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Why a Successful Valley Entrepreneur Started a Tech Incubator in Ghana

109 points by hayksaakian 9y ago

curiouslurker 9y ago
"There’s the old saying that A students become professors, B students become mid-level managers at large corporations and the C students endow buildings and professorships." Is this really true? Where is from?
- danieltillett 9y ago
  Thanks to grade inflation there are only A students now. I think the quote is implying the C students are the wealthy legacy students that are there to party, but who have the family money to name buildings.
- santaclaus 9y ago
  Zuckerberg and Gates either had good enough high school GPAs and SATs to get into Harvard or got in on legacy (George W. Bush Yale style).
  - uiri 9y ago
    They didn't get in on legacy. Their fathers went to local public universities instead respectively.
    - sjg007 9y ago
      Both had rich parents though. I think that makes it slightly easier to get into Harvard. They could live in good neighborhoods, attend the best public or private schools and also try entrepreneurial activities with a safety net. Now maybe that safety is overrated in general but it is still there nonetheless.
    - dna_polymerase 9y ago
      Gates also left a mark or two at Harvard for actual academic stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting
- projectramo 9y ago
  It is true that people with poor GPAs (to a certain extent) often do very well. They might achieve extreme results more often than people with better GPAs. To what extent? The number is 2.9 http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-barker-millionaires-bad-grades-gpa-2017-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-barker-millionaires-bad-... However, this just shows that they are outliers. It may turn out to be the case that there are just as many negative outliers for that GPA (or not, I don't know). If you are asking if it is true that this is an old saying, I have heard the sentiment before many times. I can't remember the name of the book where someone said the people who got the to the moon were lead by a C-student but all of them had perfect GPAs. However, I don't know of that particular phrasing.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    A students also go to med school.
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    Don’t know if this is true, but it rings true all the same. A students get bogged down with “getting an A” at what they do. That requires a lot of time and work. C students socialize and make connections. They fail a lot more often than they succeed, but there’s survivor bias.
  - zone411 9y ago
    This 2.9 number comes from "Millionaire Mind," published in 2000 with the data from 1990s. The same book states that 2% of millionaires were in the top 1% of the college classes and 90% graduated from college. Note the huge amount of grade inflation since the surveyed millionaires graduated (their average age was 54, so they would be in college on average in the 1960s) and a large increase in the percentage of students attending colleges. And a myriad of possible selection biases. It doesn't seem like a good argument that people with poor GPAs do better than people with high GPAs. http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2010/ted_20100428.png https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2010/ted_20100428.png https://books.google.com/books?id=p60tDntHVnUC&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99 https://books.google.com/books?id=p60tDntHVnUC&pg=PA99&lpg=P...
- gfredtech 9y ago
  I'm from Ghana and this trend happens quite a lot. But most of the time, the C students who become successful tend to come from wealthy families...
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    I love your post. Because our successful American C students come from wealthy families as well.
- cmahler7 9y ago
  The key is that there's a big difference from getting C's because you are working on a business on the side and getting C's because you are spending too much time partying or just aren't that smart. Too many people use this as an excuse to justify bad grades. For me I just saw it as another example of the 80/20 rule. I could spend hours studying to get an A or do the minimum and still get a B and spend my time working on more important stuff
yinso 9y ago
> We’ve had a few successes. One of our companies was acquired by an Accel backed company. > The other is Saya, the first African company to pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt. Weeks before the event the founders didn’t even have passports! It is very cool that there are already success stories. Without ever being in Africa, I lack the knowledge and wonder if the current infrastructure is capable of supporting knowledge-based economy on a broad scale, but it's certainly good to see that high tech businesses could thrive there, and incubators are getting created.
- jernfrost 9y ago
  Most of these countries are developing countries with low education levels so obviously it can't be broad, but of course in any country there will be a segment of the population who are well educated and/or affluent. Take China, most Chinese are dirt poor but because there are so many Chinese you can go to modern enclaves like Shanghai and never experience this poverty. In general however return on investment tends to be high in developing countries because they lack so much. There are lots of businesses you can start with minimum competition. E.g. I've seen many stories about poorely educated Chinese getting rich in Africa. They start shops, facories and all sorts of stuff lacking
  - ejanus 9y ago
    >>poorely educated Chinese getting rich Why can't educated Chinese do same ?
    - bobabooey02 9y ago
      They can, and many do succeed. In the US right now, education is a proxy for class, so saying the uneducated Chinese can succeed is like saying the Chinese lower class can succeed, which isn't necessary true. It requires capital to start a business, not education.
lyal 9y ago
Seeding entrepreneurialism in emerging markets makes sense both altruistically and in return potential for an investor -- you're not competing in a saturated market, like say seed investing in the valley, and costs are low. If you can solve the other side, such as access to capital, M&A opportunity, and potentially international customers, as Jorn is doing, you're in a great place. The part about training for business conduct feels a bit iffy in tone from the level of detail it goes into. I bought a company in Germany a few years back, and my Canadian sensibilities certainly offended folks until I learned the rules of the local culture. Any cross border business interactions are fraught with this. A few of my friends are currently investing/managing a company out of Ghana. Extremely low investment has yielded a great growth curve, and they're changing how sub-Saharan Africans manage their finances. They're some of the happiest investor/entrepreneurs I know.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  How do you make money off of people who don’t have anything though?
  - eganist 9y ago
    It's about value creation. A band of enthusiasts in the middle of nowhere and with no resources to create anything will probably have a hard time bootstrapping a startup, especially when you consider the relative definitions of "no resources," but that's the point of starting an incubator: to help resource the enthusiasts. If they can take what they get and run with it in pursuit of the idea that got them the investment, they've now created value where none previously existed. Commence the theoretical positive cascade of investments and growth and having an exit strategy so that investors and entrepreneurs get back a return on what they invested. The part that's kinda taken on faith, though, is whether the value created will stay in the area. Unless there are huge incentives to stay local, I see the companies, exited founders, and investors all taking their funds and resources back into developed nations rather than staying local and perpetuating prosperity where they first laid their roots. There's hope that there'll be a will to stay local... but man, people tend to take whatever chance they can get to escape a bad place.
qazpot 9y ago
Q - Why a Successful Valley Entrepreneur Started a Tech Incubator in Ghana? A - To make more money.
wilsonfiifi 9y ago
>> One challenge has been the lack of engineering expertise to build infrastructure that scales. The ‘WhatsApp for feature phones’ company got more traffic than they could handle and could not scale up fast enough ... If I remember correctly, at the time Saya was being built, GAE (google app engine) was available so couldn't they have just used that to take care of the scalability issues whiles they gradually developed local/in-house expertise? I've always assumed the "easier path" would be to use GAE, Heroku or any other commercial PaaS until it becomes more economical to switch to an IaaS which is more hands-on and requires in-house devops or system admin skills.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  You can't just throw an app at GAE, Heroku or any other PaaS and it'll magically scale. Even putting aside you have to have design the program for that kind of scaling, use the right language and database, a lot of apps will have hard bottlenecks in them. Table locks, disk access, API access, whatever it is. That's part of the expertise he alludes to. For example, one client had a small customer base (10s of thousands), but was already having to use Premium tier in Azure because of performance problems (P2). Very seasonal business, massive usage around Xmas. The coming Xmas they knew they had a serious problem, triple the amount of users. The site would have gone down. Bit of refactoring and performance tweaking from me and instead they never really went above 20% CPU and could sit on Azure's S2 tier (and realistically could have used S1). I'm no scaling expert, but I at least knew where to look after a decade of working on real apps and reading articles about scaling on HN.
honestoHeminway 9y ago
Seeing how many of the valles incubators focus on things that are sole needed by the inhabitants in the valley, this is a great chance to supply blindspot-markets with products & solutions.

109 points by hayksaakian 9y ago

"There’s the old saying that A students become professors, B students become mid-level managers at large corporations and the C students endow buildings and professorships." Is this really true? Where is from?

danieltillett 9y ago
Thanks to grade inflation there are only A students now. I think the quote is implying the C students are the wealthy legacy students that are there to party, but who have the family money to name buildings.
santaclaus 9y ago
Zuckerberg and Gates either had good enough high school GPAs and SATs to get into Harvard or got in on legacy (George W. Bush Yale style).
- uiri 9y ago
  They didn't get in on legacy. Their fathers went to local public universities instead respectively.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    Both had rich parents though. I think that makes it slightly easier to get into Harvard. They could live in good neighborhoods, attend the best public or private schools and also try entrepreneurial activities with a safety net. Now maybe that safety is overrated in general but it is still there nonetheless.
  - dna_polymerase 9y ago
    Gates also left a mark or two at Harvard for actual academic stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting
projectramo 9y ago
It is true that people with poor GPAs (to a certain extent) often do very well. They might achieve extreme results more often than people with better GPAs. To what extent? The number is 2.9 http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-barker-millionaires-bad-grades-gpa-2017-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-barker-millionaires-bad-... However, this just shows that they are outliers. It may turn out to be the case that there are just as many negative outliers for that GPA (or not, I don't know). If you are asking if it is true that this is an old saying, I have heard the sentiment before many times. I can't remember the name of the book where someone said the people who got the to the moon were lead by a C-student but all of them had perfect GPAs. However, I don't know of that particular phrasing.
- sjg007 9y ago
  A students also go to med school.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  Don’t know if this is true, but it rings true all the same. A students get bogged down with “getting an A” at what they do. That requires a lot of time and work. C students socialize and make connections. They fail a lot more often than they succeed, but there’s survivor bias.
- zone411 9y ago
  This 2.9 number comes from "Millionaire Mind," published in 2000 with the data from 1990s. The same book states that 2% of millionaires were in the top 1% of the college classes and 90% graduated from college. Note the huge amount of grade inflation since the surveyed millionaires graduated (their average age was 54, so they would be in college on average in the 1960s) and a large increase in the percentage of students attending colleges. And a myriad of possible selection biases. It doesn't seem like a good argument that people with poor GPAs do better than people with high GPAs. http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2010/ted_20100428.png https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2010/ted_20100428.png https://books.google.com/books?id=p60tDntHVnUC&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99 https://books.google.com/books?id=p60tDntHVnUC&pg=PA99&lpg=P...
gfredtech 9y ago
I'm from Ghana and this trend happens quite a lot. But most of the time, the C students who become successful tend to come from wealthy families...
- wavefunction 9y ago
  I love your post. Because our successful American C students come from wealthy families as well.
cmahler7 9y ago
The key is that there's a big difference from getting C's because you are working on a business on the side and getting C's because you are spending too much time partying or just aren't that smart. Too many people use this as an excuse to justify bad grades. For me I just saw it as another example of the 80/20 rule. I could spend hours studying to get an A or do the minimum and still get a B and spend my time working on more important stuff

yinso 9y ago

> We’ve had a few successes. One of our companies was acquired by an Accel backed company. > The other is Saya, the first African company to pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt. Weeks before the event the founders didn’t even have passports! It is very cool that there are already success stories. Without ever being in Africa, I lack the knowledge and wonder if the current infrastructure is capable of supporting knowledge-based economy on a broad scale, but it's certainly good to see that high tech businesses could thrive there, and incubators are getting created.

jernfrost 9y ago
Most of these countries are developing countries with low education levels so obviously it can't be broad, but of course in any country there will be a segment of the population who are well educated and/or affluent. Take China, most Chinese are dirt poor but because there are so many Chinese you can go to modern enclaves like Shanghai and never experience this poverty. In general however return on investment tends to be high in developing countries because they lack so much. There are lots of businesses you can start with minimum competition. E.g. I've seen many stories about poorely educated Chinese getting rich in Africa. They start shops, facories and all sorts of stuff lacking
- ejanus 9y ago
  >>poorely educated Chinese getting rich Why can't educated Chinese do same ?
  - bobabooey02 9y ago
    They can, and many do succeed. In the US right now, education is a proxy for class, so saying the uneducated Chinese can succeed is like saying the Chinese lower class can succeed, which isn't necessary true. It requires capital to start a business, not education.

lyal 9y ago

Seeding entrepreneurialism in emerging markets makes sense both altruistically and in return potential for an investor -- you're not competing in a saturated market, like say seed investing in the valley, and costs are low. If you can solve the other side, such as access to capital, M&A opportunity, and potentially international customers, as Jorn is doing, you're in a great place. The part about training for business conduct feels a bit iffy in tone from the level of detail it goes into. I bought a company in Germany a few years back, and my Canadian sensibilities certainly offended folks until I learned the rules of the local culture. Any cross border business interactions are fraught with this. A few of my friends are currently investing/managing a company out of Ghana. Extremely low investment has yielded a great growth curve, and they're changing how sub-Saharan Africans manage their finances. They're some of the happiest investor/entrepreneurs I know.

0xbear 9y ago
How do you make money off of people who don’t have anything though?
- eganist 9y ago
  It's about value creation. A band of enthusiasts in the middle of nowhere and with no resources to create anything will probably have a hard time bootstrapping a startup, especially when you consider the relative definitions of "no resources," but that's the point of starting an incubator: to help resource the enthusiasts. If they can take what they get and run with it in pursuit of the idea that got them the investment, they've now created value where none previously existed. Commence the theoretical positive cascade of investments and growth and having an exit strategy so that investors and entrepreneurs get back a return on what they invested. The part that's kinda taken on faith, though, is whether the value created will stay in the area. Unless there are huge incentives to stay local, I see the companies, exited founders, and investors all taking their funds and resources back into developed nations rather than staying local and perpetuating prosperity where they first laid their roots. There's hope that there'll be a will to stay local... but man, people tend to take whatever chance they can get to escape a bad place.

qazpot 9y ago

Q - Why a Successful Valley Entrepreneur Started a Tech Incubator in Ghana? A - To make more money.

wilsonfiifi 9y ago

>> One challenge has been the lack of engineering expertise to build infrastructure that scales. The ‘WhatsApp for feature phones’ company got more traffic than they could handle and could not scale up fast enough ... If I remember correctly, at the time Saya was being built, GAE (google app engine) was available so couldn't they have just used that to take care of the scalability issues whiles they gradually developed local/in-house expertise? I've always assumed the "easier path" would be to use GAE, Heroku or any other commercial PaaS until it becomes more economical to switch to an IaaS which is more hands-on and requires in-house devops or system admin skills.

mattmanser 9y ago
You can't just throw an app at GAE, Heroku or any other PaaS and it'll magically scale. Even putting aside you have to have design the program for that kind of scaling, use the right language and database, a lot of apps will have hard bottlenecks in them. Table locks, disk access, API access, whatever it is. That's part of the expertise he alludes to. For example, one client had a small customer base (10s of thousands), but was already having to use Premium tier in Azure because of performance problems (P2). Very seasonal business, massive usage around Xmas. The coming Xmas they knew they had a serious problem, triple the amount of users. The site would have gone down. Bit of refactoring and performance tweaking from me and instead they never really went above 20% CPU and could sit on Azure's S2 tier (and realistically could have used S1). I'm no scaling expert, but I at least knew where to look after a decade of working on real apps and reading articles about scaling on HN.

honestoHeminway 9y ago

Seeing how many of the valles incubators focus on things that are sole needed by the inhabitants in the valley, this is a great chance to supply blindspot-markets with products & solutions.