4 Million Years of Experience

Bouncing down an unpaved road in a far western Kenya (1 2 3 4 5 6), in the Rift Valley, I had a profound thought…

There have been people living here for over four million years!

That is an incredibly long history. An unfathomable depth of experience living off that land.

In comparison, the Puget Sound region where I live wasn’t seen by human beings until about 6,000 years ago, when the last ice age glaciers finally departed and the forests grew back. Four million years ago spans not just multiple ice ages, but shifting of continents.

Of course, my ancestors four millions years ago were the people living in the Rift Valley of Africa. Same with yours. But as we drove down that dirt road, passing town after town, I realized that these people were descended from those common ancestors. Their mother’s father’s mother, etc. were living and eating off that same land since before we were human.

Yet somehow, my ancestors 100,000 years ago stepped off of Africa into the Middle East. 2,000 years ago their ancestors migrated to Europe. Four generations ago all my ancestors hopped ships to the United States. 24 years ago I migrated across North America. And then that day, the circle completed and I was back in the Rift Valley, zipping by my distant cousins.

Finally, moving my thoughts back to startups and investing, it made me stop and wonder why those of us who migrated away think we know better than those who stayed behind? Just because we could afford to fly around the world to visit their country instead of the other way around, do we truly know better about what their country needs and how to best make it happen?

My refrigerator died last week, and with that, my family and I lived with an “ice box” in its place, using frozen bottles of water as the source of cooling until today, when the new refrigerator was installed. Refrigeration is a service billions of us take for granted. Living without it for a week helps one ungrant that taking (or however that is supposed to be phrased). All of this...

Last month I was in Tanzania visiting three Africa Eats‘ investees: Swahili Honey, Goldenpot, and Rogathe Dairy. Below are three short videos showing off their factories. All of these companies have grown more than 10x since I first met them, some of them growing that fast in two years. See the post on fast-growing SMEs to see each of their growth stories, and click on the other companies...

1.4 billion people live in Africa. But that population is far from evenly distributed. The southern edge of the Sahara is clearly visible in West Africa, as is the enormous population in Nigeria. Then over in East Africa it is even denser in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and over into Rwanda around Lake Victoria and Lake Kivu, and yet denser still down in Malawi. See the original post on www...

Other people, see things and . . . say ‘Why?’ . . . But I dream things that never were– and I say: ‘Why not?’ – George Bernard Shaw This has shown in my 30+ year career repeatedly. Most recently a few months ago, when pondering the “Missing Middle” of capital for startups in general, and SMEs in Africa specifically. Why? Why is it taking so long for...

There is no multi-national or other organizations that uses the name “Global South” and thus no clear cut definition of which countries are included when you use that term. In general, this is the most recent way to talk about the poorer countries with “emerging markets”, formerly known as “developing” economies, and before that the “3rd World”. The...