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?

Back in the dot-com bubble, my second-ever startup filed the paperwork to go public, but the NASDAQ topped off before we were able to complete that process. It’s long been a life goal to be part of a company to finish that process. That goal was not only achieved today, but by Africa Eats, my eighth startup. I’m now CEO of a public company. 🙂 Africa Eats is an investment company...

The GDP per capita metric is helpful to gauge the level of economic development within a region, but misleading in that the metric gets skewed by extraction-based industries like mining and oil (which is why Botswana, Namibia, and Gabon) are higher than their neighboring countries). Visual Capitalist has published a map of the per-capital GDPs of most of the African nations (in most cases rounded...

In today’s episode of Superpowers for Good, I had the pleasure of welcoming back a dear friend and visionary entrepreneur, Luni Libes, the CEO of Africa Eats. Luni is not only an inspiring leader but also a key investor in the super crowd. His innovative company, Africa Eats, is on a mission to end hunger and poverty in Africa through a unique for-profit model, currently crowdfunding on WeFunder...

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...