Last week, Africa’s early stage investor community came together for the 4th annual African Early Stage Investor Summit (#AAIS2017). At this exclusive investor-only event, hosted at Workshop17 in Cape Town, South Africa, key stakeholders in the ecosystem exchanged insights on best practice, shared lessons learnt, and debated what the roadmap for the future ought to look like.
In this African Tech Roundup episode, Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga discuss some of the more contentious issues unpacked at the conference-- including whether or not the hunt for the "African Unicorn" is constructive and how Africa-focused investors might best go about investing with exits in mind.
Music Credits:
Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Today's hijinks include: Talking about engineering management (and pranks)with Ben Kamens; discussing a new study on how to ask a question on Stack Overflow, and chatting way too much about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Timothy Kotin was born and bred in Ghana. He is the co-founder and chief executive of SuperFluid Labs-- an ambitious African data analytics firm which supports enterprise clients spread across multiple sectors. Superfluid has offices in Kenya, Ghana and Germany.
Kotin holds an MPhil. in Engineering for Sustainable Development from the University of Cambridge and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Harvard University. Prior to co-founding Superfluids Labs, he worked as a research scientist at IBM as part of a team which developed financial services innovations for multinational enterprise clients in Africa. Before that, he worked for Dalberg’s New York and Nairobi offices— playing consultant to key public and private sector development actors such as the U.S. Government, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Open Society Foundations and the UN Foundation.
In this conversation with Andile Masuku, Timothy relates how he and his team at Superfluid Labs have built a sustainable business around delivering business value through developing and deploying data analytics solutions, and explains why technical founders in his line of work who fail to rope in solid business development-oriented co-founders are likely to choke when reeling in the big fish.
