Silicon Savannah
I spent a month in Kenya meeting a lot of people in Nairobi - from aid workers in the slums to C-suites at the mega-companies. Many of my fundamental assumptions about Kenya have been shaken through the process.
On this trip, we’ve gone into each place asking why is this place the way it is? How did this place develop into a startup hub? This was the same for Nairobi - how come when the world talks about African startup scenes it’s all about Nairobi for East Africa and Lagos for West Africa? Lagos is the largest city in all of Africa with 21 million, which inevitably creates opportunities. However, Nairobi can hardly compete with just under 5 million.
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Tech in Israel and our visit to Palestine
What we learned in China is that the larger the population, the greater the opportunity. All the reports in the Wechat groups Ivy is part of point toward country populations of over 100 million, ideally young, as points of high growth opportunity for startups. More customers, more problems, more competition for the best product, more money, more data.
This is how we designed our trip to the countries that were highly populated startup hubs like Ho Chi Minh, Jakarta, Cairo, etc. But Israel has a population of just over 8M and yet has produced unicorns like Fiverr, Waze, Viber, Wix, Payoneer, Compass, Lemonade, to name a few we’ve heard of.
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A Snapshot of Modern Egypt
Aside from seeing the typical pyramids and other tourist sights, we also spoke with some interesting people along the way. After that, we spent the past week on an unexpected detour along the Red Sea Coast. Here we’ll share a few blurbs from our time.
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Exploring Chinese Factories
China’s e-commerce ecosystem is extremely sophisticated. The customer touch-points, platforms, social commerce, scale, online to offline integrations, and time to door deliveries are far beyond what anything in the West has seen before. There's also a lot of talk about supply chain 4.0.
I knew I had to go visit some manufacturers in China since the country itself is deemed the world's factory.
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Business Opportunities in Japan
When visiting Japan, we immediately noticed that Japan felt behind compared to China. Reality is more nuanced, it’s not fair to say Japan is behind generally, there’s so many different factors to look at and even a single facet has both good and bad. The lens we’ve mostly been observing and analyzing places through is the advancement of economic development and innovation, so we wanted to talk about how those areas are affected by Japanese culture and values.
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Day in the Wechat Life
It’s hard to explain how advanced the current state of China is and how digitally integrated it is. To give you a glimpse, we’ll walk through an example day of our lives highlighting the interactions with WeChat, a key distinguishing aspect of daily life in China.
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China's 203 unicorns: how many do you know and what opportunities are there for you?
When I first arrived in China a bit over a month ago, I googled "Unicorns in China" and came across the first hit, Wikipedia's list of global unicorns. At the time of this search, I could probably count all the public and private Chinese tech companies I knew on my fingers and toes - this proved to be accurate as Wikipedia listed 227 Chinese unicorns, and only 20 of them had links. This means 207 Chinese companies valued at over $1 BILLION USD practically don't exist on the entire Western internet.
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6 Ways to Understand Local Market Culture and work Cross-Border
Some of the greatest challenges of cross-border and cross-culture businesses are not understanding local markets, not being able to build trust with local customers and staff, and not localizing the product, thinking a product or business model that works for one market will work in another. In order to do this better, global companies need people who can empathize with local customers and diverse team members, build internal communication and decision-making models that include teams overseas, and most of all be able to keep up and adapt to different cultures quickly.
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