Ghanaian market, I can’t really say there’s a big payoff here. But if you were to bundle things together, and in theory, if you’re looking at things like international payments, there might be some commonalities or might be easier to, to sort of operate across the continent. That’s an area where there’s Yeah, lots of lots of interests. And it sort of depends on the region that you look at in Africa, but on the whole, around sort of 70% of the population, still working agriculture. And so, I’d say anything that can be done to improve the efficiency or improve the productivity in that region, there’s going to be a lot of a lot of interest. So, things around smart water filters, or central micro sensors, or using satellite imaging to about to forecast and put on a personal perspective, I’m sort of interested in, where can you consolidate demand? Where can you give farmers or people working in agriculture, consistent, predictable income, and that sort of unlocks the whole chain of being able to invest in fertilizers and all sorts of things. So, it’d be saying, Yeah, lots of different sort of agriculture and improve in that aspect, there’s probably quite a lot that can be done in health. Now we’re seeing lots of new smartphones have been on the continent now for about 10 years. And lots of smart young developers and hackers and coders are able to look at this Android phone, take it apart and figure out okay, how can we use this to solve local problems. So, for example, in malaria testing, etc. So, I think there’s probably quite a lot that can be done on the ground where you really have to understand the local context. A while back, I did some sort of first principles thinking on it. And I thought, you know, there’s probably quite an interesting case for 3d printing in Africa. The reason being is that there’s not the best roads, the ability to overcome the issues that come with logistics. A very famous company that started in Africa is one called zip line, where they drones to deliver blood. So, hospitals. So, let’s say you are a rural hospital, and somebody needs a blood transfusion. It doesn’t make sense for you to keep or it’s impossible for you to keep enough blood in the hospital based on the population size. And in order for you to get blood to come from the central city in the big city. It will take several hours to go up and down the winding hills and somebody is on a motorbike to sort of get there. This company’s zipline They put blood packets on a drone, fly the drone out and the blood packet gets released and it you know become safely delivered to the hospital and its use on the patient. So that is a way of overcoming the trendy phrase is to call it leap frogging where you basically said, Okay, well, if you’ve tried to start zip line was to try and sort of have that business proposition in America, you’d be like, okay, that’s fine. But I could probably get amazon prime to deliver at me in an hour. So, it’s not really you know, the roads are clear, there’s a lot of infrastructure in place to actually do it, there’s less of a business need. Whereas in Africa, in this situation, it’s like 10 x better than this, then the solution. So, it’s a being able to get traction, I think there might be something similar in 3d printing. There’s a lot of sort of long supply chains and a lot of expensive logistics that happen in transporting materials. So, I think some sort of model of 3d print a 3d printer in different communities of different towns and villages, might be a better way.
Shawn Flynn 35:53
Sam, I want to be respectful of your time. This has been an absolutely amazing interview, I’ve learned 10 x my knowledge before on East Africa, if anyone wants to find out more information about yourself, listen to your podcast, what’s the best way to go about doing it?
Sam Floy 36:07
Short version is a website www.samfloy.com, where you can sort of read various things that I write, there are various blog posts that you can look through. And then also, subscribe to the East Africa business podcast, which is the podcast I did about business in East Africa. As you can tell, very imaginatively, there are about 80 or so episodes on there with only a whole range of tech and non tech industries and businesses get to go through there and see what we find interesting. And then yeah, get through the website or just sam@samfloy.com. Feel free to give me an email. I’m always happy to sort of speak about what it’s like. And yeah, I was very fortunate to have lots of people that are willing to talk to me about the region before I move there. And so, the ability to pay it forward.
Shawn Flynn 36:53
Fantastic. We’ll have all that information in the show notes. And for our listeners, please go on iTunes, write a review, like and share this episode. It encourages us to create more content. And with that, Sam, thank you for your time today on the Silicon Valley podcast.
Sam Floy 37:08
Thanks Shawn cheers.
Announcer 37:12
thank you for listening to the Silicon Valley podcast. To access our resources, visit us at the Silicon Valley podcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn at Shawn Flynn SV. This show is for entertainment purposes only and is licensed by the investors Podcast Network. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
