Inspirational Black Men In Tech: Robert Greenfield of Emerging Impact On The Five Things You Need To Know In Order To Create A Very Successful Tech Company

An Interview With Jamie Hemmings

Believe that you are worth the opportunities you seek. For a long time, I NEVER thought I would raise over $1M. I didn’t think that I could do it. But with the help of my team, I was able to do that and more and this goal soon seemed silly. Keep at it. Fail. Get back up. Succeed.

As a part of my series about “Lessons From Inspirational Black Men In Tech”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Greenfield.

Robert Greenfield is a 10-year blockchain expert and activist working at the intersection of emerging markets and emerging technology. With former experience at Goldman Sachs, Amazon, and ConsenSys, Greenfield is now the CEO of Emerging Impact (EI), a social enterprise looking to bring decentralized financial services to underserved communities across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Thank you for having me! To keep it short, I am a southern bred technologist, Ice-Cold Alpha, and activist looking to create a world where low-cost, high quality financial services are available to anyone with a phone. I was raised in the rolling hills of Atlanta, Georgia, conditioned at the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering, and sharpened at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University for my MBA.

What bridged the distance between hanging out at Lenox Mall as a teenager and building a blockchain-based fintech company was two life events: (1) Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012 which ignited my bias for action to empower underserved communities — starting with the #BBUM movement at the University of Michigan, and (2) Being introduced to Bitcoin by my friend Kinnard, in the very early days of the blockchain space. The combination of these events uncovered a passion to apply technology to better serve diasporic communities.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

The most interesting story that has occurred since co-founding Emerging Impact was our digital humanitarian aid program that was shut down by the Maduro Government in Venezuela last year. Our program, in collaboration with Oxfam International, Airtm, and local partners on the ground, sought to support over 2,000 Venezuelans during a time in which hyperinflation and crude federal policies have left an entire country hungry, underbanked, and underserved. After multiple attempts to shut down the program via hacking our partner’s servers and intimidating local NGO staff, the Maduro Government detained some of our local NGO partners on the ground and put into effect a national mandate closing all humanitarian programs. In order to free our partners from detainment, we had to prove that the funds used in the program were not from the United States. Luckily, using blockchain technology, we could easily show the flow of funds in a way that wouldn’t be possible, or believable, before.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

The funniest (and most embarrassing) mistake that I have made as a co-founder has to be when I tried to present a 30-slide deck to an investor in 30 minutes. We had just started fundraising this past summer and I was still learning how to pitch investors (and grow tougher skin to hearing “No” all the time). Needless to say, we did not get their support.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

Jon Lewis, Sandra Uwantege Hart, and I — all co-founders of EI — all lived on $500 — $700 per month for nearly a year before we started fundraising. All of this despite generating $400k in revenue in the first 12 months. We were dedicated to re-investing the revenue into building products we knew were needed after working with customers like MetaMask, Oxfam, the Celo Foundation, and others in emerging market contexts.

We NEVER considered giving up. We had all worked with each other well before starting EI, and knew that this was a product-market fit opportunity that we were the best in the world to solve (having done the world’s first crypto-based humanitarian aid program in 2019). The drive to eat pop tarts and pizza for nearly a year came from the fact that we were tired of black and brown voices being overlooked in the blockchain space, when many of us have greatly contributed toward the ecosystem.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

We are EXTREMELY grateful to all our advisors — 90% of whom joined in the first 3 months of EI’s existence. They represent a collective of the most amazing people we have ever had the opportunity of working with. Additionally, the 500 Global team (Clayton Bryan in particular) believed in us enough to build us up to where we are now. Without those people, we would not be where we are today. Additional shout-outs go to ConsenSys and Joe Lubin — he gave me incredible opportunities that built the foundation for where I am, personally, today. (And, of course, my mom and dad for forcing me to major in Engineering even though it made me cry on a weekly basis.)

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Only find co-founders who have skills you do not have, and who you can argue with and keep it moving respectfully. I have had and failed multiple startups before EI. Some have been with good friends with skills that weren’t complimentary. Others have been with people that didn’t have strong enough bonds to survive adversity.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The United States is currently facing a very important self-reckoning about race, diversity, equality and inclusion. This is of course a huge topic. But briefly, can you share your view on how this crisis inexorably evolved to the boiling point that it’s at now?

Particularly in the American context, there is a pending reckoning of self-acknowledgement and resolution that society still needs to go through when it comes to race. Until then — until we recognize that the foundation of this country is built on the burials of natives and Black folk, we will continue this cycle of political extremes we see ourselves in today. To me this honestly materializes in some form of major policy reform and reparations to affected communities. But the reality of realizing that conclusion, I think, is fairly unlikely to experience in my lifetime. With the erosion of accurate history education in our public schools, it is looking more and more that we will simply forget and repeat.

This may be obvious to you, but it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you articulate to our readers a few reasons why it is so important for a business or organization to have a diverse executive team?

It is impossible to build a great product without a diverse team. Period. Diverse perspectives and temperament can also mean the difference between having massive customers and not having any at all. For example, Sandra, a Rwandan-American with over 10 years of humanitarian programming experience is at the core of EI’s revenue success. Had we not had a black woman at the helm of our ship, I am certain we would have less than 50% of our revenue to date. Additionally, our team members based in Kenya and Nigeria have provided exceptional perspective as to how our products might be used by potential users — because their proximity to those individuals is much closer than someone like myself — despite me being Black. We are VERY intentional about keeping our team diverse.

Let’s zoom out a bit and talk in more broad terms. It’s hard to be satisfied with the status quo regarding Black Men in Tech leadership. What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?

More multi-million dollar fundraises and billion-dollar exists. Period.

We’d now love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address?

Emerging Impact is a social enterprise that enables emerging market internet businesses to build and deploy blockchain-based fintech products 2x faster and 40x more affordably. We achieve this using Umoja.

Umoja consists of an entire DeFi (Decentralized Finance) product suite, including: feature-phone compatible digital wallets, a mobile point of sale for merchants, a mass-payouts dashboard, and an API that supports digital wallet generation, Stablecoin custody, and the provisioning of on & off-ramps between Stablecoins, mobile money e-float, and fiat currency.

Simply put — anyone from farmers to humanitarian aid beneficiaries can use Umoja’s products to receive payments, transfer money, access yield accounts, and soon, borrow money without collateral. The vision is to accelerate the global majority’s access to DeFi-based, wealth generating tools to accelerate the social mobility of billions of people at a time — all without the friction and barriers propagated by the traditional financial system.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Our Black founders, a focus on emerging markets, and deep blockchain and emerging market experience.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We have three ongoing pilots in Kenya, Ecuador, and Haiti using cryptocurrency in humanitarian aid programming. The pilots are proof that emerging technology can be leveraged in hard-to-reach markets in ways that people can understand and benefit from (without investing in cryptocurrency).

What would you advise to another tech leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth or sales and “restart their engines”?

Talk to someone who isn’t as close to the painting and get an external perspective to refresh your approach — particularly those that have already succeeded multiple times. Sometimes we are in our own way and we don’t even know it, and thus, the problems we are facing are due to working too hard in the wrong direction. Reaching out to potential mentors or those you admire via Linkedin and Twitter is a great place to start.

Do you have any advice about how companies can create very high performing sales teams?

Have incredibly focused customer profiles that you are pursuing and force your team to market against codified success metrics and hypotheses. This makes every marketing campaign an experiment you can learn and iterate from.

In your specific industry what methods have you found to be most effective in order to find and attract the right customers? Can you share any stories or examples?

Find what your customer needs, specifically, to be convinced to use your product. There is the product itself and then there are the benefits that you need to communicate to them to get them to use the product. Oftentimes, startups cannot concisely communicate these benefits in a way that makes their customers jump on the opportunity.

Based on your experience, can you share 3 or 4 strategies to give your customers the best possible user experience and customer service?

1. Walk through your own customer experience to stress test its quality BEFORE demonstrating it with your customer.
2. Always ask your customers for feedback — even when it is painful at times to do so.
3. Keep things as simple as possible — if it takes more than 10 minutes to figure out — then it is WAY too complex.

As you likely know, this HBR article demonstrates that studies have shown that retaining customers can be far more lucrative than finding new ones. Do you use any specific initiatives to limit customer attrition or customer churn? Can you share some of your advice from your experience about how to limit customer churn?

Respond to customer concerns immediately and with all your soul and energy. This would be my only advice. I will give a customer my home address if that is needed to resolve their issue.

Here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful tech company? Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Create with founders with complimentary skills. The perfect example here is that the things that Sandra and Jon are amazing at I have no idea how to do. This is also true with our other executives — they all have a unique skill the other does not have.
2. Learn how to hear “No” and still move forward. When fundraising, you will hear MANY, MANY more “No’s” than “Yes’s”. Get the No’s out of the way so that you can get to the Yes’s. When I say MANY “No’s”, I mean over 100.
3. Maintain financial discipline at all costs. Ask any one of my executive team members — I am incredibly stingy with spending money. If it doesn’t get you toward your company goals — it ain’t worth it.
4. Believe that you are worth the opportunities you seek. For a long time, I NEVER thought I would raise over $1M. I didn’t think that I could do it. But with the help of my team, I was able to do that and more and this goal soon seemed silly. Keep at it. Fail. Get back up. Succeed.
5. Only search, pitch, and work with investors that believe in you. Investors that do due diligence is one thing, but it is an entirely another thing to be led on and waste time with investors that don’t believe in you. Create an investor profile just like you do with customers — something specific and easy to identify — and focus on getting those individuals to join your team and journey. It will save you a great deal of time.

Wonderful. We are nearly done. Here are the final “meaty” questions of our discussion. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

DeFi for mobile money and microfinance made available through SMS and USSD wallets. I truly believe that will bring more mass-economic empowerment to the world than most things we have seen in the blockchain space to-date. This is the product vision we have for Umoja.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Nas, Jay-Z, Bill Gates, any department leads at USAID.

Any country directors at NGOs facilitating humanitarian aid; Any agro-dealer executives looking to distribute smallholder farmer payments more easily or offer them financing to expand their lot productivity.

Any crypto-native startup founders looking to simplify on/off-ramps and digital currency custody in emerging markets!

As you can see, though there are many amazing people to meet more broadly — I would rather meet with customers and partners instead!

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!