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Wiza at 15 - tell the story of the dating website and the uncle's purchase

Building Communities online - using Twitter and other tools

Example - COVID App - tell the story of creating it

Perseverance - most people don't win the first time. Read a lot of failure blogs and postmortems for companies. Failure is easier to deal with when it is happening to everyone.

Steps for practicing communication - notes to self, share with close friends, publish

Building empathy with life experience - personal reflection transition from Malawi to Kenya

Indicators of empathy (and indicators of when it is not there)

Perseverance - Hack your brain to notice the positives to provide energy to keep going.

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People could self report symptoms and the health people could arrange testing for most severe symptoms. A company adopted it and put it as scale.

It came from a place of frustration - stuck at home, no way to help. COVID was a new problem and helping to solve was a way to relieve stress. Added benefit was that it helped a lot of people.

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Getting your foot in the door - generate a great idea and write a proposal to share this idea publicly

Top Somo Skills: Communication, Empathy, Perseverance

Lesson 1 - Empathy: [New subskill: In their shoes - what is it like to visualize the experiences of others]
Lesson 2 - Initiative: Find a problem (OR New: Generate an idea)
Lesson 3 - Communication: Write what you mean
Lesson 4 - Communication: Get people fired up about our ideas
Lesson 5 - Perseverance: [new subskill: Meditate on failure]

Communication
Something in my mind is high fidelity - what comes out - words - is low fidelity. Communication, for me, is about knowing your audience and maintaining the high fidelity idea. Writing forces you to think. Sequence your ideas.

Know your audience

Contextualize it

Know your idea well

Practicing Communication
Write to yourself - notes and letters about what you want to do. Can be short notes. Share with close friends - they can capture more of what is in your head. Publish to the internet - blogged about a relationship, got lots of feedback.

Empathy - know your audience. The ultimate aim in business is to sell something. To sell something to someone, you really need to knows their needs. Basic needs don't need a lot of empathy (i.e. bottle water, people need water). For platform business you need context and you need to understand someone's reality. This was hard for me, grew up privileged in Malawi. Going to Kenya and being "nobody" helped me build empathy. Create scenarios in my head - if I was this other person, imagine what their day-to-day like. What is their environment, what is their day like? Find the right words to get the message across to get the sale. If you are right the words will resinate. This plays out in practice, lots of proposal templates. Change a few things to make them personal (i.e. change greeting to be in the local language) - make it feel like it is just for them. Include context that is very unique to them. Interact with them as a person - note names and families. If you are applying empathy well, they are going to feel heard and comfortable. There will be tells - example: they will be speaking more than you. Indicators of not empathizing well -

Perseverance - Thought I'd be Zuckerberg, now know not everyone can be that.
Read failure blogs
Hack your brain - notice the good things, this will give you energy to keep going.
How do you know when to give up - It's a matter of spirit or energy. Knowing that you can't put yourself into it anymore. Sometimes it means you adjust your approach or put it down for a while. I only give up temporality until further notice. Thinks - I'm done with this for now.

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Write to people - emotive - jumping up and down excited! It is surprisingly effective. It gets you to the room. You can have a conversation. (We made some big claims - internet, music as primary lever for consuming entertainment)

Create your own luck - broadcast where you need help, because people want to help. I use Twitter to broadcast and ask for help. Twitter has been the best for my business development.

Put out V1 and get feedback - know it won't be good until V6 or V7. I feel internal pressure to fix it because my name is on it.

Be social in online communities. Don't say, "how do i do this?" - instead attach a story to it.

At the core - is this going to be fun for me to solve - work and life are merged [when you love your job].

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Family helped him move back to Kenya.

Applied to 7 accelerator programs - all turned him down. The 8th one took them and gave them $30,000 (context: rent was $150/month). Doing surveys around consumer preferences. Had traction but not enough experience - got caught up in the hype.

Hard to manage hype vs. getting things done.

Had an offer to

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All of the lecturers were on strike (a lecturer was arrested...) - didn't go to school because of this. Helped parents out for a year then parents said, time to go to school. In May, 2012 - undergrad in Kenya in - ranked top of the year for information assistance tech. Didn't learn much, but valued the new environment. Exposed to the nature of international opportunities. Got to run with different opportunities. Built joke apps. Did a lot of blogs for other people as a hustle.

Needed an internship to graduation - "I'm lazy" I had offers from IBM and Google but I didn't want to leave campus. So I took an internship - created a job for myself. Answered people's tech questions. Met a guy who would be my next business partner.

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Did web development with a friend 2012-2014 - built interesting things including Malawi police funded by UNICEF.

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Tight-knit community of people online hacking
A lot of the people I met on that community, I am still friends with today.

Got a reputation at school as the "phone guy" or "app guy" and could make money helping friends at school do this.

Got into the idea of the web in general (bigger than just phones) - the idea of how people connect, build communities.

Got into web development - taught self HTML - example: made a website to ask a girl out. An uncle with an international credit card bought him hosting capacity. Had enough to run a hosting business. Built the website for the girl, she turned me down. This got me attention. People were asking me how to do this. A friend wanted their music on the internet and built a website for him. People could download his songs. People kept coming to him to build websites. In 2008/2009 he realized a better approach would be to build a platform. Built Malawi's first mobile download website. Friend's mom opened an internet cafe. He agreed to work there for free to get access to the internet. Did this - https://www.mwtunes.com/ - from 2009-2012 (I was 17!)

Tried to exit the company and tried to monetize it and these things did not work. So it was no longer worth it.

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Runs BD
I think this is useful for the world because a lot of people are building for Africa for the first time. Building tech solutions for problems.
A big part is getting paid. We make it easy for people to make money.
I like mobile and mobile things. When I got my first phone, I found it fascinating. Growing up in Malawi it was the number one way people access the internet.

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I was born and raised in Blantyre, Malawi and I currently live in Nairobi, Kenya. I've been writing code since I was 11 and been starting companies since I was 16. I'm always looking for challenges and adventure. I studied Information Systems Technology at USIU Africa ('15), nailed it! - 3.67 CGPA and I was the Google Student Ambassador that year.

For several years, I was part of the team that built Africa's Talking, an international mobile platform API business that generated over US$ 10 million in annual revenue in 2018.

Right now, I am part of the team at Hover Developer Services, Inc, where I lead the global BD & strategy team, serving developers and enterprises all over the world. I am also a Google for Startups Accelerator Africa (Launchpad) mentor, as well as a venture scout for two early stage VC funds: Ventures Platform and Microtraction.

I write a lot on Medium and republish my best work on Quartz Africa.

Need to tell me something important right now?
Send me a message on Telegram: @wizaj

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Wiza Jalakasi - Pan African Entrepreneur

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I was born and raised in Blantyre, Malawi and I currently live in Nairobi, Kenya. I've been writing code since I was 11 and been starting companies since I was 16. I'm always looking for challenges and adventure. I studied Information Systems Technology at USIU Africa ('15), nailed it!

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https://wiza.jalaka.si/

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The world is at an inflection point - money, internet, app developers - timing is right for people who are interested in this space and are creating value.
I can teach more people to build these - more Wizas in the world.