Can we reach 500 participants this weekend? We have 107 registered already. Join me for Tekedia Business Innovation Webinar on Friday March 22, 2019 (repeat, Saturday March 23, 2019). For $15 (or N5,000), you attend and also get access to the exclusive parts of Tekedia.com, reading my book – Africa’s Sankofa Innovation if you register.
The webinar will run for four hours and will cover business, innovation, strategy and African investing opportunities. Two hours will be reserved for questions/answers [we will follow up via email, post, etc on questions which time will not accommodate]. The essence is to provide tools which can help people find new markets and territories with focus on Africa and specifically Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa. As technology redesigns markets, I break the implications and provide roadmaps during this webinar on how you can win.
I got the message – many would like to attend our programs. Unfortunately, they are not overly affordable. And some ideas came from the community: make a quarterly webinar that most can afford. I am happy to note that I have signed-in to that suggestion. So, we are going to have Tekedia Business Innovation Webinar on Friday March 22, 2019 (we will repeat it on Saturday, March 23, 2019).
To many that invite me to WhatsApp group, Hangout group, etc which unfortunately I do not have bandwidth to accommodate, find how you can plan along with our dates. As always, the videos remain supporting tools in your programs. Here are the webinar details.
The webinar will run for two hours and will cover business, innovation, strategy and African investing opportunities. Additional two hours will be reserved for questions/answers [we will follow up via email, post, etc on questions which time will not accommodate]. The essence is to provide tools which can help people find new markets and territories, focusing on Africa and specifically Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa. As technology redesigns markets, I break the implications and provide roadmaps during this webinar on how you can win.
Dates: Friday March 22 2019 (repeat, Saturday March 23, 2019)
Venue: Online.
Time: 10am – 12noon (Webinar); 2.00pm-4.00pm (Questions/Answers). All time Lagos (Nigeria) time
Speaker: Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe, Chairman, Fasmicro Group
Who Should Attend? Everybody
Why You Should Attend: This webinar will provide tools to make this 2019 the best business-readiness year ever for you.
Webinar Theme: Winning in Nigeria (and Africa)
Register: There are two ways to register (you need to pay to value my time); please email tekedia@fasmicro.com after payment to set up your account.
Pay into any of the Nigerian bank accounts (N5,000) listed here.
After payment, email tekedia@fasmicro.com. Our team will give you instructions on how to join the webinar on the date.
Bonus: If you register for this seminar, my team will also give you (one year) access to the exclusive portion of Tekedia, and you will read Africa’s Sankofa Innovation among other contents [if you are a current subscriber, they will extend it by a year]. This is a $20 (or N7,000) value. Also, they will send you a certificate if you want one and accordingly maintain your name in our database to ensure they can confirm in future that you participated.
Sample of our certificate
Contacts: tekedia@fasmicro.com
Update – Replay Webinar Option, Question/Answer Plan
We have received some suggestions from the community on how to make this program to work for people with tight constraints. So, the following will happen:
The webinar will be available for a week so that people can watch it later when they have time. So, if you cannot make the noted dates/times, do not worry – you can easily watch the contents when you have time.
Every participant has access to the exclusive section of Tekedia. We will have a page for this event which our team will send you a link later. You can post your questions via the Comment section or you can email us. All questions will receive answers – depending on the questions, we can also answer via posts in the Tekedia exclusive section which every participant has access.
To ensure we can be effective during the live Q/A, we want everyone to post Questions within the breaks as noted, using the Comment section on the link to be sent later.
All contents will be available for those that cannot make the event live.
Samsung has unveiled a foldable smartphone (Galaxy Fold) and a 5G handset (Galaxy S10 5G), BBC reports. Now, over to you Apple to copy/imitate and make better, and then call it iPhone fashionista. The Galaxy Fold goes for $1,980, making Samsung the super-fashionista for the moment.
Samsung has unveiled a foldable smartphone – the Galaxy Fold – alongside its first 5G handset and three further Galaxy S10 mobiles.
The Fold will go on sale in just over two months time, earlier than many expected.
The Galaxy S10 5G features the firm’s biggest-ever non-folding phone display and promises faster data speeds when networks become available.
The line-up also includes the introduction of a lower cost model.
Samsung had previously acknowledged that the cost of its S9 range had contributed to “lower-than-expected sales”.
Samsung said the Galaxy Fold would open up to create a 7.3in (18.5cm) tablet-like display and would be able to run up to three apps at once.
The Galaxy Fold comes with 12 gigabytes of RAM and batteries on each side of the foldable phone, said Justin Denison, Samsung’s senior vice president of mobile marketing.
The gadget has six cameras, with three on the back, one on the front and two inside, Denison said. The phone will come in two versions, with a 4G and a 5G edition.
The three rear cameras are a 12 megapixel wide-angle camera, a 12 megapixel telephoto camera and a 16 megapixel ultra wide camera. The two cameras inside are a 10 megapixel selfie camera and an 8 megapixel depth camera. The camera on the front is also a 10 megapixel selfie camera.
I wrote about the exodus of Nigerians to Canada. Today, I am writing on HUGE remittance into Nigeria, from Americas, Europe and Asia. PwC estimates that Nigerians in diasporas remitted back to their mother/fatherlands a whopping $25 billion in 2018. Hello, that is just about the 2019 Nigerian budget! Go figure.
It is a serious issue and one I do not have the moral fiber to discuss since I also resigned a job and left for America many years ago. Yet, because commenting is free, I will go ahead. There is a big exodus happening in Nigeria right now, and the destination is Canada. When I say exodus, I mean real type like the one described in the recorded Exodus. Lol.
And while the FDI has been yo-yo (not up, not down), remittance increased 14% from 2017 numbers. As always, in global trade and commerce, equilibrium points will keep changing. Yes, as the doctors, engineers, etc leave the shores of Nigeria, and do better in their new domains, they are at many levels building the nation. Any business that is growing at double digit (here 14%) cannot be written away. Sure, we still have to deal with the exodus because a doctor in my village cannot be quantified on remittance dollars because doctors do scientific miracles.
Nigerians in Diaspora sent an estimated $25 billion in remittance to the country in 2018, representing 6.1% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, a PricewaterhouseCoopers Economic Outlook Report disclosed.
Nigeria’s migrant remittance inflow was also 7 times larger than the net official development assistance (foreign aid) received in 2017 of $3.359 billion, while the figure translates to 83% of the Federal Government budget in 2018 and 11 times the Foreign Direct Investment flows in the same period.
I did note here that besides the exodus, Nigeria can WIN – it is partly winning.
So, any illusion that more salaries to workers either in the private or public sector will stop the tide is nothing but trivializing an important matter. Yet, if managed properly, emigration is not all bad: Nigerian diasporas are helping to fund new companies, bringing new capabilities and business networks back home. We need to find an equilibrium point for the competitiveness of our nation.
The devil is always in the details. The billions of dollars being mentioned largely go to family upkeep: feeding, hospital bills, school fees, real estate, etc. It is not the money to build road infrastructures, railways, airports, schools, hospitals, energy sector, etc; so the quagmire continues…
If you have two large corporations with minimum of 10000 skilled workforce each, with the supporting SMEs that feed into that, the country and its people will certainly feel the impact; more than billions of dollars sent to families via remittances. Herein lies the problem, to build a great nation requires deep thinking and lots of sacrifices; it was never meant to be straightforward with seemingly easy escape routes.
In the meantime, the beneficiaries of the remittances must remain afloat, while men and women get to work in figuring out how to transform Nigeria.
Very bad news for the fledgling Nigerian fintech sector: OyaPay has closed doors. But this one is very painful because the young CEO is arguably one of the emerging leaders in the sector in Nigeria. I have followed Abdulhamid Hassan, CEO of OyaPay, since he left France to jumpstart OyaPay in Nigeria. In my monthly report to our portfolio companies, I have mentioned him as an emerging leader in the fintech space in Africa.
And he has shown great brilliance, product vision and capacity to fix real frictions. OyaPay makes it possible for meatspace (yes, offline) firms to accept forward payments with or without any mobile device like phone. His focus on what happens outside the web is a huge call: more than 98% of the $301 billion consumer flows in Nigeria happens in cash, notes MasterCard.
He took capital from his uncle and built his product. Now, he wanted to scale, and to make that happen, he wanted to raise venture funds. Unfortunately, his uncle does not want any form of “dilution” in his investment, Techpoint reports. He tried to resolve that but failed. Now, he has shut down the firm and has joined its former competitor, Paystack, as product manager.
“When I moved back to Nigeria from France in January 2018, I had a goal in mind to not raise external capital until we’d attained market fit and by so doing not hustling to get investor money. Instead, it would be on a neutral ground where we all (OyaPay and participating investors) need each other,” explains Hassan.
As Hassan reveals, he had earlier taken a small seed round from a senior family member (an uncle) and at the point of product market fit where the need for investors kicked in, the said family member pushed back on the idea of diluting his investment.
“For months we couldn’t resolve it, I became frustrated and decided to call it quits,” he says.
Very unfortunate that no one could convince the uncle on why owning 100% of 0 is 0 while say owning 10% of “something” returns a number! With the firm dead, that percentage is now worth $0. This is a huge lesson for everyone, not just the OyaPay players.
Question: This is really very painful, knowing that this could have avoided from the onset. Please Sir, advise on how to largely avoid this especially for young entrepreneurs like myself. I look forward to your response.
My Response: Have a lawyer as you draft that FIRST Term Sheet. The problem is that we sign anything that comes for that first funds not remembering that a company life will be built on it. It is possible he signed many powers to the uncle preventing dilution in all ways since it is evident he could not get around it. Yet, I have no uncle that can give me money. But if I was in his shoes, a family meeting could be called to discuss this. The decision is extreme to come from France, start a promising firm and shut it down this way. He could have even sold his own shares forgetting the uncle, hoping that sacrifice can change things. Remember, uncle was fair to have even funded this! This is a loss-loss and not a model way.
