Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

A couple of weeks ago, a think piece by Andile Masuku entitled "We simply must not allow investor bias to persist" - featured in African Independent and Business Report - caused a bit of a stir on Twitter. The hubbub surrounded the article's tackling of the sensitive issue of investor bias that appears to be prevalent in Africa's startup finance scene. Cited in Andile's piece are research findings published in a recent Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded report by the American VC outfit, Village Capital. According to the report, more than 90% of the funding that's gone into East African fintech startups over the past year or two has benefitted firms with expatriate founders. This has lead to some local founders complaining that their ventures aren't being fairly appraised for investibility in terms of their potential and financial viability. In this episode of the African Tech Round-up, Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga are joined by Tapsnapp founder and CEO, Vije Vijendranath, to unpack some of the impassioned response to the investor bias debate that's recently surfaced from certain quarters within our tech community and to chat about some possible solutions to the situation. Then, being that Tapsnapp is surfing the "Uberisation of everything" trend, and given the current push-back Uber is experiencing in South Africa from various stakeholders, Andile, Musa and Vije decided to try and answer the question: how enthusiastically should Africans embrace on-demand marketplace platforms? Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Topics covered in this episode:

• Craft Your Python Like Poetry
• The Fedora Python Classroom Lab
• How a VC-funded company is undermining the open-source community
• Newspaper Python Package
• IEEE Spectrum: The Top Programming Languages 2017
• SciPy 2017 videos are out
• Extras
• Joke

See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/36

Barbro Mutombo Ciakudia is VP for Business Development at Invest Africa. Invest Africa is a private members club based in Mayfair, London and was founded by Rob Hersov in 2013 as a means for business leaders, private investors, and entrepreneurs to gain insight into Africa and to be exposed to the continent's vast opportunities. They offer a multi-service platform for access and investment into Africa which aims to be a link between capital and expertise into Africa, and information and opportunity out of Africa. In this chat, Babro gives us a sense of how bullish members of their network are about investing in Africa and talks about what sort of investor support they typically need to act on their enthusiasm.

In this week's episode: We chat with Linux Academy CEO and Founder Anthony James, we play a "Florida Man" edition of Fake News, and Matt Sherman wonders how computers work.

Jean-Paul Melaga is a recovering finance professional who's had a successful career in top-tier international banking. Jean-Paul worked for the likes of Standard Chartered Bank and Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi before becoming co-founding the mobile market research startup, Smart Phorce. In his last banking gig before pursuing a more personal entrepreneurial agenda, Jean-Paul served as Head of Africa at the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, where he was tasked with turning powerful people within that organisation on to Africa's investment potential-- basically, turning sceptics into believers. In this chat with Andile Masuku, Jean-Paul reflects candidly on his corporate experience and reveals how his banking background set him up for his second career in tech.

Naija Beta is a documentary that follows a team of Nigerian and Nigerian-American MIT students who dream of shaking up education in Nigeria and head to Lagos one summer to teach technology to high-schoolers through a competitive robotics camp. As they seek to contribute to a new and better Nigeria, their ideals are tested by reality. Arthur Musah is the film's director and hails from Ghana and Ukraine. Naija Beta premiered in 2016 at the Pan African International Film Festival in Cannes, and won Best Documentary Feature at the Urban Mediamakers Film Festival in Atlanta, an Achievement in Documentary Film Award at the Silicon Valley African Film Festival, and the High Output Director Award at the Arlington International Film Festival. Naija Beta was also screened at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where it won Best Documentary Short Film at the Roxbury International Film Festival. Arthur continues his exploration of African identities in a globalised age through his upcoming feature One Day I Go Fly. Arthur studied filmmaking in the MFA program at the University of Southern California as an Annenberg Fellow, and holds a bachelor͛s and a master͛s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Topics covered in this episode:

• [more] Python Quirks : Comments
• Python 3.6.2 is out!
• Contributing to Open Source Projects: Imposter Syndrome Disclaimer
• The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI
• Arrange Act Assert pattern for Python developers
• Analyzing GitHub, how developers change programming languages over time
• Extras
• Joke

See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/35