ETHIOPIA. The African Union today adopted a unilateral resolution to deploy army troops and care packages to England as looting and violence spread from London to other major cities. Spokesperson Charity Khumalo said “We can no longer stand by while these savages tear themselves apart.”

The AU, meeting today in an emergency session to discuss the ongoing rioting in the UK, has declared that they will do “everything in their power to help bring civilisation to England”.

“It’s just so sad, you know?” said Khumalo, speaking from the organisation’s HQ in Addis Ababa. “Sitting here and watching them on TV while their society implodes. We cannot in good conscience remain idle and let it happen.”

The AU has announced a range of initiatives that Africans can get involved with to help alleviate the misery of the English.

“For instance, we have launched an ‘Adopt an English child’ programme,” Khumalo explained, showing journalists brochures featuring the faces of English kids. “If you donate a mere R50 a month, you can see to it that sweet little Johnny from Peckham receives a basic education, a pack of condoms and a pair of pimpin’ Nikes.”

Khumalo also said that the AU would be parachuting in dentists along with army troops as part of a ‘Feel better about yourselves, Brits!’ initiative.

“You can understand why they’re turning on each other,” the spokesperson told journalists. “You look in the mirror and you see teeth untouched by modern dentistry. It’s heartbreaking enough to make anyone put a brick through a Starbucks.”

The organisation also plans to air-drop care packages on major UK cities.

“Vegetables, mainly,” Khumalo confirmed. “We’re sending them vegetables and toothpaste.”

The AU’s flagship event, however, will be a star-studded rock concert to be held in Johannesburg, with all proceeds going towards the establishment of mobile libraries around the UK. Artists ranging from Mafikizolo to Steve Hofmeyr have pledged to perform at the show.

“As a humanitarian, it’s the least I can do,” Hofmeyr said yesterday. “I look at those photos of the adorable little beasts knifing each other in fights over looted X-Boxes and I want to hug them and give them a nice hot cup of Milo.”

Meanwhile, the week’s events has seen terrified South Africans in London and Manchester packing their bags for home.

“This country is going to the dogs, dude,” said Werner du Preez, a gap-year student from Johannesburg. “I’ve been offered a nice little two-bed place in Hillbrow where I can feel safe again.”

Last year I took some very big financial, personal, emotional and reputational risks, in two countries. I completely overextended myself. It hurt like hell. There were times when I thought I’d never get through it all. There were many times when I thought I was going to lose everything. And I mean everything. I got to the end of last year, and I was broken from overextending myself. I won’t go into the tactical stuff and what I did to get through it just yet, mainly ‘cos it’s still too close.

What I think is important in the context of Seth’s blog post, is that the overextending from last year has led to so many great things that are happening now, and it’s just the beginning.

I didn’t see or predict it last year, I just knew they had to be done. If I had have known then what I’ve seen now, I would definitely have spent less time worrying.

Too often we back away from apparent pain, in fear of the risks involved, not looking at the benefits that may come afterwards. If anything, the last 18 months has taught me that well timed, well executed overextension is actually what creates the lifechanging progress we all crave.

That in itself is not the interesting for most people

But what is, is that a bunch of people got together to share what they’re doing, and talk about some interesting problems and solutions they’re dealing with. This is how you learn new stuff, meet new people like yourself, find new hires, and broaden your horizons. It’s essential.

Where are the meetups ?
Where are people gathering to learn, interact, and take over the world?
What elegant solutions are people working on to difficult problems?

PASSION = BRAIN FUEL.
DUMB BRAIN FULL OF GAS ALWAYS BEAT SMART BRAIN WITH EMPTY TANK.
SMART BRAIN WITH FULL TANK BEAT EVERYONE.

Dear African technologist, hacker, developer, geek, product guy, dreamer, thinker, tinkerer, manager, CEO, multi-national-organisation-in-Africa,

We’re at the beginning of a shift in technology usage, where mobile adoption and usage is quickly going to become more prevalent and ubiquitous than the PC. Bandwidth is getting faster and cheaper for both PC and mobile, despite the monopolies that have held everyone back for years. Infrastructure is now massively cheap and easy to scale. There are toolkits, API’s, platforms, frameworks, services and stacks for almost every technology need you may have. It’s easier now to create something, and innovate, than it ever has been. Not moving forward means you’re being left behind.

The traditional approaches we’ve been using for years are dying. People are looking for authenticity, value, engagement, real’ness for want of a better word.

Dream. Find something that provides value. Help people to get some of that value. Make it great. Remove the crappy stuff.

Stop banging the same drums. Stop thinking you’ve got it all figured out. Approach problems differently. Give your people space to think and tinker. Innovate.

Get massively hyped about your product or service. Tell everyone you know. Let go of any conservativeness you may have, because if you can’t get excited about what you do, then no-one else will. If you’re working for a crap company, leave it. There are better things to do with your precious time.

We can learn a lot from places like Silicon Valley, New York, Berlin, Israel, London, Austin, Chile, Singapore, Ireland and India. We can learn even more from the people who live in those places, how they work, what they do with their time, and ultimately the success they create. We can also learn from the people we live among, by asking them about the problems they face.

There is no shortage of investors or money, only shortages of good people, scalable and executable opportunities. Be the person who can execute and scale, and do it with a product that people will use, and the money won’t be a problem. But don’t use a perceived lack of investors, internal or external, as an excuse.

There are no accidents, only trying, failure, and then ultimately succeeding. As a technologist, today, your greatest asset is the time and technical gifts you have. Use them wisely.

There are many problems people face in emerging markets, and they all need elegant solutions. Find the value. Supply the demand for that value, by doing something that makes you get up in the morning with a spring in your step and a whistle in your tune.

In short, there are no excuses or reasons not to do something awesome, other than the ones we limit ourselves with. Africa has the potential to be one of the largest mobile markets on the planet.

What are you doing about it?

1. Love what you do.
2. Be interesting, not perfect.
3. Focus on simplicity.
4. Be the ‘go-to’ people.
5. Make yourself at home.

The idea is that in every decision, interaction, argument, direction, we take, the above values are our guide. We think the above take all of the little things we want to live by, and wraps them up into something which is easy to understand and talk about.

The proof it works for us, was that this week we had an experience which tested the above values, and we felt good about the outcome. We talked about how our values applied in this situation, what our conduct should look like to make us feel congruent with them, and then we acted. What’s funny is that my own default response was somewhat cynical (this happens after being in the trenches for so long – you get jaded and less and less patient), and much more sarcastic. But it was the team which brought us back to our values and what was the right thing to do.

No discussions, no debate, no arguments. Just alignment. And then happiness knowing we’d tried, and done the right thing.

We’re going to put the values on the wall, and we’re going to use them for all the important decisions. Feels good.

How about you? What’s your guide?

So in honour of the song by Pearl Jam, “Alive”, I decided to call this functional workout “Still alive”.

So, splits were:
5 min warmup row

4 sets of following exercises:
10 x kettlebell squat to shoulder press
10 x kettlebell bent over row
10 x kettlebell deadlift to lateral raise (so bells endup just below chin)
10 x kettlebell pushup (pushups using big ass kettlebell, aiming for chest to dip below handles)
2 min rest between reps

Aim was to do weights light enough to complete the 4 sets, which worked.
Completed this in 26 mins (33 min total – 5 min row – 2 mins warmup / finding bells, setting up space); with 395 Kcal (which wasn’t enough). The last pushups rep took at least 4 mins as well (last few were agony), so when stronger there, should complete the workout quicker.

My aim is to burn 500Kcal in each workout session, so decided to do a short cardio on top of this to push out the burn, so did:
20 x lateral box jumps (1 step)
20 x lateral box jumps (2 steps)
10 x kettlebell swings
10 x lateral box jumps (2 steps)
10 x kettlebell swings
20 x lateral box jumps (2 steps)
Lateral jumps were jumps side to side over Reebok step thingy, then HR back to 130.
Last 10 of last 20 jumps was hardest.

According to my HRM:
Ended with 506 Kcal, with total time of 41min, including the row.
32m in the zone (between 120 odd, and 157 odd).
Avg HR of 131.
Max HR of 161.

Notes to self:
Last pushup set was hardest of them all. Ended up doing alternating pushups on the step moving left to right to see how far I could go. In general, it worked – I was totally pooped by the time I got into the shower, and when shaving getting my arms up was sore.

To get this to 800 Kcal, will add a good HIIT run on top. But we’re not there yet

Too often we pore over every detail in the hope of everything being 100% perfect, everywhere. I know that’s my natural tendency. I think this is something almost unrealistic to expect, or manage for.

Instead, why don’t we think of making 100% of the 20% that counts, perfect; rather than 80% of the 100%, which leads to noise?

That way we end up with something which is slimmed down, but the attention to detail will be obvious to those that see the result of what has been done. And then the opportunity is to gradually increase the 20%, or keep it that way. Most often, people only use 20% or less of a product anyways, it’s just the way we are.

This is nothing new, so I’m not claiming original thought here – more than anything, this is a little line in the sand to remind me every time I start going down rabbit holes!

5 min row for warmup.

Squat to shoulder raise, using kettlebells for resistance in the raise x 10
Pushups x 10
Alternating jack-knifes (I don’t know what else to call them – doing lunges one leg to the other at speed) x 20
Pushups on blow up wobble board x 10
2 mins rest between sets.

Took about 24 mins, then moved onto:
4 mins of box jumps, with 1 min on, 30 secs off, which gives you about 3 reps.

After that, I was falling over.
I did 2 sets today, which is crap. Should be getting back to 3 in a few weeks, and 4 in 6 or so.

HR didn’t go above 156 though, and dod 400Kcal, which is below what was aiming for, but OK for today.
Weak areas were chest and triceps, hence the falling over.

Sometimes the temptation to be perfect is overwhelming.

We work towards perfection because we’re told that it’s worth aspiring and achieving. The problem for you and me is that perfection for some is rubbish for others, especially when your product reaches beyond the early adopter pool of people.

There are so many cliches around this thinking, some of which are below:
Release early, release often
Minimum Viable Product
Lean Startup Thinking
Ship it!
etc etc

What they all say is that getting out the door with something working is favorable to pretty much everything else.
Just get your shit out there for people to use.

It’s something I have to remind myself of every day, because the temptation is to labour over every pixel, every word, every line of code, so that it’s perfect. But perfect doesn’t pay the bills.

To me, that is execution.

* I guess one caveat to this is not to build up so much technical debt, or otherwise, that you can’t recover.

Today was functional bodyweight followed by medium low impact cardio, aiming to be done in around 30 mins:
Warmup:
5 min bike ride to the gym
3 min row (need more work here)

Functional bodyweight exercises:
10 x pushups
10 x lunges each leg, with hanging kettlebell
10 x reverse pushups (on those straps)
10 x squats with same kettlebells
10 x box jumps (not sure of height today, but aiming for 24″)
2 min rest

At x 2 sets of the above.
Was about 16 mins.

Cardio:
20 mins of Ski machine doing HIIT speeds to HR 160.

Ever done / found that yourself?
I’ve been doing this for years, so it’s a really hard habit to break but I’m getting there

So what I’ve started doing is using columns for my thinking, before they go into my GTD system:
The left column is for actions. [Usually full]
The middle column is for projects. [Usually 3 to 4 things]
The right column is for projects that are further out, and are just nagging at me but don’t need immediate attention. [Usually one or two items]
Items that are highlighted are a priority right now. They get immediate action. [Usually 3 or 4 items]

So that helps me to get things in perspective. I run through the actions on the left to make progress, and figure out the next action for the projects in the middle. The ones on the right, well they stay there.

And that’s it – 20 secs to do the columns, 10 mins to put things into their place, 5 mins to get it into your GTD system.
And voila, I feel back in control.

Hope that helps.

How do you do things?

So when you look at what you’re doing in your life, do you want it enough, to go the distance, to complete the race, to finish it, or are you just a hobbyist?

If you can’t answer yes to the question above, then what do you get out of bed in the morning for? What fires you up? What makes you do what’s necessary?

The world is full of people on the same treadmill, following the same herd. Which direction are you moving in?

Food for thought.

The landing of a series of undersea cables is going to solve an infrastructural problem that has long plagued Africa and will enable African technology developers to compete on a global stage. In order to properly realise the full potential of a global customer base, African technologists need to not only expose their work to the world, but to also expose themselves to the learnings and insights that the developed world has to offer.
- Written for TECH4AFRICA

New international submarine communication cables are starting to ring the continent, bringing with them the promise of cheaper broadband across the continent. That means Africa will soon have the infrastructure to be able to compete more effectively in the online space than it did in the past. But Africa has missed out on several years of important learning in this space. Now is the perfect time for African entrepreneurs to embrace business and technical expertise from the rest of the world and close that gap.

An all-too common and incorrect perception in South Africa and other parts of the continent is that African problems are different to those experienced anywhere else in the world, and that they should be addressed with uniquely African solutions. According to this view of the world, international best practices and experiences, especially those from developed countries, are not really applicable to African businesses. That is a misguided and parochial perspective in a world where technology and global trade have shrunk the world to a fraction of its former size.

In high-tech industries, such as Web-focused businesses, there is much that African entrepreneurs, public servants and technicians can learn from international experience. In fact, it’s imperative that African businesses embrace international experience and knowledge if they’re to catch up with what their peers are doing online in the rest of the world.

African challenges

Of course, Africa has infrastructure, political and social challenges that are not present in most parts of the world. Building an online business in an environment where the electricity supply is unreliable and where international bandwidth is slow and expensive is fraught with challenges that don’t exist for an entrepreneur building a business in the heart of Silicon Valley.

But in addition to their superb infrastructure, innovation hubs like the west and east coasts of the USA also offer an unrivaled depth of human capital. Whatever an entrepreneur’s business idea is, there are people around who have the experience and skills to help make it a reality. And of course, the more that experienced people share their skills and knowledge with each other, the more new ideas and concepts they come up with and the more successful they are turning their innovations into commercial products.

By contrast, an African entrepreneur trying to productise a nifty new mobile application or a new online service simply doesn’t have access to many local people who have the skills and experience. There is an abundance of great ideas and enthusiasm but a lack of experience in turning these ideas into commercial products.

There have been a few success stories – innovators such as Mark Shuttleworth, Elon Musk and Vinny Lingham come to mind – but they are exceptions to the rule and their skills are often lost to Africa when their businesses take off. An additional problem that becomes obvious from the above list, is that South Africans dominate the list of obvious success stories while technologists from the rest of Africa do not feature as highly.

Universal lessons

Most of the processes, technology and tools that African entrepreneurs will be using to create Web and mobile products and services will be similar to those used by people in other parts of the world. There are many universal lessons around project management, usability, product development, technology and many other areas that apply anywhere in the world, and they’re ones many American and European pioneers had to learn the hard way. Speccing and configuring a server, designing a good user interface, managing cashflow – these are all things that work the same way anywhere in the world.

So why not learn from international experience? The alternative is to stubbornly waste time and money reinventing the wheel and making the mistakes that others have already made. And that is something that no African entrepreneur can afford to do.

TECH4AFRICA

The TECH4AFRICA conference being held in August this year, aims to address the above issues by bringing a number of world famous technologists and African innovators to South Africa to share, teach and interact with Africans looking to make it in the technology space. It’s an exciting time for African technology and the opportunity that Tech4Africa presents is one that really shouldn’t be missed.

Please note that I’m writing this in the spirit of the “naked CEO” theme

About 8 weeks ago I sat down to write a blog post entitled “Why do Tech4Africa?”, primarily dealing with the negative sentiment around the lack of “diversity” in the speakers and my frustrations with what I consider a limiting and naïve point of view. After re-reading it a few times, I decided not to post it, even after 4 hours of writing until 2am on a Sunday morning.

Since then, I’ve been overwhelmed both how much positive feedback there has been, by how positive our partner discussions have been, how willing people have been to help, and by how great the team is that we’ve assembled to make it all happen. Writing something that was in response to a small part of the overall discussion felt lame and defensive, so I didn’t.

So this blog post is about why, where we are, and where we’re going.

So, why are we doing TECH4AFRICA?

A lot of people have asked why do TECH4AFRICA, so here it is:
Africans are natural innovators and entrepreneurs, and I think that gradually the conditions are aligning to create an environment where a combination of access to cheap bandwidth on cheaper hardware, and readily available commodity infrastructure, is going to spark the innovation that will create products for large local and global markets.

My thinking is that Africans can compete by being innovative and creating products that are either global in scale, or that solve problems for large local markets (note that I said a “large local market”, not just “local market”).

So after 4 years of trying to get it off the ground, where the reasons have changed depending on where I was as a person, I think it boils down to anger and pride.

Anger at how far Africa is behind the US and Europe (wrt technology of course, I’m not commenting on anything else) in a 200+ million people market full of frontier opportunity, and why the tipping point seems so far away.

Pride because I can see the potential in the people I speak to, the products I’ve looked at, the interns I’ve hired and the honest intent I’ve witnessed.

So, we want TECH4AFRICA to help precipitate that innovation, give people the global perspective, awareness, skills and knowledge needed to execute their ideas, and the connections to make things happen. We want to light a spark, to let the world know that Africans can build great products.

I would derive great personal satisfaction from knowing that two engineers, a UX person and an angel met at TECH4AFRICA in 2010, and they went on to build the next 37Signals, Amazon, CraigsList, DropBox, eBay, FreshBooks, Gumtree, Jobserve, MailChimp, Mimecast, Moo, MyDeco, MyHeritage, PayPal, Salesforce.com, Skype, SongKick, Thawte, Twitter, Wonga, WordPress or any of the current Top 10 iPhone and Android apps.

The jury is still out on a lot of current local innovation, but we’re hopeful that in the future they will be shining lights of what we can be done.
That said, the conference is not about technology for sustainable development, technology outsourcing or BPO, but it is about driving innovation on the web and mobile in Africa.

We’re bringing out international speakers so that delegates can learn from the best in the business

The hardest part of doing a conference like this for the first time is that you have to “ham and egg it”. As well as dealing with cashflow limitations until there is enough partner participation to make cashflow less of a problem, you have to get great speakers lined up so that delegates and partners take you seriously. I’m happy to say we’ve done that.

I’m extremely proud of the speakers we’ve got coming to Africa (many for the first time), because they are amongst the best in the world at what they do.
I’m really confident that anyone attending TECH4AFRICA is going to walk away better off, simply because we don’t get access to these kinds of people, thinking and experience in Africa. So I would encourage anyone attending to be like a sponge, and soak up as much as possible.

Take a peek at our international speakers.

We’ve got great local speakers too

The above notwithstanding, we’ve also got great African speakers that really do give inspiration for where technology in Africa is going.
It’s been incredibly tough finding good people who understand what we’re trying to do, as well as finding speakers who have demonstrable real world experience and success behind them. I think that we’ve struck a good balance and that our speaker lineup reflects that.
Bottom line is that for the first time in Africa, we’ve got around 70 speakers talking about cloud, infrastructure, mobile, web 2.0, social media, search, funding and startups, so there is going to be a lot of great content for delegates.

Take a peek at our local speakers.

We’re actively going after the outrage

Jason Fried asks “where is the outrage”, and I agree with him mostly, so in this regard we’re actively trying to stir the pot a little, to ruffle some feathers and get some real conversation going.

I’m a firm believer in great debate, so the conference is an attempt to bring global perspective to a small market (active users, revenue; not people) which I think for the most part lives in an arrogantly myopic bubble, lacking the fundamental skills and experience necessary to build great products. And that’s aside from government and large institutions that seem blissfully unawares of how far behind they are falling.

For me, that perspective is found with people who have real global experience and thinking, and also from people that aren’t necessarily blogging and tweeting about it, but are actually doing it.

So we’re trying to get to the bottom of some important issues, not pat everyone on the back and say “well done”, where we’re still left in the same boat we were in yesterday. We want to shake up the status quo, ask the tough questions, shine lights to show the way, and join the dots for people.

We’re stepping away from the circle jerk

I’ve had many people mention the familiar (South) African circle jerk of the same speakers at every tech conference, so we’re actively trying to avoid that and find speakers who are able to get to the real brass tacks of the issues we face at the bottom end of a dark continent, without pulling punches.

Again, often the people that are doing stuff worth talking about are not on Twitter and are not blogging, so we don’t know about them on the social web, but they are around and we’re doing our best to find them so delegates can learn from them.

We want our audience to derive real value from the event, so the combination of great speakers, going after the outrage, and stepping away from the circle jerk should go a long way to create that value.

Take a peek at our schedule.

We’re creating inspiration and momentum for the doers

A week or two ago we announced that SeedCamp will be at Tech4Africa this year.

The reason I’m so happy about this is that there is a very clear disconnect in the venture funding lifecycle in Africa. It should be something like: start -> friends & family -> seed -> angel -> Series A VC -> Series B etc VC; but there seems to be a disconnect at the seed / angel / Series A VC phases. At the same time, the costs involved in taking products to the global market are almost inaccessbile for bootstrappers or organic growth, and the local market is not big enough to use cashflow from that to go overseas and be aggressive. The result of which is that it’s much, much harder to be inspired, create momentum, build and bootstrap a product to a point where VC’s can step in and help scale.

SeedCamp addresses this issue, has done so successfully in Europe, and I’m hoping will be a step in the right direction for innovators in Africa.

Find out more about SeedCamp.

We’re creating opportunities for people that should be there

This week we announced that through Old Mutual, we’re able to offer 17 seats to people that could otherwise not afford to go, which is fantastic.
Of course, we’d love to make the conference free for everyone but that’s not realistic, so this kind of opportunity really does level the playing field somewhat.
I’m hoping that next year we can add another 13 spots, and get formal mentorships going for all 30 folks.

Find out more about the Old Mutual Scholarships.

We’re modelling TECH4AFRICA on SxSW

I’ve had the good fortune to go to SxSW 3 times since 2006. I can categorically say that it really did change things for me at that stage of my life, and I can point directly to lifechanging events and thinking that was precipitated by SxSW.

I’ve been to a lot of conferences in the last 10 years, and the ones that I’ve enjoyed the most are Future of Web Apps (FOWA), and SxSW. They were enjoyable because they were relaxed, informal, the speakers were accessible (I can remember having a great discussion with Evan Williams about start-ups, when he still had a ponytail and was doing Odeo), had great content, and I met great people. The best conversations were in the hall, and at the parties.

The conferences I didn’t enjoy either had too many exhibitors, too little content, too many suits and ties, the speakers were aloof and there were not enough opportunities to meet people.

So that’s why we’ve chosen the format we have for TECH4AFRICA. We’re implementing a “no ties” policy. We’re encouraging speakers to mix and interact with delegates. We’re creating spaces where people can meet each other to talk about stuff. We’re making sure there is 15 mins at the end of a talk / panel, for delegates to ask the questions relevant to them.

Next year we’ll open up a panel picker for people to offer their own topics which other folks can vote on, and we’ll look at adding another day if it makes sense.
I’ve grown up a little more

I’m as frustrated as the next person by the lack of “diversity” candidates when looking for speakers that can sit down with globally recognised individuals and talk turkey with them (people who “have already done”, not “busy launching” or “talking on twitter”).

But I’m also fundamentally against the idea of adding people to the lineup that are simply not at the same level for whatever reason. Can you imagine what it would feel like to sit down and talk with speakers who really have cut the mustard, and realise that you’ve got absolutely nothing to add to the conversation when the microphone is passed to you?

As an inherently positive person who generally sees the good in things before the bad, I was quite taken aback at how critical or arrogant some people were with little or no real background information to inform their criticism or comments, about the above, and other issues.

But right now I’m not letting it bother me – we’re doing our level best to address all obvious concerns one might encounter when setting up a tech conference in Africa – and that’s going to have to be enough.

We’ve put together a great team to make it all happen

We’re on top of the enormity of a conference this size, with so many speakers (circa 65) and minute logistical details to attend to, and it’s only through the team that we have involved that it’s all coming together quite nicely.

Added to that, the partners that have come on board (which will be announced over the coming weeks) really have displayed a commitment to an African renaissance built on the knowledge economy, and after almost 9 years in London waiting for things to align, it’s exciting.

Thank you Bakhona, Brett, Brondie, Craig, Chrissy, Dorothy, Eve, Gerritt, Gugu, Ian, Justin, Neli, Nicolas, Sphamandla, Stephen, Tania and Thando, it really wouldn’t happen without you all

I can’t wait for August 10th!