I got my first motorcycle when I was 16 and started to ride the streets of Nairobi.  Fortunately, we had fewer cars on the road back in the early ‘90s. I started to understand the way to see and think when dealing with the odd assortment of experiences you face on Kenyan streets.  Today, I still ride my piki piki (“motorcycle” in Kiswahili) to work each day, and I’ve also been fortunate enough to take it to some far flung parts of the continent. During my daily commute, I started thinking about the business lessons I’ve learned from riding my motorcycle in Nairobi.  Each week, I talk to the 100-person strong BRCK team and decided I wanted to share these lessons with them. Here they are.

1. When going at speed, focus. Filter out everything else.

This, like many of the lessons, are not just for Nairobi rides but for everyone who is on a bike.  The first point here is to stay hyper-focused, and not let your mind wander.  The second is to learn to “see” everything so that you have situational awareness, but only watch what’s important.  

The business analogy is the same. When we’re really hitting our stride, or when things are moving faster than we can control (hello Coronavirus), then it’s incredibly important for me to know what I’m focusing on and not to try to do everything.  The same holds true for every person in the company; have a tight understanding of what you need to spend your time on so that we don’t waste energy, resources, and time on things that aren’t going to move the needle for the business. 

2. Deal with what you have, not what you wish you had.

I remember riding down one of Nairobi’s new bypasses – two lanes each way, with a divider in the middle – going around a long corner and finding a car driving the wrong way down the road directly towards me.  This isn’t abnormal. Shoot, I’ve got stories of U-turns on three-lane highways, pedestrians doing odd things, cows suddenly appearing (or camels, or sheep, or goats – you get the idea).  It’s part of what you have to learn to deal with. 

Running a company is much the same.  You’re pleasantly building your platform, doing sales or marketing, talking to investors, creating a solution for your primary user, and then something happens that you’re not expecting. 

I happened to be in San Francisco when the US banned travel from Europe. I was on my way to another tech CEO’s house for dinner.  When I arrived, we looked at each other and stated that raising capital just got 100% harder than it had been just a few minutes before.  You still have to find the capital to grow your company, but now you have to do it in a different way.  The truck hurtling down the road in the opposite direction just waylaid your plans. You either bail and find yourself in a ditch by the side of the road, or you swerve and find a new path, madly holding on to the handlebars and keeping the bike upright. 

3. It’s not about speed, but efficiency.

When people see you riding a motorcycle in Nairobi they think you’re driving fast. Sometimes you do when on the big highways, but mostly you’re just putt-putting along in first gear as everyone else is stuck in standstill traffic.  Riding a motorcycle in Kenya isn’t about speed, that’s what gets you in trouble (revisit my last point to see why), it’s about efficiency of consistent movement.  When everyone else is stopped, I can keep going.  My commute each day in a car would be approximately one hour each way, on a motorcycle it’s 20 minutes. 

There are times running a company where you are in a speed moment. We’ll find an opportunity with our customers that we need to act on now to clinch a win.  That’s great, and when those happen we have to sprint to get there.  No company can survive doing that all the time, though. So instead, we design for efficiency – for making sure we have constant forward movement and not being bothered that we can’t go fast all of the time. 

I think about how we rolled out our Moja Network across Kenya’s public transportation system over the last two years.  The first few months, when things were on a tight deadline and we were dealing with all kinds of issues, it was an all-hands-on-deck sprint.  Then we were able to gear down, continue growing the network, put in standard operating procedures, and build processes.  This network team today does an amazing job of being efficient and effective without tiring themselves out in a constant speed battle.   

4. Don’t get comfortable.

I remember jumping onto my motorcycle, and taking a friend for a lift down Ngong Road just outside my office.  One lane wasn’t moving at all, and the other oncoming lane was completely empty (back when it was just two single lanes).  As we’re moving along slowly passing a bus, a guy blindly walks out in front of the bus directly into our path.  I slam the breaks and swerve away from him.  He double-takes, his eyes get as big as saucers, and he jumps forward…!  By this time I’m riding forward up onto my tank as I hit the brakes hard, and my passenger is shoving me forward too. The pedestrian smacks my handlebars and my wheel goes sideways – the bike leans over and drops (my passenger and I were on our feet and didn’t go down with it) – then the pedestrian leaps up and sprints away.  Nothing broken on the bike or person, but we’d just gone from comfortable to shock in about two seconds.

At BRCK we created the Kio Kit, which I still think is the best and most holistic solution for bringing digital education to places that have never had it.  It was truly innovative and we were happy and comfortable with just how good it was.  While we basked in that, we crashed into the slow turnaround time for decisions in the education sector.  We had this great product, but the sales funnel was so long, and the cost of holding inventory was so high, that we just couldn’t make it work.  After two years of pushing it, and getting independent longitudinal studies of how it improved learning outcomes, we had to put the Kio Kit aside and focus on something else. 

5. You can’t complain about the rain.

This is a short and simple one.  If you buy a motorcycle, you know it will rain and you’ll get wet.  Don’t buy a motorcycle and then complain when it rains, like it’s some great surprise to you. 

In business we know there are going to be things that are uncomfortable to deal with.  You’ll have to fire people.  A new feature won’t quite do what you thought it would do.  A partner lets you down, or a company you relied on just isn’t there any longer.  This is business, this is entrepreneurship.  Don’t complain about it, you know it will happen. Instead, get to work and find a way to deal with it.  However, like a motorcycle in the rain, you can plan.  Get insurance, save cash for that rainy day – in other words, carry your company’s equivalent of a rain jacket. 

These lessons from riding a motorcycle often came to mind during my commute. I kept forgetting them by the time I reached my destination, so I  soon found myself pulling over onto the side of the road to scribble them down. As an innovator and an entrepreneur, things can feel uncertain even in the most ordinary seasons. It’s important to make sure we remember what we’ve learned along the way. 

I love the “moonshot” ideology, a type of thinking that aims to achieve something that is generally believed to be impossible.  I first came across this concept with Google X and their way of thinking about hard problems. Who wouldn’t get inspired by solving a massive challenge using next generation technology? Especially when it’s backed with enough money to see if it will actually work. Of all the projects, I love Loon the most – connectivity by high altitude balloons that use wind patterns intelligently.  It’s just that right mix of insanity and brilliance that epitomizes solving a massive problem by trying something incredibly lateral.

Like many others, I too am driven to use my time on this earth to solve big problems. My mixture of background and experience ideally suits me to do technology work in Africa, and my personality means I end up building new things, new companies, instead of working for others. By the nature of those three things (entrepreneurship + tech + Africa), I tend to be resource constrained when it comes to moonshots. Instead, along with great partners and co-founders, I’ve built organizations that utilize crowd sourcing, foster innovation grounded in the African context, provide funds to tech startups, and create space to collaboratively build and rapidly prototype new technology.

My most recent endeavor has been building BRCK, which is 6 years old, trying to solve for how to create a real onramp to the internet for people who can’t pay for it.

Moonshots and Groundshots

As I look at this odd mixture of companies, I realize that, while I’m a moonshot thinker, I’m a groundshot operator.  I’m trying to solve big problems that impact many people across the world using the last generation’s technology in different ways, and coming up with a new pattern or model for everyone to benefit. In short, I don’t have the resources to build a Loon or StarLink, but what I can do is figure out how to make something that meets ordinary people where they are with what they have, and not just for profit, but also to make the world a slightly better place.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we’re dealing with the current coronavirus pandemic. Google’s Loon was first-level approved to work in Kenya last year, and then just this week was given a final green light by the Kenyan government to operate. This is great news, and I’m excited that we have four of their balloons sitting over Kenya right now. I’m also concerned that it’s only going to solve part of the problem.

You see, connectivity is a mixture of signal and devices, AND affordability. Loon solves for the difficulty of signal in rural Africa, where building mobile phone towers has too low of an ROI for the mobile operators to be interested. Devices are getting cheap enough that we’re seeing a deep density of (low-end) smartphones across many countries. However, affordability is a BIG hairy problem, made only bigger as the economic hits start coming during and after this pandemic.

Loon uses the LTE spectrum of Kenya’s Telkom operator, so anyone who has the Telkom SIM card can receive that signal from the balloon and be connected. The problem is that you have to pay the data rates that Telkom charges, which isn’t much by middle-class standards, but most rural people aren’t middle class and their wallets are much more rigid.

That’s the problem we started working to solve in a little room beneath the iHub back in 2014. “How do you get everyone in Africa online if they can’t pay?”

The answer was a bit humbling for us techies to swallow, but it turned out that the business model was as important as the technology – maybe more so. We started grinding on this problem, which culminated in our Moja platform, now operating in Kenya and Rwanda. So far, it has brought 2 million users online for free. The answer was found in us saying, “What if the internet becomes free for consumers everywhere? The internet isn’t free to deliver, so what is the business model for that?” The mental model we were left with meant we had to find other parties to pay, which led us down the B-to-B-to-C model that we currently use and are finding quite successful.

So… What is a Groundshot Then?

I think it’s the glue that connects the amazing wizardry of the moonshot with the grounded business models and older technology found in most people’s pockets.

We’re rapidly expanding our Moja network, and I’m glad to work with our backhaul partners in terrestrial fibre internet and mobile operators. But I’m equally excited to take these moonshots like Loon or StarLink and connect them to real people on the ground in Africa. With a ground game like ours, and air support like theirs, it’s a magical combination.

The world shifted last week, and a new reality sits in front of us. We always paid lip-service to how important the internet was when everything was normal. We’ve all just realized it’s absolutely critical when things go upside down at a global level.

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
– Lenin

What we’re seeing with the onset of COVID-19 and the tightening of borders, the closing of schools, and the social distancing that’s being forced upon us is that there is a massive uptick in demand for connectivity. Even in richer countries, the response leaves a digital gap, where those who have it are able to keep working, learning, and entertaining themselves, while those who don’t are left behind. In poorer countries, it gets worse.

This is our new reality. It won’t be a short-lived one, and the effects across our society set a generational mark, just as 9/11 did in America, the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain coming down in Europe and the bombing of Hiroshima in Japan. But this time we’re all feeling it at the same time. And the global economic downturn and lingering commercial malaise will last long enough to mar my daughters’ generation with a very different future than they thought they had even one week ago.

As I was watching the servers in China groan under the weight of students learning and parents working from home, I had a realization that those in businesses such as connectivity, cloud services, telemedicine, streaming entertainment, and gaming were about to get a lot busier. This is true, and it’s a good chance for both organizations and governments around the world to step forward on setting the basic foundations of the internet – the infrastructure we need to be online.

You can’t be a 21st Century economy without power and connectivity. This is more true today than it was even one week ago. More business, more education, more news, more entertainment will be online than ever before. If your country has even a small percentage of its population offline due to lack of affordability or access to signal, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. But this is a solvable problem and one that isn’t nearly as expensive as it was a few years ago. More importantly, investing in this now is not nearly as expensive as being left behind economically because you don’t support and subsidize it today.

The larger the digital divide in your country, the more you’ll be left behind. If you don’t have a strong foundation of data connectivity, then the pillars of eGovernment services, business opportunities, education options, healthcare solutions, entertainment industry, and many more won’t reach their potential. Not in-country, and definitely not internationally.

This then is one of the great challenges of our time: connecting everyone everywhere, affordably.

I’m excited about what we’ve been doing at BRCK with the Moja network and platform, cracking the problem of affordable public WiFi that has brought 2 million East Africans online for free, and thinking through the hard business model problems that make it work — for consumers and for businesses. We think that what we have is something special and that it needs to rapidly scale. We can drastically change the fabric of a country, person by person and business by business, as we grow.

However, it’s not enough.

• We also need more terrestrial fibre options for the far greater load of heavy internet traffic and the larger video streaming services that are being used.
• We need more creativity and long-term thinking by regulators around spectrum licensing so that both satellite signals and data signals can be deployed at a cost that is open to new, smaller companies that offer more unconventional solutions than the oligopolies made of mobile operators and ISPs that wall off the space for innovation.
• We need governments and bi-lateral institutions, through funding, to catalyze incredibly rapid deployment of more undersea, terrestrial and satellite backhaul.

We often hear that in great challenges lie great opportunities. That has never been more true than today. Coronavirus is a global kick in the rear, reminding us that even if we’re not all yet connected online, we are still connected as humans. The chaos of the past few weeks and months lays bare the real dangers of the digital divide, yet it also uncovers an important opportunity and the promise of greatness that stand before us if we meet it head-on.

I’m committed to building this new future. Let’s do it together.

Kilimanjaro rises through the cotton clouds, spread like a skirt around it. I don’t often get this view as most of my flights go West or North from Nairobi. This time I do, though, as I head to South Africa for the annual trek to AfricaCom, that gathering of all things established telecom and a spark of new entrants and startups in the market.

It was 8 years ago, after this very same AfricaCom event in 2011, as I was leaving Cape Town to head back to Nairobi, that I had a conversation that would change the trajectory of my life. Henk Kleynhans was a friend of mine in the startup world of South Africa. He had a company called SkyRove that had created software to sit on top of routers that would allow hotels, cafes, and restaurants to get their customers online. On the flight home that evening, I was sitting on the aeroplane and I couldn’t stop thinking of a specific problem: why were we using routers and modems not designed for our African context? I started to wonder if we could build something better.

What I sketched out that day was a brick-sized and shaped form, with serious battery power and redundant SIM for when the ethernet went down. It was simple, and I called it BRCK.

Eight years later and I’m back here in Cape Town, having built and grown that company in Kenya. We started off building hardware, and we still do, but now we do a lot more than that.

Two years ago we launched Moja WiFi, which sits in public spaces and on thousands of buses and vans across Kenya and Rwanda’s transportation sector. Moja WiFi is free to the public; they don’t pay anything to be online. We monetize instead with our business customers across these markets. We’ve grown to 7 million sessions each month and we’re now one of the largest public WiFi providers in Africa.

This year I’m going to AfricaCom with a bit more excitement than normal, since we’ve been quietly working to open up the South African market for a few months. This week I get to tell everyone that we’re entering the country with our free public Moja WiFi service, which has transformed the East African market with nearly 3,000 locations across public spaces and buses.

Moja differs from other public WiFi as it is free for the consumer. They don’t need to pay anything to get online or to access premium content. While most just try to charge less for their service, at BRCK we realized that there just wasn’t the ability for the majority of smartphone owners in Africa to pay at all. The uniqueness of Moja is found in a business model that monetized people’s abundance of time, and subsidizes that internet connection with our business customers connecting to our user with some form of digital work.

South Africa is interesting to me as it has a wide swath of smartphone users, many who can’t afford data bundles, and that is mixed with a more mature business market than is found in any other African country. We’re already inking deals with some great FMCG, bank, and insurance companies – and we’re also interested in onboarding more of the top-level content creators from this hotbed of talent.

With Moja I think we’ve finally found a way to connect Africans to the internet, AND a way to monetize Africa’s content creators.

Join us!

BRCK has long been on a mission to create an onramp to the internet for people who can’t afford it regularly.  To this end, we built the SupaBRCK that runs the Moja Network, and then started expanding that service in Kenya and Rwanda.  Moja is about getting everyone online, even if you can’t afford it, by having businesses buy services from us (content caching, app downloads, surveys, ads), and subsidizing that usage.

The Moja Network has been growing quickly.  In January, we passed 300,000 unique monthly users and 3.7m sessions per month.  This means we’re not only increasing traction with more users, but that our users are returning to the platform 12x per month.  With 1,500 mobile nodes in buses and matatus across Nairobi and Kigali, the Moja Network is one of the largest public WiFi providers in the region.

With this rapid growth in the transportation space, we’ve been getting a lot of demand from our users to expand into fixed locations as well.  Near the end of the year we entered into discussions with the leadership team of Surf, the largest fixed public WiFi network in Kenya by number of locations (1,200).  The conversations about doing an acquisition of their network and IP went well, and we were able to find a way to put those assets under the BRCK umbrella.  
 

This acquisition continues the velocity of BRCK’s public WiFi user growth, bringing us close to 500k monthly active unique users, and putting us over 5m sessions per month.  This makes the Moja Network the largest public WiFi network in East Africa, and second largest on the continent.

One of the great advantages that we were looking for was an ability to have a fixed WiFi strategy to add to our transportation and edge compute model.  With the Surf acquisition, BRCK is now able to take off-the-shelf routers, partner with local ISPs, and roll out network faster into fiber-connected locations.  All of this will run the Moja platform, so there is a seamless user experience between public locations and public transportation.

(Part 1 here)

I’ve argued before, alongside others, that the main inhibitor of ubiquitous and perpetual internet connectivity at a global level isn’t a technology problem, it’s a business model problem. Mostly the tech exists to put the signal everywhere. What we overlook when we say this is, that while that is true, it’s unsavory to point out that many of “those users” are not valuable – that the population covered won’t make a good return on business investment. So, even if you covered the initial cost of the equipment outlay in those areas with subsidized government funds, without a proper business model to support the ongoing operations of running the network, then the ROI would be weak and maybe even negative.

A low cost tower set up in rural Africa

The unspoken technology issue

Many of the incumbent ISPs and mobile operators have sunk too many resources into legacy technology, and then subsequently outsourced their technical capacity and platform knowledge to foreign firms. This leaves them in an unfavorable position when it comes to new technology that would decrease the cost of rollout by up to 90%, or of taking advantage of how software is changing the way networks work. Due to heavy GSM investment, the industry thinks it best to switch those from 2G/EDGE to 3G. This misses the mark, though. It’s iterative change driven by sunk costs, ignoring the fact that we’re moving to a data-only network world. GSM is a dead man walking. IP networks are the future.

It’s not just me saying this. Two years ago Deloitte was saying,

“African MNOs should create business models around smartphone users and brace for the rise of the data exclusives and data centric phone users.”

This then provides the opportunity. This is the time to bring new networks without legacy business or technology paradigms, and the ability to apply web-scale economics to the network itself, backstopped by new open software stacks and business models that don’t rely solely on end-user payment.

Fortunately, at BRCK we’ve been able to find great investors and strategic partners who see this bigger picture and understand the investments needed to make change happen in this connectivity industry of ours. BRCK, alongside some other firms, are on the forefront of changes happening across all types of data pipes, at the infrastructure level all the way through to the retail side – for both people and things. And as we start running the numbers it becomes increasingly clear just how big of an opportunity this actually represents. It only helps that many incumbents are stuck in aged technology stacks and legacy business models, so the window for positive change is here and profits are substantial.

East Africa Railways train

A new railroad

I tend to think of what we do in the connectivity space as similar to our forebearers building railroads, making it easier, faster, and more efficient to move data and connect far-flung parts of the world. The 1990s brought us the rebels in the form of scrappy upstart mobile operators and ISPs, they were real cowboys and renegades then! Inspiring leaders, courageously trying everything from pre-paid credit models in Africa, to thinking of mobile credit as cash, to digging the first fibre cables into the hard parts of the continent. Regrettably, these cowboys have handed the reins over to our modern day robber barons, sitting fat and happy on their oligopolies (or monopolies), and making damn sure that no one else has a chance to build something better if they can help it.

I like to think that at BRCK we are building the new connectivity railroads. The tip of the spear for us is unlicensed spectrum, where we take advantage of the ability to roll out public WiFi hotspots without much in the way of regulatory or political hurdles. We layer this with a free consumer business model, so that anyone who can get that signal can connect and take advantage of the whole internet. The underlying economics of the Moja platform are built around the idea of a digital economy. Businesses create engagement tasks that users can complete to earn value within the system. Users then spend their value on faster connectivity, premium content, or additional services. The flow of value into and out of the Moja platform creates the monetary value necessary to profitably run the network.

This is just the BRCK model, though, and as I sit on some global boards and in meetings, I hear of the others trying their new models as well. New technology stacks, driven primarily by open source software (and some key open source hardware plays), are a big part of the significant decrease in the cost profile (both CapEx and OpEx). But again, the business models… this is where we see the real changes coming and I’m excited to have a front row seat.

As these new railroads are built, by us and others, there lies such great opportunity for economic growth, social development, and business profit.

As with most CEOs of younger companies, I find myself on the investment raising treadmill. Doing so for a company focused on internet connectivity in frontier markets provides an extra layer of complexity, since it’s not as sexy of a proposition as a new app for ecommerce, agtech, fintech, etc might be. Those are easier to invest in since you’re playing with a world of software, not any hardware or infrastructure to muddy your hands with. Unfortunately, in my BRCK world, we have to deal with atoms, not just bits and bytes (though we do those too). Which is why many of my conversations find me explaining why connectivity is critical – thus this post.

What I find interesting is that everyone wants to benefit from a basic underlying availability of connectivity, but few understand what it is or why it is so important. If you’re with me at a public event, I’ll eventually spout off something along the lines of, “you can’t have a 21st century economy without power and connectivity.” This is my simplified way of stating that for any industry to be meaningful on the world stage (or even their own country stage), they need the ability to move data. If power and connectivity are the foundation, then the aforementioned ecommerce, agtech, fintech, and others are all pillars that stand on that foundation.

Economic growth

I’ve written before on how smartphone penetration has reached critical mass and proceeds on a noteworthy trajectory across Africa and other frontier markets. Africa, coming from a largely 2g/Edge based on old legacy GSM technology will have some of the highest growth rates in mobile data subscriptions globally, driven by chat apps and mobile video, as we transition to data-only networks. In 2022, there will be eleven times more mobile data traffic in Central and Eastern Europe and Middle East and Africa (Ericsson 2017).

Mobile subscriptions (global)

• 250M smartphone subscribers in 2016
• 770M by 2022 (Y-o-Y growth of 30%) (Ericsson 2017)
• Over half of mobile phone shipments into Africa in 2016 were smartphones (Deloitte 2017)

All of this means that there are millions of new customers available for new, smart, and data-intensive financial products, agricultural services, marketplaces, logistics, and the list goes on. This is why we’re seeing the rise and rise of startups in these spaces, as well there should be.

What we’re not paying attention to is this: the market is still smaller than it could be.

Imagine that you’re finding amazing market traction with your new mobile lending app, or with your logistics system, or with your online goods marketplace. Imagine that you’re doing well. However, did you know that you’re only reaching 20% of the people who own smartphones in the country? Oh, right, that’s the piece that’s surprising! You could be doing even more, growing faster, and capturing more market share if only the other 80% of smartphone owners in your market could afford the costs of getting online regularly to use your service.

This is where BRCK is stepping in with our Moja platform (free to consumer internet). You’ll benefit greatly from our growth. We’ll benefit greatly from your growth.

Social development

Even though I’m largely driven by the economic reasoning for connectivity alone, since I believe that the best way for us to make significant change in Africa is to grow wealth for everyday Africans, there is a strong social argument for widespread and affordable connectivity as well.

Connecting an additional 2.5 billion people to the internet would add 2 trillion dollars per year to global GDP and create 140 million jobs.

• It enables improvements in health (Deloitte 2014)
• Unlocks universal education (Deloitte 2014)
• Strengthens civil society through public services, social cohesion, and digital inclusion (Deloitte 2014)

It turns out that if we connect people to the largest, greatest network of knowledge and information in the the world, then a lot of great social benefits are realized across a number of important areas. It’s hard to argue against more jobs, better education, better healthcare, more informed citizens, and a stronger civil society in any country.

Connectivity is the foundation

Like everyone else not involved in the plumbing and distribution of the internet, I used to think of this only academically. It’s easy enough to understand and think through intellectually. However, I found that in living it, in dealing with the practicalities of the internet, in coming to know the end-user, I began to appreciate just how important connectivity is. Building a new app or service can have big effects, changing the affordability equation for connectivity, and you send a shockwave reaching everyone, everywhere.

It was 5 years ago that we created BRCK as a company, and I’ve had the great joy of being on a journey with some fantastic people, including the three here with me in this picture (Reg Orton, Emmanuel Kala, and Philip Walton).

We had an idea of what we were getting into back in October 2013, but none of us were sure where it would actually take us. All we knew then was that the barriers to creating hardware had dropped enough for us to get into it, that there was a problem in the internet connectivity space in Africa (and other frontier markets), and that we had the right mixture of skills, naiveté, and optimism to figure it out. Over the next 12 months we grew to a team of 10 that had this the desire to meet a big challenge and believed we could do hard things. As I write this, 8 of those 10 are still at BRCK.

In the intervening years we’ve built three full products and taken them to market (BRCK v1, Kio Kit, SupaBRCK), and a fourth (PicoBRCK) that is still in R&D. That alone is quite an accomplishment. I hadn’t known back in 2011, when the idea for creating a device was first hatched, just what the life cycle of building a hardware+software product would be. I do remember having a conversation with an old friend, Robert Fabricant, that I thought we should be done with the first one in about a year. He laughed and said it would be at least 2-3 years. He was mostly right.

[foogallery id=”4816″]

I’ve since learned that it takes approximately 18 months for a product to go through the concept, design, testing, productization, and first samples stages. Then it typically takes us another nine months for iterations and small fixes on hardware to happen, while that same time is spent concurrently hardening up the software side of things. For example, our most recent SupaBRCK took approximately almost two years from conception to product, and then another six months of continued fixes/changes to the low-level software and the hardware, before it worked well consistently.

Asking the Right Question

You would often hear us saying, “Why do we use hardware designed for London or New York, when we live in Nairobi or New Delhi?” as a way to frame the problem we thought we were solving. It was only in late December 2014, after we had shipped the BRCK v1 to 50+ countries, that we realized we were only partially on the right track.

It turns out the problem isn’t in making the best hardware for connectivity in difficult environments. Sure, that’s part of the equation – making sure that you have the right tools for people to connect to the internet. But the bigger question involves people. Who is connecting to the internet and who isn’t? If, after many years of building BRCK, we had built the best, most rugged and reliable solution for internet connectivity, that would be something we could pat each other on our backs for. However, if the problem instead was “How do we get the rest of Africa online?”, and we were able to solve that problem, then that was a legacy we’d be proud to tell our children about one day.

Sitting in our tiny office around Christmas 2014, we started thinking hard about this bigger issue and began doing deeper research into the problems of this loosely defined “connectivity” space. We started doing some user experience research, man on the street interviews, to figure out what the pain points were for people in Kenya.

Connectivity can generally be broken into two buckets:
First, accessibility – can I connect my device to a nearby signal?
Second, affordability – can I afford that connection?

The results were quite telling, it was definitely about affordability.

For everyone who’s not deep in African tech, let me lay out some interesting numbers for you. Accessibility in most of the emerging markets has been moving rapidly since the mid-2000s when we started to get the undersea cables coming into the continent. These cables then went inland and started a rapid increase in available internet connections and wholesale internet costs decreased rapidly. Since 2008, we’ve had more than one million kilometers of cable dug across the continent, and we have over 240,000 cell phone towers. Concurrently, the mobile device prices continued to drop globally, and by 2016 we started to have more smartphones imported into Africa than non-smartphones.

Reaching deeper into the market research, we started to study this affordability problem.

“A4AI found that the average price of 1GB prepaid mobile broadband, when expressed as a % of average per capita Gross National Income (GNI), varied between 0.84% in North America and 17.49% in Africa.”

It turns out that in almost every country in Africa, there is a consistent ratio among all the smartphone owners in a country: 20% could afford to pay for the internet regularly, and an incredible 80% couldn’t.

Interestingly, when we looked at who else was working in this connectivity space, almost everyone was focused on accessibility, not affordability. Those who were focused on affordability thought that just making the price cheaper was enough. What we’ve seen is that if you just make “less expensive” subscription WiFi (as most do), then you’ll capture another 10% of the market. And while that can make a profitable enterprise, it still leaves 70% of the market unaddressed.

This last blue ocean of internet users in Africa, as well as Asia and Latin America, is still largely ignored. Those who do have the resources to go after it tend to try with iterative approaches in both business models around affordability, and only marginal creativeness in solving for technology accessibility.

Moja Means ONE

It’s taken us 5 years, going through multiple iterations of new tech, building new hardware, and creating new software stacks that go from the firmware up to the cloud. We’ve been mostly quiet for the past year as we put our heads down and tried to take a new platform to market. Where are we now?

“Moja” means “one” in Swahili, and it was the brand name that we chose to call the software platform that we would build on top of the BRCK hardware. While Moja means one, “pamoja” means “together” or “oneness”, and that was the root we were looking for. To us, Moja is the internet for everyone.

We started by trying to make it work on the BRCK v1, but that was a bit like trying to make a sedan do a job built for a lorry (truck) – it wasn’t powerful enough. The SupaBRCK was envisioned as the hardware we could leverage that would allow us to not just have enough of a powerful and enterprise-level router, but a tool that was actually a highly ruggedized micro-data center. With this, we could host content on each device, as well as get people connected to the internet. Another way to think about the accessibility side of what we do is that we have a new model for how a distributed CDN works on a nation-scale, moving away from the centralized model that the rest of the world uses. In environments like Kenya, we can’t continue to just copy and paste models from more developed infrastructure markets, we have to think of new ways to deal with how the undergirding system actually works and operates.

We give the internet away for free to consumers. How does that work if we all know that the internet isn’t free? After all, someone always pays.

The business model is an indirect one. We charge businesses for some form of digital engagement on our Moja platform (app downloads, surveys, or content caching), and the free internet to our consumers is a by-product of this b2b business model. Like everyone else, we thought we could do it with advertising at first. But we realized that our unique hardware capabilities allowed us some other options, since advertising is a poor option for all but a few of the biggest global tech platforms.

Today we’ve deployed 850 of the SupaBRCK’s running our Moja software into public transportation (buses and matatus) in Kenya and Rwanda. They’ve been quite successful with almost 1/4 million unique users monthly in just the first three months. We have both a tested and working technology platform, as well as product market fit. With unit economics that make sense, a growing user base, and a business model that works, we’re excited for the growth phase of the business. This next step means going nation-scale in each of these countries, and also determining our next market to enter.

It’s important that ordinary people across Africa and other frontier markets can stop thinking about the costs of the internet and don’t have to turn off their mobile internet on the smartphones that they already have in their pockets.

Once they know they can afford it, the way they use the internet changes dramatically. An internet like this is feasible today, and it’s a cheaper, faster, more distributed, and resilient one. It’s also being built from the ground up in Africa, where we’re close to both the technology and human problems, and have a better chance of building the right thing.

Thoughts and Lessons Over 5 Years

First, make sure it’s a big enough problem.
If you’re going to spend 5+ years of your life on something, make sure it’s something that matters. At BRCK we are creating the onramp to the internet for anyone to connect to the internet, and a distribution platform for organizations trying to reach them. If we succeed we only succeed at scale, which by its nature means that we’ve done something big and that it has made a large impact on people.

Second, figure out what to focus on.
When you start out it’s difficult to determine product market fit. We started with a wide funnel of possibilities for our technology, industries that we could target and consumer plays. Over time, we were able to narrow down what could work, and what we could actually do, to the point where we focused on this big “connecting people” problem. We did detour into education with our Kio Kit, which we still think is one of the best (if not the best) holistic solutions for emerging market schools – after all, it’s in places across Africa, as well as the Pacific Islands and as far as Mexico. However, it proved to be too costly for our bottom line to hold inventory, sales cycles are too long, and it was largely a product sale. When we realized that, we started to focus most of our efforts on the bigger underlying issue across all of the markets, which was affordable connectivity and our Moja platform.

Third, persistence trumps skill.
Building hardware is hard. It’s even harder doing it in Africa. The upside, however, is that you’re both closer to the problem and that, if you succeed in figuring it out, you have a good head start on everyone else. The process takes time, costs money, and there are people and organizations who don’t want you to succeed. It always takes longer than you want to get software working properly, or hardware built and reliable. We’ve often been faced by that same problem that plagues all venture backed companies in Africa, in that you have to do a lot of education to investors to even raise the capital, and then when you do, you get charged a premium for perceived risk. Partner organizations take resources and time to work with, and they don’t always come through on their promises. All of these things (and more) mean that the best ideas don’t always win in the market, because it’s those that push the hardest and longest that win.

Fourth, it’s the people you do it with.
If you’re going to be on a journey that takes a great deal of time, with intense pressure, and where success is not guaranteed, then you had better do it with people that you can trust, who you can work with, and it helps if you like them too. Throughout my work career I’ve been more fortunate than most (whether at Ushahidi, iHub, or BRCK), and this time is no exception. I get to work with a host of wonderful people; not just smart and talented, but also genuinely good human beings. It makes work a joyful challenge, not an exhausting chore.

So, to those back in the day who believed we could do this when it was just a sketch in my notebook, thank you Shuler, Kobia, Nat, and Juliana (and the rest of the team at Ushahidi). To our investors who have joined us in this dream of connecting and doing hard things, you’ve continued to step up and that has made this possible. Thank you.

To Jeff, Janet, Birir, Kurt, Barre, and Oira, thank you for sticking it out for all these years and stepping up to more leadership challenges as we’ve evolved. To Philip, Reg, and Kala, I want to thank you for making the impossible happen, time and again, each for more than 5+ years.

I was bumping along a waterlogged dirt road on the island of Pemba a couple weeks ago, trying to find my way to a lighthouse where the BRCK team was setting up a weather station. I stopped to check my map, and had a solid 3g signal I could use to check my map. Looking around I realized that all the houses in this section were wired up with electricity too. It turns out, though Pemba (a small island north of Zanzibar off of the Kenya/Tanzania coast) is a bit behind economically and it has that island slowness to it, that they meet the basic infrastructural requirements for a 21st century economy.

No matter where I’ve traveled, this holds true. Whether in the city edges in Nairobi or Lusaka, or the rural areas across Africa or Asia. If there is power, if there is connectivity, then people will find a way to further their lives in enterprising ways. And that word enterprising is important, because their ingenuity and drive are focused on finding a way to make money. For school fees, for food and living, for their future.

A Foundation of Power and Connectivity

Power and connectivity are the two foundational elements of a 21st century economy upon which all of the other pillars sit. Whether you’re talking about commerce or education, entertainment or logistics, you’re not going to play in the global economy unless you have access to reliable energy and internet.

It used to be that the way a country developed to a point where they could have nice roads and comfortable homes for the middle class came by building a low-cost manufacturing sector (witness the Asian tigers.)

Yet, today the world has turned.

Although manufacturing will always play a meaningful role in a country, you can now have far greater gains on the world’s economic stage for lower costs if you invest in digital communications and transactions.

McKinsey released a fascinating report on “digital globalization” where they show that increasing flows of data and information now generate more economic value than the global trade in goods.

Stop and think about that for a moment.

They’re saying that an industry that didn’t exist 15 years ago can now bring in more value to a country’s Gross Domestic Product than the centuries-old trade in goods.

And in Africa, here’s the reason this is a big problem. While the continent is moving forward, the internet is more available and devices for accessing it are getting less expensive, we’re still far behind. We’re simply not moving fast enough or staying close enough to the rest of the world. And that has profound consequences.

And there is only one investment needed: Digital infrastructure. This is the undersea cables, the terrestrial cables, the internet exchange points and locally stored content.

Regular commerce isn’t possible without physical infrastructure like roads, nor is ecommerce possible without digital infrastructure which gives us accessible internet.

In the energy space, smart friends of ours like Mkopa, SteamaCo and SolarNow (and many others) are working on ways to make power affordable. Truth be told, there has been a lot more money put to work in that space than on connecting people to the internet. What’s interesting is that there are now millions of Dollars spent each year on tech startups across Africa which rely on connectivity, but very few investment dollars being put to work on the connectivity frontier itself. There are some though, and that’s why companies like BRCK exist.

Whether in Pemba or Nairobi the face of Africa is changing, and power and connectivity are the reasons why. While I might ride on a bad dirt road to get somewhere, I know that if private and public organizations both focus on increased power and connectivity, we will get there.

This last week I was part of a BRCK expedition team that traveled from Nairobi through the Chyulu Hills, and oversea to the small island of Pemba in the northern part of Zanzibar. On the way, we installed some of our equipment, including:

• A point-to-point link running Moja WiFi, providing free internet access for Kenya Wildlife Services rangers who protect the rhino population.
• A weather station at a lighthouse on Pemba island, running off of our PicoBRCK device.
• A special SupaBRCK running Moja, educational content in a school on Kokota island, as well as training and use of the Kio Kit at the same location.
• A SupaBRCK Moja installed at the port of Shimoni in a store near the market.

One thing I’ve learned on BRCK expeditions is that there is no “normal” experience from one to the next. This one we had to be used to water everywhere, we lost or broke two phones and severely damaged a third, all vehicles behaved themselves (miracle!), and we had the Good All Over team with us that made it feel like a reality TV show.

We do these expeditions for two primary reasons: to have a fun adventure as a team, and to test our products far out in the field.

We do have a lot of fun, you can see that in the Instagram, Twitter, and blog posts. However, a requirement is that they also be challenging, providing a certain amount of physical and mental difficulty. We plan them this way for us to test ourselves, strengthen our internal team bonds, and stress out our equipment. It works, so we keep doing it year after year.

Creative solutions come from time with users

While we were out on this trip, there was a good Economist article published that references BRCK and what we’re doing. It’s important to remember that so few companies are actually out in the field trying to find solutions for people who aren’t financially wealthy. Logically this makes sense. Unless you’re a development company or a charity organization, you have to make money and if the numbers don’t work, then they don’t work.

The ITU calculates that in poor countries the average cost in 2016 of the smallest mobile-internet package was equal to 14% of the average national income per person, putting it out of most people’s reach.

One of the benefits of the BRCK leadership team playing such a direct role in these expeditions is that we are installing, testing, fixing, and using the equipment right alongside the users of it. We’re doing the messy work, but also having to explain how our platform works to the people we’re leaving it with. This is what leads us to creative solutions for both the technical and business problems that we find. It could be a better way to waterproof our gear, or it comes in a deeper understanding of how important it is to focus on our model of FREE public WiFi as we realize that these people will not be able to pay.

Just because the companies that came before us were unable to find a way to serve the needs of the people with small incomes doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way forward. It just means that we need to be more creative. Nothing builds creativity like sweating over a connection in rural Africa with your colleagues and the users breathing down your neck. 😉