Rift Valley Meets Silicon Valley
How a Silicon Valley luminary joined my Tanzanian startup
Remember 2008? Obama vs. Clinton, iPhone 1, the market collapse? Back then I was fresh out of college with my St. John’s College bachelor’s degree in philosophy and mathematics. I was living with my octogenarian grandmother in Los Angeles. She was the sweetest woman and always so supportive of me. She brimmed with pride when I got hired at the Olive Garden. So after being fired from the Olive Garden, I continued putting on my Olive Garden uniform and walking out the door each day because I didn’t have the heart to tell her. Tough times.
Eventually I was canvassing the streets of LA for the election of Barack Obama. While I really didn’t enjoy asking people for money, I loved being part of something bigger: Change and Hope. Yet in my daily life I did what lots of Americans in their early 20’s do — partied too much and felt confused, wondering why life was not going my way. I wanted to make an impact and see the world. So I applied to the Peace Corps, all the while hoping deeply that something better would come up.
A Peace Corps Volunteer commits to 27 months of service living on the meager income of a local, approximately 1/40 the average US salary. You don’t get to choose where you go when you join the Peace Corps, though you can always decline their offer. So, no, you cannot finagle a spot in the Caribbean, as I’d hoped. Instead, the Peace Corps looks at your languages and skillset and determines where you will be of the most service. Because I’d studied French literature in college, I was going to Africa.
The uncertainty of my future mounted. I tried to guess where in Africa I would be assigned to, researching which African nations spoke french and had Peace Corps contingents. I pasted a map of Africa in my shower, and stared at it every morning, wondering which mysterious land I’d go to .I didn’t get the specifics of where I was going for almost an entire year.
Finally, on my 24th birthday, I got a letter from the Peace Corps. I tore it open and read that I was assigned to Tanzania. Tanzania?! That wasn’t on my list of possible francophone countries. I wikipediaed it and found the national language is not French, but Swahili; that it’s the land of Kilimanjaro, Zanzibar and the Serengeti. It’s also on the east coast of Africa. Apparently in my year of staring at the African map in the shower, I totally neglected the right side of it.
In truth I was more desperate than anything else. If I’d had a good job, or even career prospects, I probably wouldn’t have joined. But I didn’t feel like I had a better option. This was an absolute wild card and I figured I might as well play it. My friends and family gave me a big and loving send off. Everyone was so proud of me though I had done nothing. I was fairly sure I’d never see any of them again.
The first six months in country were the hardest of my life. Wilima, the school where I lived for two years, was a 14-hour bus ride south from the major city of Dar Es Salaam, and then a 75 minute hike through rolling green hills. My home was relatively luxurious because there was a tap of brown water outside, a metal roof, and three hours of electricity most evenings. I was washing my clothes by hand, collecting rain water to filter and drink, getting the hang of balling up ugali (a gelatinous white blob of corn flour and water) by hand to scoop up beans, learning Swahili and Kibenna (the local tribal language), bucket bathing, going toilet-less, cutting the grasses around my home by hand with a “slasha” to keep the environment free of snakes, eating the fried bugs my neighbors caught and cooked, building a garden, learning to farm, teaching math and physics in Swahili, and getting used to life as a celebrity (everyone in the villages knew my name, I didn’t know theirs). That all sounds really fun, right? Well it wasn’t. Not at first. I had just enough internet to see all the Facebook posts of clubs and Coachella from my friends in LA. FOMO agony.
I knew that with one phone call, the Peace Corps would fly me back home, no questions asked. I dialed the number numerous times, but something kept me from completing that call. At a low point, in one of my first math classes, I gave the students an exercise to calculate the number of days, minutes and seconds until my service was over. I couldn’t wait to return home and get this whole Peace Corps thing over with.
“Karibu” is probably the most common word in Tanzania. It translates to “welcome” but it means much more. I am a bit embarrassed by how withdrawn I was during my first few months, despite the kindness of the local villagers. Eventually I became close friends with a fellow teacher, Kassian Mwenda, who was from the neighboring village of Matatereka.
Kassian helped me in every way he could. He told me about the history of Matatereka village, how it had been formed artificially when socialism was in full force and tribes were pushed into villages. He explained words and expressions I couldn’t find in the dictionary. Built a fence around my garden. Gardened. Mary, his wife, began bringing me food each day and washing my clothes. I was Karibu’d.
Together we started our first grain banking operation out of my house. It was a fairly simple venture: in Tanzania, corn is eaten as the main course for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Demand is constant, but supply is not. Farmers harvest within a few weeks of each other, but the average farmer is desperate to sell because it has been so long since the last harvest. Thus many Tanzanian farmers cannot afford to wait until prices spike, or preserve the crops themselves. Bugs, rains and volatile markets create a fire sale. So when supply is still high, most farmers sell for very low prices to the few middlemen they meet, and so the cycle of poverty continues.
I raised roughly a $1,000 from local expats to invest in maize for the upcoming harvest. Together Kassian and I used the money to buy and store about a ton of maize in my house. A few months later we sold the corn to our school for about $2,000. I paid Kassian a quarter of the profits and returned the rest to the expats. As a Peace Corps Volunteer I received no share of the profits I facilitated, but I didn’t care, my eyes were opened.
By the time my 27-month Peace Corps sentence was complete, I stayed in country, not taking a trip home for another 6 months. I’d fallen in love: with the culture, the land, the people, the charming and beautiful Danish girl who moved into my hut (highly recommended) and my new job as the logistics manager of the social enterprise, Cheetah Development. At Cheetah we enabled farmers to capture a greater share of the value they created by using Mohammed Yunnis’s model of microloans as well as classical economics. A true business solution to poverty, not another charitable cause, but a sustainable business. My job was simply to coordinate the movement of the goods. Easy, right?
Hell no! Tanzania has a terrible infrastructure for banks and roads, two things that really help a business. I’d ride for hours down rocky roads in empty 12 ton trucks, which were very expensive to rent and fuel, only to find the road washed away and impassable before our village was reached. Signing farmers up for bank accounts was equally maddening, as travelling all the way to a banking town is too costly to be practical for small holder farmers. On top of all this, after moving into the city with my partner, our house was robbed repeatedly and our neighbors attacked in their homes. As a passenger, I survived many automobile accidents on motrcycles, buses, tuk tuks- some deadly. I started getting the overwhelming sense that it was time for me to leave.
Fortunately, last minute, I was admitted to do my MBA at the Copenhagen Business School. My Danish partner and I packed up in a hurry and went North. Soon I was with top business talent from around the world, who were vying for high paying jobs in banking and consulting. I’d still never made close to $30K per year and felt immense pressure to get a “grown-up” job. I applied for a position as a business analyst at IKEA headquarters. Being hired required a multi-day process of business cases and interviews. One interviewer, Magnus Kerker, who would be my future cofounder of NINAYO, actually recommended that I not be hired at IKEA because I clearly cared so much more about “the UN and stuff like that”. Magnus is a sharp one. But his insight did not prevail and I started my new job. I found myself in another strange and foreign village, this time in Älmhult, Sweden.
I continued to obsess about how to improve food security and trade in Tanzania and Africa. Reading Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, I was struck by his now famous interview question of “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” My immediate response: Africa can feed itself and have a thriving economy, not through aid, but via for-profit investments.
I started mapping the NINAYO marketplace. The site would enable farmers and markets to communicate directly. Farmers would no longer depend on middlemen to sell their crops. Food waste would be reduced and better prices achieved for farmers by reaching out directly to markets. If Etsy could spark a booming macramé industry like this, we could create a small roar for food supply in Africa.
In my spare time at IKEA, I kept working on my idea. I built a team with Magnus and his brother Staffan. We cobbled together the website and named it NINAYO, Swahili for “I’ve got crops” and all caps because we liked IKEA’s branding. Launching NINAYO was thrilling. I was back in contact with my old friends in Tanzania and even making new ones down there from my desk near the Arctic circle. Slowly, over the months, NINAYO grew as farmers in Tanzania signed up. We saw our growth surge when their maize harvests arrived. There is (almost) nothing sexier than a growth curve that goes up and to the right. Trades poured in.
At this point in the story, you’d expect me to boldly quit my job and dive head first into entrepreneurship. But I was working in Sweden, and companies there are legally obliged to give employees a leave of absence to start their own business or go study for a year. So there was really little risk on my behalf.
So I took my modest savings of Swedish Kronor and decided, for petty reasons, to make the leap. I travelled down to the villages surrounding Lake Malawi, where the majority of our users operate. I interviewed dozens of farmers, middlemen and buyers to better understand the pain-points of the value chain. One middleman told me, “NINAYO is like a goldmine, but I don’t want anyone else to know about it”. That’s exactly what I had hoped to hear. For a long time, middlemen have had asymmetrical business information that they (rationally) exploit for maximum profit. Although the middlemen have much more capital than farmers, they rarely compete with one another. With NINAYO.com, the supply and demand information is democratized. There’s no need to travel to each village beforehand, the info is all right there in a searchable online directory. This particular middleman had begun out-pricing his competitors, actually competing to better serve the farmers.
Invigorated by my Tanzania trip I finally returned to Los Angeles to land the seed capital I needed to scale NINAYO so this valuable tool could be in the hands of all 240 million farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. We were disrupting a massively inefficient $12 billion industry in Tanzania. We were attracting people who had never been online before because we had made a product that was designed specifically for their financial needs. We were dramatically improving people’s lives.
I knocked on every damn VC door from Silicon Beach to Silicon Valley with this pitch, getting few meetings and fewer second meetings.
In retrospect, I get it. Would you want to write a check to a pre-revenue company solving a problem you don’t understand in a country you can’t find on the map? It’s a big world with a lot of interesting places and industries, and most people in Silicon Valley don’t know much about the problems in Sub-Saharan Africa, or how tech can solve them. Their loss. After 3 months of rejection, I flew back to Scandinavia, exhausted and broke, with no runway left for myself… or for NINAYO.
Back at work a friend asked me, “so how much money did you raise?”
“None… But we got our name out there and built a really valuable network.” I continued defending, “It was worth it.”
He laughed, “Yeah, but you failed.”
My friend was kidding me and I might have made the same joke back to him. But a part of me was devastated that he was right.
One evening Magnus and I got together in Malmö, Sweden, to discuss the grim future of NINAYO. When I got home I saw my mother had been trying to contact me on every channel available. Apparently Expa Labs had called her while she was on another call, “I’m sorry I don’t want to buy anything from Expa” she said, starting to hang up. Thank goodness she didn’t.
In all the rejection, I’d forgotten that I had done an online application to Expa. Now, Eric Friedman at Expa Labs was offering to fly me out to San Francisco to meet with his partners for a 45 minute interview in less than a week. Those partners included the chairman of Uber, Garrett Camp, cofounder of Foursquare, Naveen Selvadurai, and a host of other heavy hitters. A favorable outcome would determine a half million-dollar investment in NINAYO and one of six spots in their labs, with these Silicon Valley all-stars taking a hands-on role in my little startup.
I honestly wasn’t nervous in the meeting, probably because I was confident it was a waste of everyone’s time. The Expa team would later joke with me that, after my interview, they all wondered why I didn’t think NINAYO was an Expa company, because they totally did.
That was a month ago. Thanks to Expa, NINAYO continues to grow and improve the livelihoods of thousands of independent farmers across Tanzania through our simple online trading platform. We empower farmers with the current market information they need to grow their businesses. This service is crucial because in Tanzania over 30% of food rots, largely because supply and demand fail to communicate efficiently. By using crowd-sourced information NINAYO provides actionable business intelligence for suppliers and buyers, much the same way Craigslist, Ebay and Etsy have.
As an example, consider Yuditha, a small holder farmer from Mbinga, Tanzania. Yuditha is a second wife who depends on her agro business for survival. She helps her husband and his first wife with their coffee harvest, but the only money she keeps is what she can sell from her tomato and onion farms. With Tanzania’s average income around $637 per year, she has very little room to take financial risks or invest in herself. By posting her onion harvest on NINAYO, Yuditha found a buyer willing to pay twice as much for her harvest. She has sold the entire amount with minimal waste, raking in almost $2,000. Doubling her income, this female entrepreneur was able to keep her son Alfa in Secondary School, improve her home in the village and put money aside to invest in a more bountiful next harvest.
…
During his speech last Friday at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016, President Obama commended the efforts of entrepreneurs and startups around the world “Entrepreneurship puts rising economies on the path to prosperity and empowers people to come together to address our most pressing problems, from climate change to poverty.”
Listing particular success stories, President Obama said,
“I think of the Tanzanian startup that helps farmers reduce their harvest losses…”
and then my social media blew up as friends from around the globe began pinging me, “That’s NINAYO, right?” “Of course not”, I thought. “Or… wait… it certainly could be.” Amazing that by posting this on Medium I can get this clarified, but in any case, President Obama was endorsing NINAYO’s mission on live TV.
Whichever startup President Obama was referring to, the NINAYO team sends a tremendous “Thank You” and “Asante Sana” to the president for publicly endorsing our efforts, and those of startup entrepreneurs across the world.
A week prior, after hinting that he was interested in working in Silicon Valley after his presidency, I tweeted that President Obama could have a board seat on NINAYO. I’m really hoping his televised shout out to NINAYO was a quid pro quo.
“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.” —Basil King (I associate this with the movie Almost Famous)
A bold move takes you off the beaten track, into new challenges and solutions. I made a few bold moves over the last 8 years: moving all around the world, deciding to stay put when times were hard and jumping into high risk businesses. I think these worked out because humanity actually wants to support the bold.
When I started NINAYO I was surprised by how many people I admired wanted to be a part of it, work for free, put in money, share advice, introduce me to the right people, etc. And when I moved to Tanzania, I was surprised by how many people I hardly knew opened their doors and kitchens to me with a hearty “karibu”. I believe there’s an abundance of goodness in people that just needs an outlet. Bold moves can give just that.
