Building products with Africa’s fastest growing startups from the diaspora
Venture for Africa co-founder Tobi Lafinhan sat down with Kesaobaka Modukanele, a fellow from our second cohort, to learn more about her journey from public health to immersion in tech and building accessible products. Kesaobaka was placed as a Product Management fellow with Nigerian fintech company Carbon through VFA.
Tell us a little bit about you, your background, and your journey so far.
I was born and raised in Gaborone, Botswana and moved to the US by myself when I was 17 to finish my final year of high school. This was made possible through a scholarship my high school had with a boarding school in the US and became a stepping stone to enable me to apply to US colleges.
I ended up going to Stanford, and at the time I was quite excited about the intersection of science, public health, equality and access to care because of how related all of those things were.
As an undergrad I was focused on the sciences and did some work in a lab, where I was studying the HIV virus and its evolution when it gets transmitted from mothers to their infants. The population I was studying was mothers in Zimbabwe.
I really enjoyed science, and I wanted to continue focusing on health care but with a bit of zoomed out perspective, so I did a fellowship through Stanford for a year in South Africa. I worked for UNAIDs, helping them size the burden of the HIV epidemic. I was still super focused on healthcare, but at a population level rather than a genetic level. In that experience, I got exposed to the power of analytics and being able to triangulate numbers to tell a story.
How did you get introduced to tech?
Coming out of that fellowship, I got my Public Health degree, but I think something I learnt in that process of working for the UN was that I didn’t think it was sustainable to solve problems on the continent through multilateral organisations like the UN. There was both the risk of the UN leaving and the risk of donor countries getting fatigued from financing initiatives like the one I was working one.
So I moved into the private sector and worked in consulting, still focusing primarily on health care and how the work within that sector could be translated to building sustainable healthcare systems or financing systems that would help African governments become more self reliant.
Within consulting, I was surprised to be constantly surrounded by conversations about how the future was going to be tech-enabled and data-driven and how there was going to be a lot of customisation of the customer experience. This got me really interested in tech.
I realised I didn’t really understand what it was like to work in a real tech environment. This was around when Facebook happened to reach out to me about a role in their developer operations team, and although at beginning I was a little uninterested because it wasn’t healthcare and I didn’t feel it was directly along the path I was going, in the end it ended up opening my mind. When I accepted the role, I got to learn about APIs, how to scale technologies, how to think about the customers and build for them, and how to build products that are delightful.
I think that experience at Facebook really helped me become very open to testing out building products across additional industries as a mechanism to democratise access. That is if we built products really well that were targeted at people on the continent, it could be a way to use the tech that we were always speaking about to increase access.
It was an interesting closure because I realised it didn’t have to be a massive haul of, for example, transforming how capital moves in the world. Rather, transforming the types of products that we build so they are more accessible to people in low-income settings and so that the products being built are really solving pain points in a really productive way can be just as impactful.
Why Carbon?
When I decided to join Carbon, it was really to continue the narrative of building accessible products. Carbon is doing exactly that — building a fintech solution for the unbanked and underbanked to help improve their access to capital.
It sat really nicely with my exploration of how to make products that help improve quality of life, access to money and access to basic services like healthcare and education, without having to overhaul the entire system.
Why did you apply to VFA, and what stood out the most for you?
I think it was really the opportunity to be able to build products for people on the continent and solve their pain points from here in the diaspora.
Sometimes when you are here [outside the continent], it feels pretty removed, isolated, and lonely because if you wanted to work on problems back home in Africa, you would have to make a big decision to move back. VFA was a cool way to test out that question for myself and also to have that opportunity to get a lens into how innovative companies solving hard problems on the continent operate, their challenges and their bright spots. So it made sense for me and gave me the opportunity to get immersed and experiment with the experience.
How was your experience at the startup you were matched with?
I think what stood out for me with the Carbon team was just the hunger for being better.
Everyday the team showed up and asked the question, “what did we do today that was better than yesterday?”. There was a constant push, energy and drive which made me realise that building awesome products isn’t easy and involves taking yourself out of your comfort zone and saying, “what am I doing today that is going to help me move a little further?” as well as being very accountable to yourself and to others.
What about the VFA program did you find the most useful?
I really enjoyed the workshops VFA put together. It was incredible to get exposed to the perspectives of VCs, product managers, developers and entrepreneurs on the ground.
I found this really delightful because you don’t really hear those stories in my current setting. There are speakers who come here [to Stanford] all the time, but they tend to be based here in the US and are solving problems for that demographic. So it was cool to see how people in different capacities on the continent were solving for that demographic.
What’s next for you?
I still plan to explore product management over the next couple of months, and even after business school I also have plans to explore some entrepreneurial endeavours and begin to do some high-level customer exploration and needs-finding exercises to really help get to a point of view about what problem we should be solving for people.
I think what I’ll work on in the end is going to be an intersection of the product world and the entrepreneurship space, but I’m also starting to explore the investing side both on and off the continent.
I’m currently an investor in the Stanford GSB impact fund, and as part of that we’ve been identifying businesses that we want to invest in. I’d want to continue exploring how to make the right investment decisions and on the other side how to become an entrepreneur that investors see value in, as well as how to build a product that delights customers and has success in the market.
Final word to anyone considering taking a leap into working with an African startup?
I would say go for it! It’s definitely an opportunity to experience something you probably wouldn’t have otherwise, without making huge leaps like moving to the continent immediately.
It’s a great opportunity to have that window of insight into the operations, strategy, product development and investment world of companies that are successfully being run on the continent, so take advantage of that!
If working with startups in Africa is something that you’re thinking about doing in the long-term, then Venture for Africa also gives you the chance to test it out, experiment, and answer some questions you might be asking yourself.
Whether you’re looking for your next challenge or planning a major career move, becoming a Venture for Africa Fellow gives you a unique opportunity to gain startup experience and local industry knowledge while contributing to meaningful impact at a leading African startup.
