How Silicon Valley came to the heart of Africa
November 29 2031
When I first met James Nkunda, about 10 years ago, he bubbled with energy and had a wild dream of placing his hometown Mwanza on the Venture Capital (VC) map, and with that, to divert many millions of investment dollars away from European and American cities. Mwanza, on the southern shores of Lake Victoria, sits in the centre of East Africa with easy access to Kampala (Uganda), Nairobi (Kenya), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Kigali (Rwanda).
Nkunda worked at Wakanda Mining, one of the largest gold mines in the area, and was frustrated over how many ideas were discussed among his colleagues and friends, but never got anywhere due to lack of funds, facilities to research and experiment, and access to electricity and the internet.
One day he bumped into then COO Brian Todd, outside one of the disused workshop buildings. Taking the opportunity, he asked if they couldn’t use the old building to test new ideas and create new solutions.
Fast forward 12 years, and the old workshop building is now the centre of a hi-tech corporate campus. It has research labs from the region’s universities, affiliations with MIT, Stanford and Oxford, and the region’s biggest companies have funded its own VC entity. The EU has opened a satellite patent office in one of the wings, and China has a permanent team of metallurgical scientists based there.
Todd, now CEO of Wakanda Mining and on the board of Wakanda Innovation, says with pride: “When we allowed our staff time and opportunity to tinker with the equipment they used every day, we opened a fountain of creativity and innovation happened all around us. We gained efficiencies, and accidents became less frequent.”
Nkunda continues the story: “The big breakthrough came when we opened it up for all people living around here. We now have 23 companies providing African solutions for African problems.”
“Everyone is creative,” says Todd, “and we as companies need to give our people — and the local community that we depend on — the opportunity to think, experiment, test, fail, and try again. Even in the heart of Africa.” /First published on Mindbullets November 30 2023
SILICON VALLEY’S GOLDEN YEARS DRAW TO A CLOSE
June 16 2016
Bill Gates has said his last goodbye. Announcing his decision to retire from his position as chair of Microsoft, Gates wished the company well and said he was going to pursue philanthropic and personal interests. It’s the end of an era in Silicon Valley.
But innovation and inventiveness have never been more prevalent. It’s a global phenomenon, driven by ubiquitous connectivity. We don’t need Silicon Valley to incubate ideas and bring them to fruition. Just connect to one of the hundreds of virtual Silicon Districts that populate the cybersphere, and you’ll be collaborating with peers and mentors in no time flat.
Ideas are like fire. The more you share them, the more you have. Extreme collaboration is the name of the game, and that concept is growing like wildfire. Multinational conglomerates working with “makers” and indigent hipsters online to create the next killer app or black swan — who would have thought it possible?
The downside is that it’s chaos out there. You never know where the best network for your idea lies, and you can lose control of a project pretty fast. But that’s the beauty of art imitating life. It’s random and chaotic, with plenty of mishaps, but the beauty that emerges, almost unbidden, is truly awesome.
Things change faster than ever, and life, and business, has achieved a scale of complexity that is mind-boggling. But let it never be said that “everything that can be invented already has” because you ain’t seen nothing yet. It’s the end of the world as we knew it — and the start of something much, much greater.