Onafriq (Pan-African): Be the Wire, Not the Storefront
Asili AfricaPlay episode
Show notes
Be the wire, not the storefront — and seventeen years later, nobody outside the company can tell how well it is doing.In 2009 a man in Johannesburg registered a company on a conviction: that African mobile wallets would never talk to each other unless somebody built the wire between them.He was right, and he was unpaid for it, for eight years.This is the story of what that choice bought and what it cost. A car on the road to the airport in Abidjan in 2014, three weeks of runway, and a two hundred thousand dollar offer to sell that Dare Okoudjou turned down. A round in 2017 that slipped from March to September, salary cuts, and a client list cut from twenty accounts to ten.
