Build what you need where you need it

Silicon Valley versus Moscow, Cape Town versus Bangalore. All round the world capitals are fighting to emulate silicon valley. The coolest place to attract talent and the coolest place to spend money on drinking the coolest coffee dressed in the coolest hoodie.

Traveling around the world, I see a different paradigm coming.

Everyone on the planet is steadily getting their interconnected devices in their pocket. My time in India, Brazil and Russia is showing that even in towns that have only just become connected, consumers are being empowered at all levels of society

We’re good at using technology to solve problems. In San Francisco luxury cabs, cleaning services and private jet sharing clubs are solved by wealthy entrepreneurs from California who suffer daily. I know that in the same way the big problems that affect tens of millions of people will be solved by people experiencing the problems themselves. Their solution may not be as glitzy, but it will probably be very effective. Even life changing.

A girl in a village in Northern India [who developed an app to broadcast when the water is working] , a guy in a tent in Lapland or a blind person in the back streets of Munich are as empowered as a Facebook millionaire fresh from a recent exit — they can program using tools that are available to all, learned free of charge on line and perfected at home. They can deploy using cloud infrastructure at negligible cost, and they can demonstrate the viability of the product easily.

The mobile device enormously multiplies these effects . The power it puts in the hands of people that will appreciate products that change their lives is unstoppable. This democratisation of the web may have happened to the middle and privileged classes already — but the scale and type of changes that we will see for everyday people are immense. There is no doubt that the mobile computer is the most transformative technology that we have seen since electricity and the wheel.

At Mangrove, we believe that great initiatives can come from anywhere. That’s why we travel a lot. That’s why we welcome meeting entrepreneurs anywhere, and that’s why our team have uniquely enjoyed significant time in their personal and working lives in Brazil, in Africa, in India, in Russia , in Eastern Europe and Asia. We’re as happy in a Favela in Rio de Janeiro as we are on University Avenue. Perhaps more so

We look forward to investing and supporting projects that help people anywhere. We’ve a great record in successful projects that needed an open mind. Please don’t be afraid to reach out. If you solve a problem for millions of people, wherever they are, please let us know..