Uber Killing Our Local Startups

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What I see from this thread is a baby crying because of pain. That the baby can not explain the real problem does not mean the baby’s issues aren’t valid.

Here are my thoughts in no coherent order:

  1. The Nigerian/African government(s) has absolutely no plan for this software revolution and how it/they plan(s) to benefit. That is a shame but no be today them begin shame us.
  2. I have written about this before. Calling out Jason that wanted to send the “foreigners” into the lagoon (heard that before?) eventhough is co founder and investors are foreigners.
  3. Having a strategy that will allow Nigeria/Africa to be competitive in the long term is VERY important. Reckless banning will not be the answer. @MistaMajani would you be content if you are banned from operating in Nigeria? Or you think banning will be sought for only non African countries? I thought Jason was being dangerously hypocritical because at the time he was calling for bans, he was/is trying to penetrate Kenya, South Africa etc.
  4. Still on banning. Those talking Anjani web host. have you EVER priced local web hosting? Do you think you can come across your $5 Digital Ocean servers? Please email MainOne and ask for prices and come back and call for banning. Remember to turn in your Macbooks and Pick up your “Made in Nigeria” Zinox laptops. Banning will surely affect hardware too. you do not get to pick and choose
  5. My own suggestion would be to encourage the locals. Tax cuts, funding, R&D credits, etc. “Local” not being determined by the colour of your skin but by the locality of your HQ. i.e where the money is flowing back to.
  6. Do you think without Rocket Internet, the Nigerian Internet startup startup scene would be where it is again? Please think again.
  7. While the "foreign VCs are funding expeditions to “Africa”, our local rich men want to be Zuckerberg at 60 (I’m no ageist but e get wetin papa/mama dey do, e get wetin pickin dey do). Theil paid $500k for 5% when it was still less than 50 million users. Our people could not put a dime in Saya. Shameless bunch. Now they will follow and be pointing at WhatsApp. Nonsense!
  8. FWIW, those in Silicon Valley to not play “fair”. They prefer a certain type. However they will not ban you. They will not fun you but you are welcome to play.
  9. Back to banning again. We will ban open source too right? Browsers nko? because, I know a guy that knows a guy whose friend in Awka has built an Ubuntu killer. ;). My neighbor’s daughter has built a great alternative to Chrome.
  10. Finally (I just wanted this to reach 10. made my points a long time ago) TechCabal or another publication/journalist needs to do an well detailed report on this and interview loads of people and find the opinions of people here, Asia, US, and of course Mother Sweden (more powerful in Africa than anyone sees). My hunch is, it would be a foreigner that ends up funding such a report or even doing the actual report.

PS @seyitaylor you see I am not all Socialist all the time.

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That’s the problem right there. The fear of turning in our Macbooks. SMH!

(To drive Europeans luxury cars in the US, buyers pay premium on taxes. Next to nothing on American brands.) -

@OoTheNigerian there are subtleties, damn it, even Russian had to play by the books with its new ban now chasing Google Russia (- well by its own books)

Prices of locally made products (Laptops for instance) can be driven down with subsidy. While money (- government sovereign investment funds) is poured into production to boost quality. it won’t happen over night but quality will chase par with time. The government can/should even take a publicly listes stake in the local company via subsidiaries (like BOI in Nigeria)

But like I said our government sleepeth?

You hardly see any foreign luxury car in Indian cities. Just locals ‘pushing’ their made by TATA, tuk-tuks and lorries. They even started exporting TATAs to 3rd worlds.

Except for well documented reasons, a traveller (especially foreigners) won’t leave India with more than $10K in PTA. (Though this must have changed over time).

In the same stead. National trade/business laws can demand that for ‘internet’ companies of Jumia size/valuation. Major positions and xx% of high execs should be nationals, or have parents who are?

While the government over time, creates an ‘unfair’ playing field for Konga by the side. All these will be done subtly, but within provisions of territorial trade laws. (With same employment demography applying to Konga).

Such laws protect the shade of things even when foreign funds spring local companies to prominence, Iroko for instance.

Also threatening to ban and actually banning certain advantage to favour local players time and time again.

See, Protectionism is not even a practice for faint of heart governments. US capital and influence are powerful, the Russians and the yellow men of the Orient have been trying to push against this with staves and sticks. Because they dare to raise local competitiors.

Europeans funds will crush our pot bellied politicians with more porridge, if they smelled resistance.

@akindolu you talk of ideas not been out of store. Very very True. But my brother, believe me if a Facebook was first integrated in Nigeria, you wouldn’t have heard of it.

Our European counterparts are teaching local investors how to bet for the long haul.

Before our investor would rather put $200 mil dollars in building Estates in Abuja people don’t live in, than throwing $2mil in starting an SME fund.

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Mother sweden and Father Germany!!! :slight_smile:

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Uber isn’t killing shit, they have a very small niche in the transportation sector. Except they are working on some major transportation solutions, they are not a threat to any of our startups.

Major reason for the death of a lot of startups is education. The government needs to fix education, that should be the number one mission of any government in power. China’s education system is what has made the country today. Educate the youth, let them build, and then protect.

@akindolu mentioned how Elon Musk, put together a team consisting of Reid Hoffman and some other niggas. Before Reid Hoffman joined Paypal, he started a social network called Socialnet in 1997. Where is Socialnet today, I bet none of you heard of it. He even got funding from VCs , so cash wasn’t entirely the problem. Building shitty products is part of the cycle.

On building a team, it’s kind of hard for us down here. A lot of good american products were built in dorm rooms of university campuses. Founders of HP met at Stanford, same with the paypal guys, I can go on and on. Which schools do the bright young Nigerians go to? Where do we meet and start exploring ideas? The education issue comes up again.
The tough economic situation also makes it difficult for most people to be willing to work for little. You talk about joining certain established companies, that is also not so direct.

That’s my suggestion too, we hope the government can wake up.

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Exactly! I know in Qatar and several other Gulf States, foreign brands are not allowed to come in without selling about 50% of their equity to local investors. That way it is not a complete exploitation of the country. Most people here aren’t even talking about trade deals lmao. When last did Nigeria sign a trade deal outside useless West Africa? Do you know how much it costs to export to Europe, or even setup a foreign company there? I feel we don’t realize that for a foreigner to enter your countries markets is a privilege. Why do you think you hear about sanctions everyday on the news led by Americans. The Americans have realized that their most valuable asset is their rich market. The have the most cash circulating in the world, with the richest people, investors and banks.

Capitalism by definition does not entail free access to a foreign market, trade deals are made constantly. Entering a foreign market should never be free, some sort of compromise has to be made. I was reading on the news the other day that Europe banned several food items from entering their borders from Nigeria. The sucking sound of money flying out of the country will continue for a long long time.

But per usual, laws don’t really exist or aren’t enforced in Nigeria. Yeah obviously education is an issue, not everyone has to go to university, I just want everyone to speak English properly. So many useful jobs are done by secondary school graduates.

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Gets really boring when techies argue economics.

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Can’t escape the econ sadly.

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You have great points and I agree with you but I have a question, how many apps, services, sites or startups have you built and how are they doing as of now?

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Thank you for the insight and reflection. I enjoyed reading your posts and yes you have made alot of points. Still I feel like you are trying to find middle ground, but the truth is there is no middle ground. It is what it is. We are being conquered all over again. Just like how there are many ways to skin a cat, there are many ways to ban a foreigner app/startup from dominating our local apps/startups. Like you said [quote=“OoTheNigerian, post:121, topic:2267”]
FWIW, those in Silicon Valley to not play “fair”. They prefer a certain type. However they will not ban you. They will not fun you but you are welcome to play.
[/quote] Isn’t this indirectly banning competitors? Isn’t banning sort of like the same thing as barriers to entry? They are banning as well, they just do it subtly. Also please understand my definition of foreigner is anything non-African. Im all for Africans apps/startups making money in Nigeria, because it helps Africa go from a dark continent to a light one. It is the so called West who have been oppressing us and abusing us for centuries first physically, then economically and now they wanna oppress us digitally and mentally, that I have a problem with. All of this open source software comes at a cost. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything comes at a price. Just because we are using something that is free or open source doesn’t mean that we are not paying something back in return. In case you don’t know this is the 21st century and in the 21st century, DATA IS THE NEW OIL. . People look at Wikipedia for history and Facebook/Twitter for news. Can’t you see that history is being rewritten digitally and if we are not careful, the truth will be hidden? Our culture will be erased. I just don’t see how anybody can support foreigners taking over us.

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Good question. I guess I needed to have built apps, and websites and services to make a point, right?I am not here to publish my CV. The gra-gra effect to always want to push things just to say you’ve done stuff.

Well, I won’t say. When you know what I have done/doing, you will know. I’ll rather take my time, build something important than roll out slew of services that don’t matter. Have fun.

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Thats why I think we are on a different page. Im posting or making comments through experience. Like I use to think like you but now Ive seen the truth.

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Dude you don’t know me and I don’t intend to project any notion. Because I have not listed stuff I have been part of in one capacity or the other, doesn’t mean otherwise. But if it rocks your boat that I have no experience in these things, have fun.

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My comment was not an attack on you and neither does it rock my boat that you don’t have experience. I was just trying to let you know why we see things differently. Its not a matter of you are right and Im wrong or vice versa, its a matter of having different perspectives on the same situation.

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@davidsmith8900 So he thinks differently because you have some experience trying to duplicate SV success and failed but he’s refraining to respond to your request for his resume? The way you jump into conclusions says a lot about every point you have tried to make on this and many other threads on this forum.

Do you think that maybe it is an inferiority complex thing? Like most Africans (or Nigerians) don’t really believe in their own product?

Yes I see you peddling that all over the place. Like someone said to me offline earlier this afternoon, you make it seem like people open websites, go to the about us page, see a bunch of Nigerian names (or a Nigerian address), and then decide to not use the service.

Anecdotes below (and this isn’t because of some lame resume call out, but to provide counter arguments)

In 2007, a group of friends and I came up with the idea of creating a service to make it easy to buy recharge cards online. I mean, at the time it was rather interesting… plus only two other people provided such a service - rechargenigeria.com and one other whose name eludes me right now. Anyway, we tried to differentiate by offering this wallet of a thing where you could put funds in to buy recharge cards via SMS or by flashing a number because we assumed that more often than not when you run out of credit and need it the most, you probably don’t have internet access. I mean, it was 2007 - most people were connected only while at work. This (reloadng.com) worked out quite well, and in less than 3 months, we already had over 10,000 subscribers that had spent money on the platform with at least 1000 regularly using the flash service. A few months down the line, we were doing over a million in transactions per week. Unfortunately, this took a toll on us. MTN was everyone’s favourite network and they were literally the only ones who didn’t deem it worthy to provide us with their vouchers in softcopy. We had to buy cards in bulk, scratch them, and feed into the database. Profits were meagre even at that scale and didn’t justify the effort being put into keeping the service running. The purse was spurn out into its own payment gateway (softpurse.com) with APIs and all so subscribers could spend their money on other websites that cared to integrate it and the recharge service was shutdown a few months after. Turns out people only funded their accounts primarily to buy recharge cards (obviously) and weren’t really interested in conducting other transactions online. We kept it alive anyway for the next couple of months - till early 2010, I think.

A couple of random enterprise projects for corporate clients after, I decided to take a stab at something public facing again. Armed with lessons learnt from Softpurse, we created a more simplistic payment gateway without a purse but let merchants accept payments from cardholders without having to integrate Interswitch/Etranzact/Unified payments themselves and called it Eyowo. This fared pretty well via word of mouth only and in the time it ran for, I am not sure of the specific numbers right now, it processed over 30m in transactions and was used by sites like Gigalayer, etc. I had a fallout with my partners and quit before joining Jobberman some months after. Eyowo died a natural death, as it was only run by a team of three - @leslie on the frontend and @Tolu on customer success and helping with integrations, both of whom quit shortly after I did with no one else from the company equipped to support or improve the product.

These are my successes and eventual failures. They highlight the fact that we found a need, provided a solution, and milked it because people used our products. Also, the failures had nothing to do with any foreigner playing on our turf. Eyowo could have still been alive today were it not for greed and other random shit I would rather not put out here. Those are totally local factors.

There is a reason why I sometimes come off as harsh when I criticize products that are posted here - differentiation, and execution. It’s cool to want to build the next social network or the next e-commerce website. What isn’t cool is to think your naive approach to the ‘problem’ is going to impress anyone and draw users. A lot of developers I have met have this idea of “if you build it, they will come” and forget about the legwork side of things. Like, oh… let’s build a service that will connect everyday people with artisans. Who signs the artisans up on the site? Who acts as the actual broker between the artisans and their clients? Everybody is a techie and wants to write code at the expense of the real dirty work involved. Some foreign backed company comes along with a real plan and eats your lunch, and then you cry “Uber killed my startup”.

Come on, let’s get real please.

@MistaMajani No. Those “small niche apps” you see on my profile are just random personal projects from back when I created that page - 2008, I think. I am not scavenging for scraps. Some of us just like to hack at stuff and don’t delude ourselves into thinking we have created a product. :blush:

Edit: My longest post on Radar so far and I didn’t use the word “fuck”. Proud of myself maybe. :smiley:
PS: Payments is still a real and interesting problem to solve in Nigeria today and I am definitely interested in getting on board with anyone looking to do so, pro bono. A couple of friends over at Paystack are on to something interesting and are worth keeping an eye out for.

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Well personally Im impressed with your work and past achievements. I’ve never once thought of your intense ideas and most likely I’ll never will. You are pretty much diligent and patience in your occupation n patience is something I don’t have. LIke other developers, Im looking for a fast way to get out of poverty. Nonetheless I still think that your opinion is wrong about how foreign (non-African) startups dominance over local startups turf is okay (and that might not change), but I respect and admire your past accomplishments. Please keep up the good work and continue to inspire us all with your achievements, accomplishments and goals but not with that ‘LET SILICON VALLEY STARTUPS TAKEOVER AFRICA’ mindset.

Also for the record there is a difference between people SEEING THINGS DIFFERENTLY & THINKING THINGS DIFFERENTLY. When I was replying to akindolu with an open heart and love, I said that WE SEE THINGS DIFFERENTLY, not that WE THINK DIFFERENTLY. N I wasn’t calling him out or anyone else for their resume neither was I in attack mode. I plainly asked if they had created apps/startups, main reason being that I will love to see the magic that they are using to become successful so that I can use it as well. They could let me know what Babalawo they are going to so that I can go to that Babalawo as well but for some reason, everybody is not doing good and yet we have some supporting foreign (non-African) startups over local startups. It’s not adding up to me.

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In summary, you want to copy other people’s work with ease

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This thread needs to die a natural death right now!

@davidsmith8900 buddy, you’ve got to let it lie. Attaboy!

-#itsbeenfun

In-between brilliant run from @xolubi. I think you’ve earned your stripes to a lifetime store of ‘fucks’.

(Either way its interpreted I think that’s a ‘good’ thing, innit? :smiley: )

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Last time I checked it was called the world wide web.

You’re not entitled to a particular audience because they come from the same country as you.

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…Now the getting you on board part , really interesting…how do we reach out?

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Start by sending him a message on radar