Technology
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Trust is essential in a functioning society. We need it to hear each other, see each other, and work together. When trust leaves, the guards go up, caution enters, and forward progress slows down. What happens when trust is lacking in a society? This has been on my mind over the past few weeks after…
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In typical fashion, Chamath Palihapitiya went on CNBC last week and shook things up by saying that corporations and hedge funds should be allowed to lose their shirts as this recession continues to set in: This is a lie that has been purported by Wall Street. When a company fails, it does not fire their…
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Microsoft’s $1B in OpenAI Microsoft and OpenAI signed a deal where Microsoft will invest $1 billion in OpenAI’s business. OpenAI will use the funds to buy computing power from Microsoft. Running the algorithms needed to develop new AI technologies requires rapidly growing amounts of energy. This is the largest deal in the current inflection point…
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Andreessen Horowitz posted this interesting conversation on cobalt – the mineral helping power our phones, electric vehicles, and more. The conversation got me thinking about a piece I wrote back in 2015 (time flies!) on Jean-Yves Ollivier, Marc Andreessen, and the common interests they share in minerals that power the global economy. There has been…
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My daughter is particular about manners. If you don’t say please or thank you when you’re supposed, it’s a serious problem. This is starting to extend to the Alexa device she uses to listen to audiobooks. She says please and thank you after the device follows her instructions. Numerous times she has corrected me for…
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Over 50 years ago, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel observed that the number of transistors computer chip makers were able to fit on a chip doubled every two years. Moore’s Law held true until the past couple years as the amount of power these chips need to compute becomes unsustainable and their…
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Thanks to Kwabena Sarkodie for having me on his podcast, Insights from the Sahara, to discuss all things artificial intelligence and Africa.
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AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Textract (Amazon) Amazon is making widely available a text and data extraction tool that is going to make it real easy to search all kinds of information. My whole time reading this release all I could think about was how hard it is to search your own posts on…
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Op-Ed: The Future of Africa’s diaspora is in Africa (CNBC) 42 Countries Agree to International Principles for Artificial Intelligence (NextGov) Five questions you can use to cut through AI hype (MIT Technology Review)
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Heinrich, Portman, Schatz Propose National Strategy For Artificial Intelligence; Call For $2.2 Billion Investment In Education, Research & Development (Martin Heinrich) I wrote here about Congressional efforts to figure out the U.S. artificial intelligence direction. That effort plus this bill by a group of senators helps move us closer to the U.S. having an AI…
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One of the things that keeps me up at night is the thought of underrepresented minorities and poor people not being at the table as the latest AI developments emerge. So, I was through the moon when I listened to this interview with Tara Chklovski, founder of Iridescent, a nonprofit committed to exposing disadvantaged families…
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Speech and language: the crown jewel of AI with Dr. Xuedong Huang (Microsoft Research) This interview and the next one are examples of this shift picking up speed in the development of artificial intelligence where we’re not just feeding data to computers as part of training it for one task. The computers are drawing insights…
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Why Rihanna Broke Barriers That Others Couldn’t (Trapital) I’m looking forward to seeing what becomes of this joining of forces with LVMH. Dan Runcie, as usual, does a real nice job breaking things down. Brain imaging AI leader icometrix raises $18 million in new funding (icometrix) This is a very interesting company. My grandmother has…
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TikTok Is the New Music Kingmaker, and Labels Want to Get Paid (Bloomberg) I wonder what it is about the music industry that has it looking at itself on the wrong side of a deal once again. Decades ago, Napster and file sharing put a massive dent in the industry, then Apple came along and…
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Waters Announces Committee Task Forces on Financial Technology and Artificial Intelligence (US House Committee on Financial Services) I’m glad to see Rep. Alma Adams on the artificial intelligence committee. My hope is that she asks those questions that get at the unintended consequences around the meshing of AI technology and financial services and those impacts…
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This is a fascinating conversation between Fei Fei Li, a computer science professor at Stanford and co-director of their new Human Centered AI Institute, and Yuval Noah Hariri, a historian and author of the widely popular book Sapiens. The two have a respectful go at one another on what the future looks in an AI…
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Kenya wants to replace Bob Collymore with a local at Safaricom (Daily Nation) Young Designers Dismantle Cultural Stereotypes At Nigeria’s Arise Fashion Week (British Vogue) Fei-Fei Li & Yuval Noah Harari in Conversation – The Coming AI Upheaval (YouTube)
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5 AI Breakthroughs We’ll Likely See in the Next 5 Years (Singularity Hub) Is Ghana’s Economic Growth Failing to Reach The People? (Global Risk Insights) Uganda’s Leading Family Owned Businesses (Asoko Insight)
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Zoom, Zoom, Zoom! The Exclusive Inside Story Of The New Billionaire Behind Tech’s Hottest IPO While reading this piece, all I could think about was how different Zoom was from other Silicon Valley unicorns-turned public companies that are more well-known. The company registered to go public with a profit after having already turned a profit.…
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Notes on AI Bias Machine learning is much better at doing certain things than people, just as a dog is much better at finding drugs than people, but you wouldn’t convict someone on a dog’s evidence. And dogs are much more intelligent than any machine learning. The problem with this statement is that we have…
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Nigeria to Negotiate Future International Investment Agreements…. To Use New Model This is a strong quote from Yewande Sadiku, head of Nigeria’s Investment Promotion Commission, at a recent event honoring the late Professor Michael Ayo Ajomo: “it is true that Nigeria has challenges, but when we are going into a negotiation that is not the…
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Growing the Pie I’ve spent the past week crafting words about this memo. After a fantastic meeting earlier today, I’ll just speak plainly. For us to have the responsible capitalism Howard Marks calls for in this piece, we have got to get to the point where we have a frank conversation about how the U.S.…
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W.E.B. Du Bois and the American Soul This is a compilation of three beautiful set of conversations on W.E.B Du Bois’ life and impact on society during and after his life. I first understood that a black American living in Africa was an option when I learned that he finished his life in Ghana. I…
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3 Thoughts: Cashless| Amazon|Masayoshi Son
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Africa is projected to have more people at working age than the rest of the world’s population by 2035. By 2045, artificial intelligence is projected to reach the singularity, where it will be self-improving rapidly rather than being dependent on human inputs. On their own, these two developments are concerning. For years now, policymakers have…
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Tastemakers Africa CEO Cherae Robinson Gives Us A Sneak Peak On Her 10-Year Plan and I’m Here For It Marketplaces are powerful and have a track record of disrupting industries and building. See eBay and Airbnb. Look out for what Safaricom could build on its Mpesa platform if regulators don’t make the two break up.…
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CcHub Pushes to Keep Yaba’s Startups Clustered Together I struggled to parse out whether there’s really cause for concern for Yaba’s future as Lagos’ tech hub, or whether this piece was a veiled branding for CcHub. Perhaps, it was some of both. All the same, it’s cool to see CcHub making plans for the long-term…
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Author Calls For African Entrepreneurs to Talk About Failure Idril Abshir penned this interesting piece arguing that African entrepreneurs should talk about failure more, indicating that they will find resilience in discussing failure. She cites the culture among Western entrepreneurs of acknowledging failure. While the stories in the piece were compelling, I don’t know that…
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Black Market Naira Trading Cheaper Than Official Naira Nigeria’s currency situation has been a mess of late, and I’m blaming it on Billions (read my thoughts in Issue No. 24). Sure enough, hedge funds are sniffing around for a deal. This week has felt like something of a perfect storm for Nigeria with telecoms having…
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No. 148: Three AM Reads: MTN Keeps Eye on Iran | Senegal’s Got Gas| Taxing Entertainers and Athletes
MTN Signs Non-Binding Agreement to Invest in Iranian Net South Africa-based MTN Group continues to set its sights on participating in Iran’s fast growing telecoms industry, with this preliminary move to place nearl $40M in Iranian Net for a 49.5% stake in the company. MTN has growing stakes in Iran, with its minority ownership of…
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Last year, I brought up Atlas Mara management getting dressed down in an investor conference call due to the lack of confidence the market had in the firm. Well, their Q1 2016 results can’t be too much more encouraging considering the $2M loss the bank posted. Apparently, management plans to implement some cost reductions and…
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Kudos to fellow Woodberry Forest Tigers Johannes, Tao Tao and the rest of the Get Your Guide team on the $50m they raised from KKR. More vim to them as they continue helping folks have enjoyable trips around the world. I would be remiss to give a shoutout to Cherae and the Tastemakers Africa team…
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Francophone Africa and Europe can expect access to more African and African-American content through Afrostream. The two-year old startup led by Tonjé Bakang has been on a tear this year, finishing up at Y Combinator and landing funding from Troy Carter’s Cross Culture Ventures (have they finished raising their $50M fund?), Orange Digital Ventures, Ace…
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Tayo Oviosu and the Paga team are pushing their dominance in Nigeria’s mobile payment space to the next level with the $13 million Series B round of financing they announced earlier this week. A couple things I need to look into: Now that the Central Bank of Nigeria is implementing its cashless policy, how is…
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I opened up my Pocket to develop my latest “Reads” post a few minutes ago, and got the message you see in the image. For five seconds, I felt like my world had fallen apart. That’s not good. There are so many different ways I can access the news, but have built the majority of…
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I was glad to see the news about the launch of Valor Ventures, a VC firm led by women and focused on finding women founders. Another firm that excites me is the Impact America Fund. Here’s a good interview it’s founder, Kesha Cash, did with the Andreesen Horowitz team. Some time ago, I posted First…
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Andreessen Horowitz just posted a short interview with four high school girls who recently competed in Technovation 2015. (If you’re opening this in your email, click on the title so that you can see the podcast linked below.) The winner of the competition was a team from Nigeria! All of the teams are really impressive.…
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When Aubrey Hruby and finance ministers from several African countries waited for the globe at Google headquarters to rotate to the African continent so that they could see how many hits the continent was getting at the time, they were stunned to see just a couple dots compared to completely outlined countries for the rest…
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What does it look like for tech startups and governments to work together well? Andreessen Horowitz posted a new podcast with Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser today to discuss this, alongside former DC mayor Adrian Fenty. Pretty good conversation. Some of the topics covered in the conversation, included: 1. Catching up to the technology startup sector…
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For us, today, Africa is more important than the U.S. In five to 10 years, Africa can become the new frontier for luxury. – Ermenegildo Zegna While reading this Quartz piece on Africa’s fashion opportunity, I came across this Global Retail Development Index put together by A.T Kearney. The Index ranks the top 30 developing…
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For the righteous falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble in times of adversity. Psalm 24:16 I discovered a new podcast earlier this week, Masters in Business, with Barry Ritholtz. Two of his recent interviews were with Anthony Scaramucci, head of Skybridge Capital, a hedge fund and host of the SALT Conference, probably…
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Chinedu Echeruo gave a talk at Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series on the value that creativity unleashes into the world. In it, he shared a parable David Foster told in a speech to Kenyon College’s 2005 graduating class. There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish…
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The New Yorker profile on Marc Andreessen I wrote about earlier today mentioned an AMC show, Halt and Catch Fire. I had never heard of it, but just…You should watch the show. Messed up people (who isn’t?) build a PC from the ground up in the days when PCs weighed more than your one year…
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I gave a presentation earlier this week on how investment was key to moving the needle on transforming economic engagement with African countries from development aid to infrastructure. Here is my brainstorm in preparation for that talk, with some edits. During the IMF Spring Meetings a couple weeks ago, I heard a theme of working…
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I was excited to read that President Obama has set his sights on ensuring that cities can develop their own broadband networks, should they choose to do so. While working with the Georgia Municipal Association, we had a couple of close calls that would have prevented Georgia cities from operating their own broadband networks. President Obama…
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No. 50: Three Podcasts That Will Make Your Daily Commute Amazing
andreesen horowitz, angela benton, boris johnson, cherae robinson, freakonomics, harvard business school, harvard kennedy school, information, interviews, itunes, jaime tardy, james altucher, jason calacanis, kai ryssdal, lewis howes, michael williams, pimm foxx, podcast, professional development, silicon valley, simon sinek, tim ferriss, tunein radio, wade danielson
Helpful resource podcasts to give a listen.
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Why did there seem to be so many African health care professionals at DeKalb Medical Hospital? Over the course of my weeklong stay at the hospital, recovering from surgery, I could not help but ponder this. In the course of a week, nurses from Nigeria and Tanzania tended to me. My primary doctor was Nigerian.…
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I left a 10-day vacation in Switzerland last month in awe of the country’s rail infrastructure. One can live in a small village hours away from a major city like Zurich or Geneva, yet work in the city without a car. This would be tough to do in Atlanta. In Switzerland, trams are an indispensable…
Kwame Som-Pimpong 