Crazy, twisted then broken

My friend Kimo used to summarize life in Africa as a statement –

“Where there is no plan, that is the plan”

We take life a day at a time and just seem to drift and “go with the flow”. It is difficult to plan where nothing seems normal and everything seems broken but somehow some people seem to find a way through the chaos to make something out of nothing. Those people who create some sort of order out of seeming chaos are the exception not the rule. They become leaders or they become rich.

The people who make things work when everything seems broken are probably the twisted ones. They refuse to accept norms and they force change. George Bernard Shaw calls these people “Unreasonable” and I wrote about a typical African that exhibits those traits in a previous blog post I wrote titled “The Unreasonable New African”.

At this year’s Google I/O event, Naval Ravikant was asked why he decided instead to start Angellist and focus more on supporting entrepreneurship? His response was that “you have to be fundamentally broken to be in this game” and he believes each entrepreneur and investor is “broken” in some way as they refuse to accept “normal” as the rule. Meaning — there is something in each person that follows this path that questions the norms then try in their own way to make change happen.

I read a post yesterday on Medium titled “Why I left Google” and had a discussion with my wife about the driving forces behind career choices we have made. My wife is also a superstar, 1st class graduate with Ivy league MBA who decided to come back to an obscure corner of Africa, her response was that she too wanted to go out and change the world but she realized that it can actually start from making her own corner brighter and for all to see and learn.

Personally, I have never really looked back and wondered what could have been different had I taken an alternative route. I don’t do post-mortems; I keep looking at future possibilities from where I am standing, and there are awesome possibilities. I believe this is the case because I do not see career as a short journey towards any particular “happy destination”, it is a subset of long marathon called life. My career is my life they are not separate but intertwined.

I am in the midst of all I feel that is wrong and I try to be the exception always than become part of the norm. Maybe if everything becomes different and conforms to what I believe is ideal then I will seek change again. Yes I know it; I am broken. My happiness comes from “fixing things”.

I have been fortunate to be in the company of very great achievers and there is a common trait I see about them that is unique. They first simplify the things the other people obsess about (appearance, self esteem, achievement) to the point of irreverence then they go after real problems and tackle them. More often than not they win and are celebrated but they do not revel in those achievements, they keep on winning and they become heroes or villains. They are broken.

I see that trait in people who are cut out for greatness especially in members of our team. If someone gets a brand new laptop and the first thing he does is get rid of Windows 8 to install Ubuntu, he is “fundamentally broken” but in a very good way. Our team members are fanatical about “fixing things” and get to the root of problems. They are not satisfied with good when great is an option. Our people are not carried away with shiny objects, they are on a path to greatness and cannot be stopped, they are the type of people Paul Graham describes in his essay as “formidable”. They know their sh!t.

What I saw from the article “Why I left Google” goes to the heart of the argument I tried to make in another post titled “The future of the enterprise, global innovation and brands?. I wrote –

“The institutions of the future must also live what they sell…. — Disruption must start from within the enterprise before it can as an entity become an agent of disruption in the marketplace.”

Fundamentally disruptive organizations are also broken. They do not fit the normal mold. They keep changing and raising the bar.

The change in the structure of the enterprise and nature of human capital is only just beginning. HCL and Google may just be intermediate stages of something bigger and more distributed, more broken. Another article from medium titled “distributed everything” puts this future possibility in proper perspective.

Just like the lady that wrote in the blog post on why she left, she kept on having the recurrent dream of something chasing her, I also had a recurrent dream of building a structure that will collapse under its own weight. I decided to change that by starting Afrinnova to create a platform for “formidable people” to achieve their dreams. Maybe more organizations have to explore platform thinking when it comes to the human resource.

Most large organizations tend to collapse under their weight over time as they grow. They become part of the norm rather than the exception. Steve Jobs himself sounded that warning in an old WWDC video sent to me by our CTO. The cost of coordinating very large teams grows exponentially and adding one team member could become the last straw that breaks everything. 

According to Steve Jobs —

“Apple suffered for many years from lousy engineering management… created a large farm with animals going into different directions. …The total became less than the sum of the parts… ….Focussing is about saying No!

It sounds crazy and counterintuitive but to keep growing yet getting better, organizations must stay broken. While strategy and objectives require cohesion, the way we structure organizations to achieve them do not necessarily have to become a hindrance to achieving those objectives. Great products are built because people feel a personal pain and not just because they are told by their bosses to build them. 

Organizations should strive to be not just “different” but “better as Jobs said, “the sum of all the parts must be greater than the whole”. Sometimes you just have to break things to fix them and make them “better”. The best description for this structure is from the Dee Hock the founder of Visa, it is “Charodic”. 

Visa is huge and probably one of the largest man-made organizations on the face of the earth but it has not been crushed by its own weight. Over time, organizations will become more and more like natural ecosystems. We were created individuals for a reason, nature is “Charodic”, and nature is broken.

UPDATE: One great quote from a friend that inspired this post is the one I actually forgot to mention:

"Accept your past with no regrets, handle your present with confidence, and face your future with no fear."  - Tunde Jinadu

Ray Charles and Silicon Valley

Back in school there was term we used to tell each other when to "move on" after a relationship break-up, we told the person to do a “Ray Charles”. What we meant precisely was that they should heed the lyrics of his hit song “Hit The Road Jack”. It also became a euphemism for telling people to get a grip and move on with life. Each time I hit an obstacle the first thing that comes to my mind is “Ray Charles”.

Bessemer Venture Partners is a well-known Silicon Valley VC company and they also have a great sense of humor. They acknowledge the fact that in Silicon Valley you can never always be right and they illustrate it with their “anti-portfolio”, a list of misses they made as they went on their investment journey. One notable one was Google:

Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine”. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”

What is important to note here is that they have a sense of humor about it as they have moved on and realized that “you can’t always win everything”. They have other notable successes like Skype and Twillio in their curent portfolio. Startup founders must also have the same mentality. Aaron Levie the co-founder and CEO of the enterprise cloud company Box puts this very simply in a tweet

Entrepreneurship: 90% proving others wrong, 10% everything else.

Successful entrepreneurs usually have astronomical odds stacked against them, and what separates them from others is the conviction (sometimes delusion) that they can surmount those odds. They work tirelessly at this 90% of the time. It is better to channel your energy and emotion towards making your venture a success than wasting it on trivial pursuits. In simple terms, “Hit the road Jack”.

Those two perspectives from “both sides of the table” above sum up why Silicon Valley is a unique ecosystem and according to Kingsley Idehen the founder of Openlink Software “One of the luckiest places in the world”. In a recent conversation I had with him in Boston a couple of weeks ago, he said that Silicon Valley is fortunate not because anyone purposely designed a place where really good investors and really great entrepreneurs meet to build great companies, everything evolved from a fortunate series of events. Serendipity and discovery is easier when the best of both sides of the table are in close proximity.

The Internet has however made this proximity an even less relevant factor when it comes to discovery and tools like Angellist have taken the lead in facilitating serendipity. Angellist is still not perfect but evolving, it has however succeeded in proving that discovery is possible by building platforms that depend on data rather than magic or alchemy. Techcrunch also has Crunchbase, it is a useful resource for background research in the community and their stories add to the repository of data. When data is used wisely, Silicon Valley’s success can be replicated anywhere.

Africa

The data is all around us yet we make blunders. We listen to narratives and form opinions without testing them for validity. I made a presentation at the recent MobileMoney Africa event in Lagos titled “Startup Lessons for Mobilemoney” and someone told me bluntly that those ideas in Silicon Valley will not work in Nigeria. I asked him how sure he would be if he has not tried or tested them? His only answer was “This is Africa not America, lean methods will not work here”.

Yes it is Africa but it is my hypothesis based on experience and I plan to continue testing my assumptions. His dismissal based on anecdotes did not make it less or more likely that the results of my tests would yield a particular outcome. My success in proving people wrong all depends on the data and my determination to gain validated knowledge.

Nigeria

The Nigerian Startup scene is a unique one, unique in the sense that there is latent opportunity but with very bad actors. I actually wrote a post titled “Rich Man, Poor Man, BeggarMan, King” based on Noam Wasserman’s bestselling “Founder’s Dilemma” and my observations of the Nigerian ecosystem. I decided against publishing it yet as too much has been said about one issue. Maybe I will still publish that post at a future date, but right now it just serves no purpose as too many sentiments emotions have been whipped up to frenzy. There is no need to go into the dramatis personae involved in recent events but there is something curious to note; everyone has an opinion but few (including myself) have facts.

Facts are very interesting as they can be presented in a variety of ways to bolster a weak argument or sometimes to try to defend one’s actions. According to Mark Twain, “There are lies, damned lies and Statistics”. Ultimately all opinions including those backed by “facts” are subjective but results do not lie. Results add to the pool of data from which people can perform experiments to prove or disprove hypotheses.

How well do we really know the Nigerian technology ecosystem? What data do we really have there beyond self-serving stories from entrepreneurs and lists from competitions that are glorified schoolyard pissing-contests?

“Hit The Road Jack”

My favorite Michalangelo Quote is “Criticize by creating”, indictments and observations about an ecosystem do not make a difference without contributing to its improvement. The problem with serendipity and discovery in Africa and to a large extent Nigeria is not with a shortage of talent resources or ideas, it is a data problem. I realized that Angellist and VC4Africa’s platform are aggregate platforms that serve a core demographic primarily and only have a peripheral utility to others who don’t fit into that demographic. A further level of granularity and context is required to facilitate discovery at the ecosystem level.

I have since registered the domains Afrigraph.com and Startups.ng and when I did them, my goal was to create platforms for discovery similar to AngelList for the aggregate African and Nigeria specific ecosystems. I became distracted and did nothing about those projects. I still believe such a platform is a good idea and a great mechanism for aggregating data for discovery purposes. I would like to now make it open-source by inviting others to join to make this happen. I will be providing more information about this initiative shortly.

I admire recent founder meetups organized by Techcabal and led by Iyionluwa Aboyeji of Fora. I praise Bosun Tijani and Femi Longe for the great work they have been doing and continue to do with ccHUB. We must move from anecdotes and talk to actual experimentation and sharing of results. That is what made Silicon Valley great. It was not the link-bait by tech blogs, founder battles or endless prattle in social media. It was serendipity and discovery; it was data. One story or a few stories do not define a great ecosystem; it is the aggregate results of people’s actions. We must keep producing results, we must move on.

There is a tweet from Bosun Tijani below which sums up all I have said above:

Conversations are good - so are blog posts but this place is thousand years backward - and desperate for builders!!! Step up and fix things!

— 'Bosun Tijani (@tunbosunt) July 28, 2013

I read an awesome Medium article this morning titled “Accelerating Serendipity”. It is highly recommended.

Future payment possibilities of Skype and messaging

Today I tried to catch-up on my mail after a long recovery period from illness. I got tired of responding in detail and decided it would be better to actually just speak with a number of the people who sent me mails. It occurred to me after my 5th conversation that I just sent some of these people I was speaking with for the first time my Skype ID and did not ask if they used Skype or not, it was a given. I don’t know if I am making assumptions but is there really any serious person who does not use Skype? My 70 year old mother uses Skype daily and it is probably the most efficient means of communication over long distances.

I admit that my Skype usage is a bit extreme as it is probably more likely that my phone batteries are dead and I never bother to charge them. I am always online and I am on Skype, it is the best place to catch me. Even when the phone is working, 99% of my conversations are online. My wife thinks I am a very weird and I have completely lost social skills as a result. I recollect her telling me once that she had to leave me in Accra and travel to Lome so she could get my attention on Skype. Sad.

I remember clearly when I got introduced to Skype and I was ecstatic! Free International calls? Who wouldn’t be excited? My girlfriend at that time lived far away in Ottawa, Canada and it was what kept the relationship alive. I was always fascinated when I saw the indicator showing the number of people online and using it. I was part of a global community that had discovered the freedom of “Voice Over Internet Protocol”.

My big brother Austin on the other hand was very paranoid about security, he was (at that time) a Microsoft Solutions Architect. He refused to use anything that could bypass his firewalls and made it his duty and mission to find ingenious ways to block it. Austin did not trust any software from the same people who produced spyware laden Kazaa one of the earliest p2p (person-to-person) file sharing platforms. It is ironic that Skype has now been acquired by Microsoft and is now mainstream, accepted by the same corporations who once did everything to block it. It is interesting also now that most of my conversations with Austin are also now on Skype.

I actually use Skype to make more than just free calls these days; I use “SkypeOut” for paid calls as well. I have subscription bundles for countries and even use Skype Manager to allocate Skype credit to my wife and my mother – bad mistake, not advisable. 

Skype can also let you use Internet on hotspots like Boingo and since your payment details are stored anyway, it can basically be used to pay for anything. I still wonder why Starbucks did not just buy Skype and allowed Microsoft to grab it.

Skype is an excellent platform for payments and if Microsoft does not see this opportunity they are truly done. They should just turn over and die. It already stores payment details so PCIDSS compliance is not an issue. It has encryption and it is available on mobile and desktop. It also accepts multiple payment types across continents and converts them to Skype Credits. Skype is already being used to pay for access time at hotspots so I don’t see why that functionality cannot be extended.

Google has pulled the mother of all stunts with Google Wallet for Gmail. It is definitely going to be huge as it is a no-brainer. They are also chasing Skype with “hangouts”. P2P payments fit nicely with the tools you use to communicate with people daily. I told someone recently that the day Whatsapp decides to add P2P payments, I will go back to farming as the game is over.

These platforms have tremendous reach and great potential. There is no point trying to build the next P2P payments platform when all these guys need to do is just add your entire product as a feature. The real opportunities for payments startups are in B2B (business to business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) and it is rapidly getting crowded. Maybe it is time to start talking to WeChat, Saya, 2Go and others.

The current state of the payment industry is pathetic. It is reminiscent of the early gold prospecting days by pioneers in California; totally chaotic. I believe that all the consumer wants is simplicity and if payments are already woven into everyday processes like messaging, there is a higher chance that they will use it than install yet another app or get another card. Maybe the messaging companies are the railroad barons of future payments.

If Microsoft does not see the advantage of using Skype as payments platform, they just leave a wide opportunity for Google Wallet to become the “Skype of payments”

This post was originally on my Medium. I hate Posthaven :(

Dear Rocket…

Please save Nigerian Internet from itself

Growing up, whenever we had to go for an outing, my mother always repeated the adage "you never get a second chance to make a first impression". I always remembered that when I was meeting new contacts for the first time and I have been very conscious of what I wear. I try hard to strike a balance between what I am comfortable with and what passes as "acceptable". I can never be caught looking stiff and uncomfortable. I have never been a fan of "dressing up" to impress anyone. The last time I wore something close to a tie (a clip on cravat) was my wedding day. Even on that day, I could not wait to take it off and went for a "kente" waistcoat to replace the formal one I wore in church. I learned from an old friend that "clean, neat and simple" was always a winner over expensive, tacky and not well put together.

 My default mode for business outings has always been what is described in this rather hilarious Entrepreneur.com article as "Sprezzatura!". I prefer wearing blazers and chinos or slacks to dress suits; I am also addicted to specific brands. Gap and Austin Reed store attendants in Manchester and London don't even have to ask, as they always know what I want. My everyday attire primarily consists of jeans and short-sleeved shirts and I have always avoided occasions with an explicit formal dress code. I however do not do "hoodies" (RIP Trayvon) or sag my trousers.

 A lot of people claim to admire my "moderate irreverence" and refusal to wear ties but others like my uncle (a retired career banker) probably secretly despise me for it. I had somehow always survived the stern glances whenever I had to accompany him for meetings. He was initially trained as an accountant in England and is very "British" in his ways. My wife (also a banker) calls me a "Kubolor", a Ghanaian term for "vagabond" or "outlaw", and I see it as a term of endearment as she also becomes "Mrs Kubolor". She says I sometimes dress as an "Igbo trader" or "Ewe tradesman". I refuse to conform not only because I feel that wearing ties and suits in the tropics is a dumb idea, I also believe that we actually should be wearing our own African attire but I have not yet reached the level of Herman Chinerry-Hesse who refuses to wear anything non-African.

When I visited San Francisco and Silicon Valley for the first time a couple of years ago, I was happy to meet fellow "Kubolors" who are making Millions and Billions of dollars in spite of wearing flip flops, sweaters and hoodies. I never saw Steve Jobs wearing a suit and tie, yet he built one of the most successful and valuable businesses in the world. I was at peace and balance was restored to my existence.

I have been to a lot of technology events involving startups and attended by entrepreneurs in America, the dress code, as always was "no dress code". Jeans and sneakers are encouraged. The first time I made the mistake of wearing a jacket to Techcrunch Disrupt, I looked overdressed and pretentious. I learned quickly and got rid of it and folded my sleeves. I even looked cool and "GQ model like", which to me was “age appropriate”. I never also could pull off "ambivalent casual" as well as the much younger Disrupt crowd. I somehow feel that the older I get, the more ridiculous I think they seem. I am gradually joining Dvorak and co. as one of the grumpy old techies.

London as usual was the opposite of Silicon Valley. I attended "Cloud World Forum" early this month and on the first day I went as a "Kubolor". I made the mistake of thinking that the techies in London would be as liberal as those in California. I was mistaken as I forgot that most of the people here went to English Public schools with a long tradition of wearing ties even to school. I stood out from the suit-wearing crowd and was in most cases politely avoided. London has not received the memo from Silicon Valley yet and they seem to have no Dave McClure.

 There seemed to be an expected dress code at the event to which I definitely did not conform and I was sort of politely ostracized. Someone from a company selling VDI products actually asked me if I knew what cloud technology was all about? I played along and feigned ignorance; in a condescending manner he referred me to a junior colleague, as he couldn't be bothered with the "poorly dressed African". The lady he referred me to, had a good laugh when she realized what I had done. It gave me an insight to why London will continue to struggle as a hub for technology innovation.

I amused myself thoroughly the first day of the event and was amazed by the behavior of people towards me because I did not conform to the unspoken dress code. The next day however, I had to do serious business and I could not afford being ignored so I learned and "suited up". The transformation in the reaction from those I met there was unbelievable! It was as if I had changed from Clark Kent to SuperMan. I went to a Bitcoin event at Canary Wharf the next week and it was largely the same with a few humorous exceptions.  This got me thinking and bothered. Are we all really that shallow and cannot see beyond appearances? Is that shallowness probably the reason why some ecosystems are held back while locations like Silicon Valley flourish? Do certain cultures push away truly innovative people because they don't fit the mould? I wonder if there is a real correlation between "bohemian" behavior and appearance with innovation.

Richard Branson the very different and quintessential symbol of new British entrepreneurship put it very clearly here: "Suits and ties in an office are just another type of uniform, but in an arena where uniforms no longer serve any useful purpose. At one time they probably showed that the wearer was, at the very least, able to purchase and maintain a fairly expensive piece of fabric. Now, however, in an individualized, interconnected culture, your achievements speak for themselves. The suit and tie is an anachronism."

Culture is a strange and powerful thing; we may not understand how unconsciously we are helping to perpetuate a specific behavior or bias. All human beings to some degree probably have the fatal flaw of stereotyping but I expected more tolerance from those involved with technology. Maybe I expected too much as I may also be guilty of the same biases. I remember when a group of young startup founders I agreed to advise came to pitch to me recently in Accra. They were all wearing black suits, I burst out laughing when I saw them and asked "who died?” they did not get the joke and also did not get any money or referrals. I am sure they were surprised when I insisted on meeting them at the mall and not the office. They still came in suits anyway and probably were shocked that I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts at 11am on a Monday.

Normally I see excessive vanity as a bad sign in tech entrepreneurship but sloppiness is even worse. Maybe subconsciously I have a bias against those wearing suits but I am sure that my decision with the case of the Accra crew was based on the quality of their pitch and not their suits. I actually did not employ a guy once when I saw that his expensive crocodile skin shoes did not match his income from the job he wanted to leave. Maybe I am also shallow too like that. It turned out that my hunch was right, as the guy had lied in his CV. I see overcompensation in appearances as a sign of deep-seated insecurity. There is an inverse relationship between dressing to impress and confidence in product. It probably explains why bankers focus more on dressing as they all offer the same products with little innovation.

The London experience however made me realize that my mother was probably right. First experiences matter and for a lot of people the perception they get are the only reality that matters to them. One could lose a big opportunity if dressing or appearance is not "culture or age appropriate". It seems we all carry around our own biases and it is always better to err on the side of caution than to think irreverence will always be acceptable. In San Francisco, people could have laughed at me afterwards for wearing a suit but would still have been open to talk to me. In London, maybe if I had gone to extremes and grew dreadlocks they probably would have treated me even better as I would be a novelty. Victor Okigbo seems to pull off dreadlocks well. For him, there is a reason he wears his hair that way and his achievements and family pedigree speaks volumes.

I will never know how much my "Kubolor dress mode" has cost me in the past or if it has actually helped. The lesson I have learned from London is that if you are not yet as rich and powerful as Steve Jobs or as influential as Mark Zuckerberg, you cannot afford irreverence at all times. You may have to bite the bullet occasionally to conform. Conforming for certain reasons and for short periods will not kill innovation in you. I am writing this post now wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt but earlier today I had to wear a suit as I attended the AITEC Banking and MobileMoney event. Even the crazy founders of Rap Genius also suit up when they have to. 

As a tech entrepreneur please keep a suit or jacket handy, you may need it. Also try to read the Entrepreneur.com article as it provides sound advice that I had to find out myself the hard way. Try not to be like "Mr TieTus".