15 minute read
Startup After Pivoting Seven Times
How Sam Udotong Bootstrapped His Transcription Startup After Pivoting Seven Times
In 2016, Sam Udotong arrived in San Francisco with only $100 in his pocket, unsure about his future prospects. The Nigerian-born entrepreneur went from eating three pizza slices and drinking a bottle of Soylent every day to owning the world’s largest transcription company.
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Udotong, is the co-founder and CTO of Fireflies.ai, a venture-backed speechto-text transcription startup.
The entrepreneurial ride has been a roller coaster for Sam Udotong and his co-founder Krish Ramineni. They changed the course of their business seven times before settling on a strong foundation.
The company has offices in Hyderabad, India, and San Francisco. But at the beginning of the journey, the company first started at an MIT hackathon.
Udotong’s success has been nothing but sheer determination and relentlessness.
After graduation from MIT, many of Udotong’s friends went on to work for firms like Facebook and Google, but he opted to take a chance on himself and start his own business.
When the product didn’t resonate with clients, he asked family members in Nigeria to introduce him to engineers ready to work remotely, and he didn’t give up.
At the time, Fireflies was a bitcoin-based food delivery service for students on campus.
Educational background
Sam never considered launching a business before enrolling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He was born and raised in New Jersey, in a tiny village near Philadelphia, and attended MIT, where he majored in aerospace and computer science.
“That’s where I probably got my first taste, working with people who knew about tech. I never thought that I would do that before I got there,” he said.
Udotong found it easy to start a company due to vast opportunities of resources and guidance.
He stated that “one of the things that actually got me into tech was hackathons. MIT had several hackathons and when I was an undergrad, I would go to some of them. One of them was where the actual original idea for fireflies started.”
Founding Fireflies
After graduating from MIT, he applied to graduate schools, where he got admission into really good programs alongside full-time job offers in Los Angeles, where he could earn like six figures.
“At the end of the day, I chose Fireflies. I woke up every day, excited to work on building something that could impact everyday lives.”
After deciding to start his company, Sam and his co-founder, Krish moved to Silicon Valley. The founders took the risk because they felt the best time to work on something was when they were young.
Fireflies began as an online food delivery app for students, allowing for bitcoin payments to be made.
Unfortunately, its slow speed yielded minute earnings, making the return of the capital invested a long shot.
Despite this, Udotong persisted in working 15 hours every day in a free co-working space, pivoting the business seven times while he bootstrapped the company due to a failure to raise funds.
Living in Silicon Valley, one of the United States’ most expensive cities, as a young grad without a job was not easy. Udotong had to change his habits and diet in order to survive in the city.
You would think Udotong situation was in great dismay, but with supportive people at his side like his co-founder, navigating the footwork to achieve his goals was a lot easier.
In 2022, the business has raised over $19 million, the most recent being a $14 million round headed by Khosla Ventures.
Yonas Beshawred:
the Black Founder Who Worked Twice as Hard to Scale in Silicon Valley
Yonas Beshawred is the CEO of StackShare and a slew of other businesses. Since its launch in 2014, his company, StackShare, has grown from strength to strength, allowing software engineers and IT organisations to share their tools and how they use them.
From what started as a side project on a WordPress blog, StackShare has raised $7 million and reached 1 million developers, engineers, CTOs, VPEs, architects, and founders.
Beshawred’s journey has been nothing short of rocky, but the results speaks for itself. Besides his work with StackShare, the 34-year-old co-founded Harambeans, a network of over 250 African entrepreneurs who, according to him, have collectively created over 3,000 jobs and raised over $400 million for their businesses.
He also assisted in the formation of Ethiopians in Tech and the Ethiopia COVID-19 Response Team (ECRT), a forum for experts from all over the world to work and collaborate on COVID-19 responses in Ethiopia.
Early life
After graduate school, with a degree in business, Beshawred worked for one of the world’s largest consulting firms, Accenture, for 18 months. He has always been interested in business and international development, but not necessarily tech.
However, his role at Accenture made him fond of tech by seeing how large companies made IT and large-scale technology decisions.
He worked in the IT strategy group, which gave him the opportunity to help big companies figure out a new data centre and its different components. That was one of the things that inspired StackShare. Yonas who is also a voracious book reader, credit a book for his inspiration,
“I actually read this book called Founders at work by Jessica Livingston and I was just really inspired by what I read and after that book, I decided I had to get into software,” he said.
On this premise, he started studying humancomputer interaction at the University of Maryland, just to get deeper into software development.
StackShare
Building StackShare
Building StackShare came with many hurdles, including building teams and getting funding.
To combat the issue of not having a co-founder, Yonas dealt with it by surrounding himself with people that were more skilled than him. This trait has also largely helped him when hiring or looking for a team.
His background was another challenge for him while building StackShare. He was a black founder from the East Coast without a tech background or an Ivy League pedigree. This made it hard for him to raise funds. The growth of StackShare was quick as the company entered Batch 15 of 500 Startups flagship accelerator in 2015, before eventually becoming the go-to place to debate technologies in 2020.
Today StackShare, a social network-like platform that allows developers and companies to rank open source, SaaS technology and developer tools, now boasts 1 million developers and CTOs with a recognition from Forbes as a Cloud 100 Rising Star.
For Yonas, this is a big win because there have been a few developer communities on the internet that have scaled to a million members.
To counter this, Yonas made sure to prepare and out-perform in gaining traction, traffic and users for investors to analyse.
Jessica Matthews: the Techpreneur Who Invented a Power-Generating Soccer Ball
Nigerian-American techpreneur, Jessica Matthews was inspired on her visit to Nigeria for her aunt’s wedding. There was an electricity outage, and a diesel generator was used as an alternative. Though the power was restored, the smoke was hazardous to health. There, she conceived the idea of producing an environmentally friendly power generator.
Being a problem solver and having a background knowledge in energy came in handy for Matthews. In 2008, during her junior college, she invented Sockett, a soccer ball that doubles as a power generator. She did this with her classmate Julia Silverman, as an assignment in an engineering class. Sockett retains kinetic energy as it is utilised. Also, a thirty-minute play produces sufficient energy to light a small LED light for three hours.
The launch of her startup - Soccket
Despite not wanting to be a businesswoman, the Harvard Business School graduate found herself in the heart of it.
She said, “Believe it or not, I never aspired to be a businesswoman or run a major company. I always wanted to make cool, meaningful things and help people self-actualize and get more value out of whatever time they have left on this planet. As it turns out, to do that sustainably and at scale, you have to build a business.”
Thus, the Havard college graduate launched Uncharted Play in 2011 after quitting her full-time job at CrowdTap, a crowd-funding company.
Raising funds for Uncharted play
By leaping for 15 minutes, the jump robe creates and stores energy sufficient enough to power an LED for three hours. Both devices use the M.O.R.E to convert the power produced by minutes of play into hours of electricity. In 2016, she established the Harlem Tech Fund (HTF), a non-profit organisation to support 100 new entrepreneurs and provide technology training to 10,000 Harlem residents. She served as the chairman of the HTF.
Jessica Matthews used Kickstarter and convertible debt to fund her firm at the initial stage. In the same year, she exhibited her invention at the Clinton Global Initiative University and also to ex-president Barack Obama during his 2013 visit to Tanzania.
As the company grew, she redirected the its attention to producing a larger variety of kinetic-energy-storing devices in collaboration with experienced manufacturers.
This included M.O.R.E, a Motion-based Off-Grid Renewable Energy, a technology that leverages Soccket’s energy storage mechanism.
This, in turn, led to the development of SOCCKET, an energy-generating soccer ball, and PULSE, an emergency batterycharging jump rope. Uncharted Play was renamed Uncharted Power in 2016. The company has been booming for three years in a row, with gross profit margins doubling yearly. In the same year, her company received $7 million in Series A funding, valuing it at $57 million.
Driving Expansion
Jessica Matthews has her sights set on the US market after dominating the African and Latin American markets with roughly 500,000 Socckets and Pulses in use as of 2017.
This is to be accomplished by enlisting the help of parents and young people interested in renewable energy and global issues.
By leveraging its Think Out of Bounds educational program, the company educates over one million kids in innovation and STEM. Due to her immense work, She was honoured with the Outstanding Corporate Diversity Award at the Harlem Economic Development Day in 2016.
Her achievements earned her the White House’s invitation from President Barack Obama to represent small businesses during the signing of the America Invents Act in 2012.
By receiving the highest Series A round fund ever, Jessica Matthew set a new record. She was, therefore, selected to anchor the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) opening ceremony bell on behalf of all Forbes 30 Under 30 alumni.
In 2021, Jennifer M. Granholm, the Secretary of Energy, appointed her to the Electricity Advisory Committee to advise the Department of Energy.
How to Tap Into Opportunities in Africa’s $200 Billion Energy Industry
Article || By Wale Ameen
In April 2019, the World Bank Group announced the approval of over $200 million support fund for a Regional OffGrid Electrification Project (ROGEP).
This included $150 million in the form of credit and grant from the International Development Association. There’s also a $74.7 million contingent recovery grant from the Clean Technology Fund to the West African Development Bank and ECOWAS Center for Renewable Energy and Energy efficiency in a bid to increase off-grid access to electricity for 19 countries in West Africa and the Sahel region. These countries include Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
According to the bank, the overall objective of ROGEP, it said, was to increase access
of households, businesses, and public institutions to electricity through the provision of stand-alone solar systems through a harmonised approach. It is projected to benefit about 1.7 million people across these African countries.
While the continent’s energy sector is a vital component to its economic development, the journey to energy sufficiency is far from being a reality. Interestingly, energy demand in Africa has been on the increase at an annual rate of 3%, which is the highest when compared with other continents but supply has regrettably continued to lag behind. Initiatives like the above give an optimistic look to Africa’s energy shortage which continues to hamper development as it is a major requirement in the growth of any nation’s businesses.
A look at the numbers…
Over 640 million Africans have no access to energy, the African Development Bank (AfDB) says. This, in turn, translates to an electricity rate for African countries at just above 40 percent, the lowest in the world.
The bank also states that the per capita consumption of energy in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) is 180 kWh, a far cry from that recorded in other parts of the world, for example, the United States boasts of 13,000 kWh and 6,500 kWh recorded in Europe.
Taking a look at the continent’s energy mix, according to BP Energy Outlook 2020, Africa’s energy mix has been relatively constant within the last 30 years and despite its number of renewable energy projects, the overall scale of renewables in Africa remains small.
Instead, it has been largely dominated by the use of fossil fuel with hydropower. Despite a recent shift within the renewable energy mix to accelerate the use of solar and wind technologies, the effort remains largely negligible at a measly 1.6%.
According to the review, the composition of the energy mix and their share as as follows; Oil - 38,7%, Natural gas - 29,7%, Coal - 22,1%, Nuclear - 0,7%, Hydro - 6,8%, Bioenergy - 0,4%, Solar - 0,6%, Wind 1,0%.
Going by this data, Africa’s energy industry is a $200 billion strong opportunity waiting to be tapped. There is probably no better time for large-scale investors to look at the sector and tap into the abundant opportunities.
Meanwhile, as it stands, a shift to the more cleaner types of energy like solar and wind is the way forward, especially with the race to achieve clean energy globally.
AfDB’s efforts at providing funding for large scale energy projects
In a bid to contribute to the improvement and plug a little of the hole, the African Development Bank recently launched a program tagged a New Deal on Energy for Africa, a partnershipdriven effort with an aspirational goal of achieving universal access to energy in Africa by 2025.
This partnership drive is built on five inter-related and mutually reinforcing principles which are: (i) raising aspirations to solve Africa’s energy challenges and establishing a Transformative Partnership on Energy for Africa.
Others are mobilising domestic and international capital for innovative financing in Africa’s energy sector; supporting African governments in strengthening energy policy, regulation and sector governance; and increasing African Development Bank’s investments in energy and climate financing.
This effort basically provides a framework through which the bank has partnered and continues to partner with individual countries to fund bankable projects that will deliver access to energy in Africa.
According to the AfDb president, Akinwunmi Adesina, about US$12 billion has been committed between 2016 and 2020 and this is expected to leverage US$45 – 50 billion in cofinancing for energy projects in Africa during the period.
It’s worthy of note that the AfDB’s energy intervention drive comes with a special focus on encouraging clean and renewable energy solutions.
This it says will require the provision of 160 GW of new capacity, 130 million new on-grid connections, 75 million new off-grid connections and provision of 150 million households with access to clean cooking solutions.
This shows that there are abundant prospects and financing opportunities for businesses in this sector.
How to tap into the abundant opportunity in Africa’s energy industry
From the foregoing, looking into the provision of services in the area of renewable energy is the way to go for startups across Africa.
With the global drive for countries to look away from nonrenewable and dirty energy sources which include oil, gas, and coal since they are only available in limited amounts, many are looking to transition into the use of renewable energy.
As such on the energy mix list, there is a drive for more investment in renewable and clean energy sources such as wind and solar.
The use cases are numerous; households, businesses, factories all need this provision and startups that seek to target users within this demography already have their path laid out for them.
As it stands, solar is more favoured, possibly because of its lower cost for setup. Additionally, Africa has an abundant stretch of sunlight all year round the year which makes this a great resource to be maximised.
There is a need for more investment and off-grid energy service providers across the African continent. The resources as noted, are in abundance here and it’s almost a shame that Africans are the ones lagging behind in the exploitation of this energy source.
Countries like China and the United States currently lead the pack of countries making use of renewable energy with the equivalent of 349.2 million tonnes of oil in renewable energy, while the U.S. consumed 143 million tonnes.
With this and the focus of pan-African agencies like the AfDB announcing targeted support in this regard, there is no better time to invest in the industry.
The efforts of renewable energy startups such as Arnegy and Wisolar is commendable as they are leading the charge to provide more Africans with off-grid energy.
Startups with this focus looking for financing can approach the AfDB through its multi-donor Special Fund, Sustainable Energy for Africa (SEFA), through which financing is provided for private sector investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency.
