Market entry
Rwanda might end our business. Good.
We get hired because markets are hard: regulators that don’t answer, deals that stall for months. Rwanda barely has that problem.
Zipline wanted to deliver blood by drone in 2016. No rulebook for autonomous aircraft existed anywhere. Rwanda didn’t make them wait years. The government wrote the framework with them, and Zipline went on to fly in Ghana, Nigeria and markets that signed on later.
Volkswagen opened an assembly plant in Kigali in 2018 and built a ride-hailing business on top of it. Their Africa boss called it a “lighthouse project,” the place they learned to operate before taking the playbook to Ghana and Ethiopia.
Kasha Global, Inc. started in Kigali in 2016, then moved into Kenya, South Africa, and West Africa on the back of a $21M raise.
Drones, cars, and health commerce. What they share is the place.
Ask a Rwandan regulator a question, and you get a yes or a no, usually within weeks. For a founder burning runway, that speed is worth more than any introduction I could make.
So yes, the better Rwanda runs, the less a company needs someone like me there. I’m fine with that. It’s the model I wish more of the markets I work in would copy.
The work just moves to the next place where nobody picks up the phone.
Would you rather crack a big market slowly, or a fast one first?