“The simple things are the most successful in Africa. The things that are mundane, somebody will not look at savings as anything vitally important. Well, savings is a very, very big deal. PiggyVest in Nigeria is one of the most successful and the biggest startups in Nigeria because they just help people to save money and nothing else. You shouldn't build Swiss Army knives. Build the simplest possible solution for the simplest problems and you'll be amazed at how successful you'll become.”

People tend to want to build for investors and what the investors think is right, rather than finding a way to actually convince people that that's actually the best thing to build. You know, there's a whole lot of me too, everybody's trying to do what the other person has done. Too many copycats and very, very little originality. And there are so many problems still left to be solved. You know, I found out that when people are not thinking about profits, the not-for-profits are actually much more innovative, like easily 50 times more innovative than for-profit startups. The kind of ideas we saw in the not-for-profit accelerator were far ahead of what people were doing in the for-profit accelerator. For-profit accelerators, people tend to do things because they want to get money. The not-for-profit accelerators, people do things because they want to solve real problems. So those real problems become big profit centers in the future. Originality interests me a lot. I meet a team that has very, very high conviction in an area where almost nobody wants to play. I want to find out if there's something they know that other people do not. And more often than not, that's the case. I listen to people who look at things differently, who have a lot of domain knowledge. Because…