Passion Without Capital

Myanmar has many smart, entrepreneurially-minded people. Whether they are developers like Ko Thura Hlaing, finance associates like Ma Thiri Aung, or marketers like Ko Aung Kham, there are Myanmar people who have overcome an under-resourced education system and have displayed exceptional talent. My co-founder in Koe Koe Tech and cousin in blood, Yarzar Minn Htoo, is both a doctor and a computer scientist, and yet when we first met in 2009 he was languishing, with only $100 to his name, struggling to run an Internet café in a country which at the time had awful Internet connectivity.

But how many more talented Myanmar people have no access to the resources that would enable them to express their abilities?

Silicon Valley used to (still does?) pride itself on being a meritocracy, but there are a lot — a lot — of First World assumptions built into that claim. One, you have to be born in the United States, a similarly rich country, or a really wealthy family elsewhere, which is simply not possible for almost everyone in Myanmar or most other countries in the Global South. In the United States, when a startup launches a product on Apple’s App Store and Google Play, at a bare minimum its founders and employees assume (1) everyone has a smartphone, (2) everyone is very fluent in using smartphones, (3) Internet connectivity is ever-present and 4G-fast, (4) electronic payments work, (5) everyone has an email address, (6) people know how to download and use apps, and (7) people have annual per capita incomes north of $50,000 so they generally have some disposable income to spend (in Myanmar people earn about $1,200 per year). These startups also have access to angels and VCs for capital and fellowships and accelerators with experienced mentors.

And at a more fundamental level, these First World entrepreneurs have access to:

• Constant electricity
• Fellow citizens with over 20 years of embedded cultural experience with apps so they understand postmodern, abstract Google material design and Jony Ive Apple minimalism.
• Functioning showers with hot water
• Clean toilets that flush
• Temperate climates that lack an abundance of mosquitoes and other parasites that carry disease
• Clean food that doesn’t result in food poisoning every couple months that knocks them out for a few days
• Freedom of movement and expression, especially for women and ethnic and religious minorities
• Access to really, really good education, professors, and a culture of critical thinking, logic, and debate.

While navel-gazing movies like Knight of Cups, Broken Flowers, or literally any indie movie ever made will lead you to believe that American life is really, really hard for rich or upper-middle-class people (do we really need 10 more of these movies every year? I’m looking at you, Coen brothers.), life in Myanmar is several orders of magnitude harder. And even if you are a talented Myanmar entrepreneur, you have likely never learned how to formally incorporate a company, structure a deal or a contract, how to pass due diligence in order to close an investment round, how to create a cash flow statement and why it’s important, or how to write a grant application in order to receive grant capital. Nor will you have access to the mentors and experts who can explain to you how to do these things properly (or do them for you).

Oh, and by the way, even if you have enough burn to hire a small team, pay them, and build out a product, electronic payments don’t particularly work and most Myanmar people cannot download apps off of Google Play because it requires an email address (nor does it yet allow for in-app payments), and so app monetization is bracingly difficult, which is why the cluster of IT startups that formed in 2014 are now pretty much all “digital marketing” startups, which means they get paid by multinationals to maintain their in-country Facebook pages.

Very recently, there have been a few rays of sunlight. Phandeeyar, a Yangon-based incubator run by the wonderful David Madden, has just announced $25k for 12% equity and $200k value in additional services for startups. This is very promising but much more needs to be done, especially with regards to tech literacy, electronic payments, and access to capital. As anyone running a startup will tell you, cash is king. Lean startup principles like getting product-market fit before you run out of cash is generally true, but it presumes you have a well-functioning market in the first place. What if you are making a market for the first time?

In a true meritocracy, talented and industrious people in Myanmar would be able to compete with Silicon Valley. We are quite obviously not in a true meritocracy. Those privileged people in rich countries would do well to help “make a dent in the universe” by working to level the playing field, so that smart people in the developing world have the access to capital and learning to fully express their talents.