10/05/2024
Victor Asemota writes:
The reason you have an MTN in Africa today is not because a poor boy from South Africa got VC funding and became a billionaire. I know some others try to force a similar narrative but it is not true.
People gained experience, put together plans, and then got investors. No magic. Each base station was built one site acquisition and equipment deployment at a time. Financing was tough but they hired the best to get it.
You just have to work or create work. It is in the creating work that we end up building the things that likely become venture scale. Scale builds upon scale and we have very few things already at scale. Scale is not built upon dreams and wishes but upon solid ground first.
I remember my observations the first time I visited America. My cofounder Salil previously told me that America runs like a well oiled machine. Femi Edun also told me that they build scale by dumbing things down to the basics. I saw that both descriptions were true. The infrastructure exists to sell at scale and you dumb things down to sell more.
According to Ogilvy “we sell or else.” America always sells or else it is not America anymore. To be able to sell, there has to be a market to sell to. They created that market in many ways. Infrastructure, education, and advertising.
You can’t sell when you haven’t built. Prospecting for gold in California led to the great railroads. Mining solid minerals in Congo and Nigeria have only led to wars and terrorism.
In Africa, we build, or else…
Let us build and then sell. We can’t sell what we haven’t built yet. Building on cloud infrastructure far away and trying to provide services to those who don’t have access isn’t building.
The day it dawned on me that payments in Africa wasn’t a startup opportunity but an infrastructure play was the day the scales fell from my eyes. PayPal got licenses in 50 American states and not 50 countries before it started making a lot of money.
One African country will not deliver our version of PayPal without our version of EBay which can only happen because we have our version of UPS or FedEx and the logistics that support it. That is further built on universities and a prosperous middle class.
We don’t have to follow the same trajectory but one truth is evident. Scale builds upon scale. Let’s build scale carefully. We have wasted so much time and effort on trying to create magic on a continent where illusions lead to hunger and despair.
