What does it mean to innovate? Wiza Jalakasi: Head of Global BD and Strategy

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. Today I interviewed Wisa Jalakasi. Wiza has a very interesting story to tell and I got in touch with him through a previous guest. And Wiza knows the technology, innovation and business scene in Africa like crazy. He's the one to talk to and I talked to him and this conversation is really interesting. There's a lot of insight in here about a lot of different stuff and I'm really honored and proud to publish this one. I've been waiting to publish it for a while because this is the first one which really got me onto this whole there's something going on outside and there's a lot of hype about it as well. And I don't want to contribute to that hype. But this is a question, how do you tell hype from reality? It's like with hindsight, that's the only way you can really figure it out. I think it's impossible to find, to figure out whether you're being hyped or not in the current moment. So there's a lot happening around the world and what I want to do is get as much as possible burn through the hype and get the real difficult situation. And so for this, from this episode, I learned a lot, particularly about that what are the things that the African Texian needs to develop in order to make this a sustainable long term thing and its infrastructure and what is the first infrastructure for having commerce be channeled through the Internet? Finance. And that's what I'm discovering about also Brazil, Latin America. So we got finance and then we got E commerce. Those are the big things. And if you think about it like in the United States in 1990, the first company that I ever invested in was Webvan. So I learned an important lesson on that one. But everybody's like, this Internet thing is going to revolutionize E Commerce. In the 90s. I was here, it all happened around me. I got caught up in the hype there and then there's E commerce and it's going to take over the world. But they were wrong about it. Although they weren't because Amazon got started at that time, right around that, before the tech bubble, the first tech bubble. And then look at 2007, 2007, you really start to see E commerce as a way of life in the United States. That's going to happen to other countries and it's going to happen fast, much faster than it happened in the U.S. i believe that's something I'd be willing to stake money on. And so Wiza has a really, really important, insightful understanding of what's going on in Africa. And I'll let him explain more. I've gone on too long already. But if you do enjoy this episode, please find us on itunes by searching for Crazy Wisdom, hitting the subscribe button. If you really like it, then please go ahead and give a review. You can also find me at Twitter ewart, allsopiii. I'm also starting to publish episodes on a separate account, etcrazywisdom. That's another handle on Twitter that you can find all the episodes I'm gonna publish. I'm gonna publish all of them there. And, and then if you speak Spanish and you want to understand what's going on in Latin America and Spain and eventually in Brazil, although I'll create a separate channel for that, I am starting to tweet about those episodes, CrazyWisdom esp for Espanol. So Crazy Wisdom esp on Twitter and hope you enjoy this episode. Please let me know what you think. Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast.