Rockstar. Charisma. Altruism. And many other glorifying nouns and verbs I could use to define the Power Rangers, the popular 90’s T.V series. Besides their super hero capabilities, there was this Googliness they exhibited thanks to the different block colours each member of the squad donned.
There was a particular Ranger, a black Ranger whose team playing and fighting skills were cut throat. For the love of disambiguation, let’s call him Samuel. Naturally armed with a towering figure, great prose and a great academic history. He got the ball rolling in several ventures he set foot to do. He was a man on a mission, a renaissance man.
Fast forward, in 2009, he returned back to his motherland in pursuit of pastures green. It was a messianic kind of return back to the continent that is still riddled with disease and civil strife. He had fresher and better plans. In an interview with Pando, a popular tech blog based in the U.S, he was quoted on the record as having drawn inspiration from the enormous possibilities of the internet and was ready to give it a shot back home where the scene was novel. With the Africa Rising narrative rising a couple more eyebrows in the media, the interview opened floodgates of free PR and opportunities for more interviews with other leading media houses.
It isn’t your ordinary rags-to-riches kind of story but probably a story of born-with-a-silver-spoon-and-turned-it-gold. Samuel was born in an affluent family with definitely more resources than an ordinary African family and of course received more exposure in his studies in the U.S. The later part of the script is the usual rhetoric, hustles in acquiring a critical mass of customers, load bearing server costs, burnouts and…Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah (insert sound track) the money started trickling in, slowly, slowly and later amounts to a size of a stackhouse.
Diversification and introduction of new products followed suit.
As they say, birds of the same feather flock. Imagine an addition to the Power Rangers. Another black one exhibiting the same eccentricity, prose but this time with a different bait of swag. Yeah right, this is another visionary African techpreneur who graces the scene closely after Samuel. They sure must be cut from the same ilk. “Akwa is a kind of friend any business minded person would love to have,” Samuel says with praise. “However much we are in different sectors of this grand internet economy, there are possibilities of us working together in the future.” He chipped that in a keynote at the consortium of the change makers in the tech industry held in Ghana. Regardless of the fact that both of them served different sectors of the digital economy, what they would later partner on remained nondescript.
Cometh thy enemy
Competition ethos are well inscribed in the human genome. The way we react to competition is often stoic, in the name of protecting assets we have spent our lives building. On the internet it’s quite a different story, almost everyone has got a Google alert on their name, whenever you talk about them they will know. Does it make sense to keep mum about competition, your enemies? It depends. Does it make sense to talk about those you like? Of course! In the bid to stamp their positions on the tech ladder (or radar, so meta, I know!), the newly christened African tech duo less often turns down opportunities where there is interaction with the media.
Be it delivering a keynote at a conference, a TED talk, interview and asserting thought leadership through personal blogs. There is this particular great long write up by Samuel that showed the defiance of his media startup against a mushroom of sudden competitors. Instead, armed with concrete recent statistics, he alluded that competition was by a company whose locus of services weren’t really based on the internet, well, on the satellite technology backbone. It was prevalent enough that the use such technology for example cable T.V wouldn’t get ubiquitous unlike the products rolled out on the internet. “Ridiculous!” competitors shuddered. Samuel was treating them with such contempt yet they were equally relevant industry players and promised breaking even in the foreseeable future. As records have it, the founder of the Satellite only company, a decade ago, had invested in a Chinese online market that was strapped in a near bankruptcy dilemma. He took the risk of investing in near dead company and as it turned out later, in 2014, the company in question entered the celebrity IPO territory with the highest valuation in the history of Wall Street. Now, that’s the kind of vision Samuel would want to emulate sometime.
In the next webisode, find out how paranoia threatens to take over the whole scene 