Congratulating my peers, African tech entrepreneurs
When one hears good news, one should try to spread it even if one is not part of those who benefit from this good news when everything was and still lend itself for one to benefit from it.
This preceding sentence is the motivation behind this article that is about congratulating entrepreneurs mainly African tech entrepreneurs and is inspired by a bit of news about the state of VC funding in Africa head on equitypod’s episode of … from the always and I hope ever sound and pleasant voice of Mary Ann Azevedo, the new to me but not the less sound voice Rebecca Szkutak whom I am happy to hear and discover on Equity pod along with Natasha Mascarenhas’s always helpful and kind reporting and questioning with her sportive and leading voice both with and without the talented voice of the new father Alex wilhelm who’s actually taking care of our new friendly and nice friend, sister and daughter Ada and her mother all of you good people worth knowing and listening whom I wish to thrive and to continue doing more easily the important and creative work you do while having a happy and long lifetime because with a good stream of news one could make better the life of many others and that’s what you and other journalists arround the world do that is spreading quality news for people to act on them. So peace to all of you spreaders of news, information, knowledge, and useful things for this to not be bound to journalists only but to anyone who’s sharing through the medium of the internet. I have benefited from your work and will continue to do so who eats on the plate should not throw sand into it once satiated is an African saying then act like that.
writing the paragraph above that stands like a congratulating part for journalists I remembered those who passed away and because I thought of my dear cousin a very talented African journalist, so connected and open-minded, so sportive and combatant, and all of this with a born illness that he has not decided to carry with him, nor has he caught by accident or by an event of a life or a voluntary action but with which he courageously, bravely and voluntarily decided to live and to try with success to do more than what healthier people can do without asking help by contributing to the world with his profession and work as well as his life, helping many through the internet and the real life. If he had a bit of the health I have now and that I have benefited from during all these 38 years that will soon convert to 39 he would have done 100x more than what I have achieved now and many more other good things like writing and spreading quality news for people to be well informed and well educated. I think his life is a lesson of efficacity. amlam was the nickname by which his peers' Senegalese journalists used to call him.
so, I hope that you could let me specially congratulate African journalists before I get to these African entrepreneurs who achieved what I think merits congratulations because African journalists did the same and even more than these African tech entrepreneurs, and this with less funding and technology than them. The African news consumers I encounter can’t say that they are not well served with quality news produced by professional journalists but journalists in Africa are finding their work more and more difficult due to a lack of support from both public and private organizations when everybody knows how difficult it is now to manage profitably a media company without the financial support in form of investing of entrepreneurs like what jeff Bezos do with the Washington Post and his peer the French entrepreneur Patrick Drahi with L’Express. African media companies lack a bit of such kind of media-aware investor-entrepreneurs and public and private organizations. With the support of these entities, I see how further African journalists like the late amlam could achieve because I saw what they have achieved with less support. So, congratulations to all African journalists who are working hard to produce well-informed African citizens like what your peers from developing countries like the U.S are doing.
So let’s get to what I heard from equitypod about the state of African tech venture capital that made me think about congratulating African tech entrepreneurs with the unmeaningful words I could write from my poor English vocabulary like what I have done in the subsequent paragraph that was about congratulating journalist and broadly spreaders of digital and physical useful things. But before that let me try to share with you an insight I got writing this article because I think that it is a useful insight worth sharing with others and this is about writing in a world fueled by generative AI. This insight is about the growing need of writing and publishing in a manner, a way, that will be simpler and better digestible by generative AI models of solutions like chatGPT and the others that will be in production in the years coming certainly some of them about news production and dissemination. This need is like the need that was expressed when search engines like google were introduced to the marketplace forcing content production to care about how to structure the content for it to be SEO friendly, to be better processed and ranked by search engines. I feel like this same kind of need will appear with services like chatGPT because the more we will understand how these GPT services process the digital content we produce and how they show it to users according to their business model that is not actually well defined the more content producers like TechCrunch, bloggers and all others digital creator will need to structure the digital content they create for it to fit the processing pipeline of the AI models behind these coming growing number of GPT services. This is for sure not so pressing need but those who want to lead tomorrow should act early and I think that it’s the right time for content producers and broadcasters to start experimenting with what I tried to explain given that I was clear with my explanation. To resume it like SEO it is very likely that there will be a growing trend of GPT Engine Optimization but don’t take this as a sure piece of information like this one from the trio of Equitypod who reported that African startups have raised more funds in 2022 with the continent showing a growing number of investments compared to others parts of the world with examples like carry1st an African gaming startup which raised 27 million dollars from Konvoy Ventures and now Bitkraft Ventures and a16z. When fintech funding was down everywhere globally about 46%, Africa was the only region that showed an increasing number of fintech funding deals compared to 2021. Africa saw a record 227 deals in 2022, up 25% compared to 2021, however, the funding dollar amount was lower because 89% of funding deals in Africa were early-stage deals. As Mary Anne Azevedo said this is a very good signal for Africa and more if we know that the number of early-stage deals in Africa is the highest of all regions.
I thought that this was a pretty good signal for African entrepreneurs like me to pursue their efforts and an opportunity to congratulate all these African entrepreneurs who worked hard to bring investments into the continent and also for encouraging all entrepreneurs around the world to continue their work because there may be coming funding opportunities down the road.
