Why Africa May Never Produce a Facebook, Groupon, Zynga or Google | Hacker News Reader

Why Africa May Never Produce a Facebook, Groupon, Zynga or Google

blogs.forbes.com

15 pointsOoTheNigerian26 comments

So because there are no VCs now, Africa may never have some?

"Never" is a pretty big word, don't use it unless you really mean it.

Agreed. It's just another annoying contrarian headline. It's not what the article is saying at all.

I was about to say that. It's never possible to be sure that something will never happen. Forever is a mind-bogglingly long time.

To be fair, the title was "May Never", not "Will Never".

In anything other than perhaps a human life, Never just feels too definitive. The may just makes it sound wishy washy.

Hehe, cue the obligatory Lord of the Rings quote:

'Never is too long a word even for me,' said Treebeard.

"I recently read Parmy Olson’s interview with Yuri Milner on Forbes’s recent Billionaires issue... But as I read the article, I could not help but ask myself the pertinent yet habitually unanswered question: What about Africa?"

Why would you ask "What about Africa?" I don't get it. This article is so generic. Yes, you need a lot of capital and a large, advanced market, and you don't have that in Africa. You also don't have it in about a 100 other places.

Much more advanced countries in Europe can't do it, why would you ask "What about Africa?"

Because the author was born and raised in Nigeria. http://blogs.forbes.com/people/mfonobongnsehe/: I was born and raised in Nigeria

Its more of a personal article and a call to VCs from around the world.

Still it begs answering this question first in order to understand the nature of the problem: why hasn't rich Europe produced Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and Facebook?

Markets aren't that big, not enough investors/capital, different culture.

The article starts to hint at one thing I think is really interesting about Africa and other developing nations: by having leapfrogged some past infrastructure-heavy tech, they're in a unique place to get huge bang for your innovation dollar, both access-wise and out-of-the-box thinking wise.

The article cites a lot of examples from South Africa, which is actually a pretty developed country. CIA Factbook has it as the 26th largest GDP in the world, ahead of countries like Greece and Austria. Obviously that's only one metric, but I would guess that some VCs will give it a look eventually. The more interesting question is what will happen to less developed Africa countries - i.e. the ones, whether for better or for worse, you imagine when you read the headline.

South Africa is in the unique situation of having developers and business communities with access to all of the resources and education of the West living as little as 20 minutes away from townships with millions of people who are as under-resourced as any in Africa (well almost - they do still have access to a well-funded government). It is the perfect proving ground for applications for Africa.

Obstacles against success are in brief:

- Schizophrenic government policies, swinging from incredibly enlightened consumer protection legislation to, "We should establish a regulatory body for the press to prevent them from embarrassing government officials when corruption scandals occur"

- A legacy of underinvestment and draconian regulation in telecommunications. My 10Mb line costs me > 100 USD / month, and that's the fastest connection money can buy here.

Another country worth singling out is Kenya, which has produced incredible innovation like Ushahidi (http://ushahidi.com) and MPesa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa). Technology is a focus of government investment there, probably more so than SA.

How about corruption and lack of political stability ?

Not all of Africa is corrupt and politically unstable. It's a pretty big place.

I totally agree that each country is different (I am half-african and I've lived in a west african country for more than 15 years). The issue is way more complex than it appears. But as far as my experience can tell, corruption makes every single effort required to build something a real pain.

I'm frustrated that so many VCs want to make a "Next Silicon Valley" in New York, Chicago, or another part of the U.S. The rest of the world needs one significantly more.

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2011/03/goog...

"Nur Bremmen reporting on Memburn writes that Google has chosen Cape Town in South Africa for a pilot startup incubator called Umbono - Zulu for “vision”, “sight” or “idea”."

Here's a blog post I wrote this week about a Samsung initiative to provide capital and equipment for promising projects out of the University of Cape Town (in South Africa).

http://onesizefritzall.blogspot.com/2011/04/samsung-smiles-p...

Ironically enough Naspers, a major South African media empire, owns 35% of Tencent and I believe 28% of DST.

Ubuntu was produced in Africa.

The word, yes. The code, not so much.

My mistake. Canonical's founder is from South Africa hence my confusion.

Mark Shuttleworth started his company in South Africa, and he has bankrolled Ubuntu with what he got from selling it. So while "made in Africa" isn't quite right, there's a component there, in a somewhat roundabout way.

Ok, but Canonical has directly or indirectly written, what, 0.1% of the code in a typical Ubuntu install? Maybe 1%? There are tons of hardworking (and overwhelmingly non-African) programmers that are forgotten every time the press writes another breathless piece about Ubuntu. (Or, for that matter, Red Hat - their contributions are much larger, but still a tiny part of the finished product.)

No argument there, but I wasn't talking about the code.

No argument there, but I was talking about the code. ;-)

Seriously, though, good point.

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