Venture for Africa: Fellow Journey
Q&A with Tobi Lafinham and Joel Burke: VFA Fellow @ Diool
About Venture for Africa
Venture for Africa is a 3-month fellowship program designed to immerse top local and global talent in the African startup ecosystem.VFA enables experienced talent who might be new to the startup space or the particular market they’re looking to enter, to soft-land and gain context while working with a startup that’s hiring now.
You’re working with Diool during the VFA Fellowship. Can you tell us a bit about the company and why you were excited to work with them?
Diool is one of quite a few African startups in the fintech space which is incredibly hot right now, however, what makes the company really interesting is how focused on B2B it is and how it helps companies save time and money. If you think about the economy in Africa, it’s dominated by traders and small businesses rather than the large conglomerates an American like me is used to. Giving these business owners tools like Diool that allow them to accept all sorts of mobile money (given how important mobile money is for payments) and streamline their operations means that you’re directly helping the economy and boosting GDP. It’s also interesting to see how the market is shifting to online — Diool also has a payment API that allows companies to accept mobile money via a website which hadn’t historically been popular in Cameroon, but we’re seeing a lot of demand from companies for this sort of service as they try to digitize. As someone who has been an entrepreneur and understands how important having a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem is for the development of an economy, I was excited to work with a company that is giving these businesses the tools that they need to succeed.
Can you tell me a bit about your background?
Absolutely — I started my career in Silicon Valley working at a few startups and a VC firm but the most notable was Gigster, a YC/Andreessen backed company that did on-demand software development with a network of freelancers. I joined as the ninth employee right after they graduated YC and it was a hugely informative experience seeing a startup scale quickly to nearly 100 employees and 500+ freelancers. After that I went to Berlin to run a venture for Rocket Internet, a hybrid publicly traded Venture Builder and Investor, before going to Estonia to lead a team for e-Residency, the Estonian Government’s flagship digital initiative.
After that experience, I decided that I wanted to do more work at the intersection of technology and government and to get more experience in Sub-Saharan Africa given how much opportunity I saw in the region. So I started a Master’s degree at Georgetown in International Business & Policy and a myriad of other projects and experiences including this one!
So, why the interest in Africa?
One reason is familial — I’m descended from slaves on my mother’s side of the family and although unfortunately I’ve never been able to find records of where we came from in Africa, I do know thanks to genetic testing that it was somewhere in West Africa. But before that, I was conscious of that African heritage of course, but not having a specific area or country that I was connected to I just broadly felt an affinity for the continent. Also, I like solving big meaningful problems and when I was in SF I frankly was quite frustrated that all around me people were claiming to solve world changing issues but then the product would be an on-demand laundry service that meant you didn’t have to wash your own clothes. There’s nothing wrong with building that sort of business, but I felt like the delta between the problems that could be meaningfully solved in the U.S. or Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa was quite large. For instance, I’m currently in Cameroon but was previously doing a project in Kenya and on average once a day the power would go out. It’s a minor disruption for someone like me working on a laptop to wait for the wifi to turn back on (but only because every business and apartment complex has an expensive generator). If you’re trying to do something like run a factory that requires 24x7 uptime this is a serious impediment to your business which may make you think twice about even setting up in the region. Of course, on the other hand, every problem that you encounter is an opportunity to solve it in a meaningful way (and potentially make a massive business out of it)! It definitely is really exciting to see the energy from entrepreneurs in the region as they’re tackling these problems (just look at Talent City, Carbon, or Twiga) and finally seeing capital going to these startups in a region that has long been underfunded.
You’ve been on the ground in Cameroon for more than a month. What learnings do you have?
This is my first time working with a startup in sub-saharan Africa and in Francophone Africa to boot so there have been quite a few adjustments. Of course, there’s the old cliche that time is more relative in these places that is absolutely true. Being used to a more American and German culture it takes some getting used to about meetings rarely starting on time. I think it was also an important mindset shift for me to understand that the saying “time is money” doesn’t hold up well here. Most people have far more time than they do money which leads to interesting user behaviors you wouldn’t see in the U.S. like walking for many kilometers to save 50 cents on transport. You also just have to be aware of the lack of public infrastructure, regulations, etc. which means that you can’t depend on a house having an address or roads being in good enough condition to drive on. The lack of domestic or even regional product manufacturing is also interesting — outside of basic food staples the vast majority of products I’ve seen are imported mostly from Europe and are quite expensive including everything ranging from chocolates to furniture. This is a real shame given that Cameroon is a raw lumber exporter and most of the inputs for chocolate come from neighbors in West Africa and that building these value chains locally could massively drive economic growth and employment.
Now you’ve heard the challenges but what is particularly interesting is how they’re being solved and existing systems that someone like me under-appreciated when first encountering them. For instance, although there isn’t really public transport, it is basically impossible to walk on a street for more than 10 seconds before a taxi honks to see if you want a ride — while this may sound inefficient, they are not just picking up one person usually, but cramming a car full of people on the way to an area, basically the low tech version of an Uber Pool! This makes it not only affordable for the average person, but also much more environmentally friendly rather than having a single rider to a car. With roads usually in a dismal state, motorcycles have become huge for people and goods transport (if you’ve never seen a motorcycle carrying two passengers and a combination washer dryer it is a sight to behold) and I am still shocked there hasn’t been a breakout African company building a domestically produced cheap motorcycle — perhaps as the AfCFTA (continental free trade agreement) goes into effect we will see one. Finally, it is fascinating to see how basically every African country I’ve visited has totally leapfrogged the west in use of mobile money. Very few people have credit or debit cards (or even bank accounts) but the the majority have mobile money attached to their phone provider that they use for all sorts of transactions (e.g. I’ve used mobile money for groceries, restaurants, but also for my cellphone plan and data packages which are quite cheap). How Africa continues to leapfrog in different areas will be quite interesting and present a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs on the continent who can figure out how to build the next generation of tools and products rather than just copying what the U.S., China, and Europe did.
Diool is a remote and English first company despite being based in Francophone Africa. Can you share your advice for other remote first companies?
On remote and English, this may be my American bias but I think any high-growth startup has to be English by default and needs to embrace at least a hybrid if not remote-first working environment. While the startup ecosystem in Kenya and maybe Lagos is well developed enough that you could potentially get away with all local talent (although I am highly dubious of this given the lack of certain skill sets like senior developers and other specialized talent), it certainly isn’t the case outside of these hubs despite there being a strong entrepreneurial spirit. While of course a company in a place like Cameroon can recruit folks from anywhere in the world and bring them to the country, this would severely limit the number of applicants and I have no doubt the company would end up not attracting the best of the best (that said, I hope more people from around the world are willing to head to Africa and try it out. The continent is hugely varied and there are so many different opportunities, cultures, and places to see it is a shame not to physically relocate for at least some amount of time). The argument is similar for English versus French — being an English company by default just means that the pool of potential applicants is dramatically larger given the number of English speakers versus French speakers.
In terms of recommendations from past experiences working with or managing remote and international teams, the main recommendation I have is that you have to truly embrace remote across the entire organization. This means that even if you are running a hybrid organization and people are in an office and have an off the cuff brainstorming session, they need to make sure that this is documented and shared with the rest of the org. Companies that aren’t amazing at documenting everything and sharing information in a timely manner risk getting out of sync between employees which is a disaster for a startup that needs to move rapidly to beat out incumbents. It’s also important to do things like onboarding very well to make sure that 1) new hires really understand the business and culture but 2) to make sure that they feel like they’re part of the team. Startups are really hard and turnover can often be high. Having new team members feel like they’re part of the mission and the team can make all the difference between retaining a new hire and losing someone after a year.
What’s at the top of your stack?
I just finished The Alignment Problem which does a great job examining the potential pitfalls with artificial intelligence — not just AI safety and existential risk focused topics like much of Bostrom’s work but also things happening here and now such as the use of ML in deciding who should be granted parole or not in the U.S. I’m now switching to a bit of a European kick with Revolution Francaise which examines Macron’s rise to the Presidency as I figured being in Francophone Africa I should better understand the French political sphere given the outsized role France still has in business and policy in the region (for better or worse). I also recently read Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis, a former Greek Finance Minister who spearheaded negotiations with the EU, IMF, and other international institutions during the Greek sovereign debt crisis. The book is a fascinating and approachable read even for someone who wouldn’t consider themselves a ‘finance’ person.
For folks interested in working in Africa with a startup, VFA is recruiting for several new fellows today! Check out the listings now.
