Zimbabwe is not inside SA (its also bordered by Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique). But even if it were, would this not be a bit like Canada being "inside" the U

Zimbabwe is not inside SA (its also bordered by Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique). But even if it were, would this not be a bit like Canada being "inside" the USA? Anyway, by extension of this logic, then also places like Israel, Palestine, and even (in the not too distant past) Ireland, should not be expected to be candidates for such developments either. I echo the sentiment from elsewhere, that if a few guys in a dorm room could hack together a facebook -- then that dorm room could be situated anywhere in the world (including, say Ghana). And by running on AWS or AppEngine (say), infrastructure is largely isolated from country-specific stability concerns. In fact, users probably won't know or care where the HQ is, and nothing stops any organization from procuring expertise in whatever country it needs to further its aims. This seems to address the first part of what is necessary. For the second part -- growing the business -- no argument this is more tricky from places like Africa, because of perception issues, African VCs largely being focussed on the largest deal sizes possible (e.g. putting up a mobile phone network), etc. etc. From this perspective, Africans look at Silicon Valley and think how "easy" it all appears. Some move their operations, and do really well. Others find creative ways around -- like Thawte for example (for the growth question & VC environment for small growing tech companies, in my opinion, there is not much difference between SA and the rest of Africa). But for the most part, many Africans seem to be happy to build solutions for themselves, and don't immediately expect the rest of the world to be interested. From my experience, the main reason for this is physical distance -- many Africans just don't get to talk to people from the USA and Europe on a regular basis to realise there may be broader appeal, and so in many cases you just don't see a drive to want to scale something up to the size of Google. There is also an implicit belief by many Africans that they are simply not capable of doing something like this. People like Mark Shuttleworth have gone to a lot of effort in Africa to try and address this perception. Africans hold to a principle of shared humanity -- which is called Ubuntu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28philosophy%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28philosophy%29). Interesting the resonance with open source principles here. It is not a coincidence that Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu Linux carries this name.