Ahabwe Collins

What is a startup What comes into your mind when someone says the word startup? Innovation, new trends, disruptive technology, experimental business models, scrappy young entrepreneurs, instability, revolutions, universal impact, name it. These words and so many others keep crisscrossing one’s mind when one talks about startups and this can be depicted in the different definitions of a startup below Definitions of a startup A startup is an experiment in search of a business model – Solomon Kitumba C.E.O and founder YOZA. A startup is a young company that is just starting to develop, startups are usually small and initially financed and operated by a handful of founders or one individual, these companies ofer a product or service that is not currently being offered elsewhere in the market or that the founder believe is being offered in an inferior manner – ‘investopedia’ . A startup is a company working to solve a problem where the solution is not obvious and suc...

Uganda is considered number one in entrepreneurship, with the highest number of business startups in every single year according to research by international agencies. This is one side of the coin but on the other side of the coin, there is also a high mortality rate (death rate) for these small businesses in Uganda. Last week we had a heated discussion about this issue on one of our whatsapp groups (young treps), am glad to share with you some nuggets from this discussion and my personal ideas on how to reduce on the mortality rate of business in Uganda. Starting a business with one single idea of making money is all wrong. What if you don’t make the money, what happens? Can you hold on during tough times like the ones we are in today? So why would you start a business in the first place? If you don’t have any strong reason for starting a business chances are that you may not survive the first year in business. In this heated discussion the whole argument zeroed down to the...

Image credit: ArtisticNaturee  www.facebook.com/ArtisticNaturee / __Always pay your workers first. You can’t call yourself an entrepreneur if you have the habit of not paying your workers on time, erratically, or not at all. Real business leaders always pay their employees first. Let's call it the first law of entrepreneurship. Let's talk. I began my business career as a construction contractor more than 30 years ago. My business entailed getting construction contracts, some which took several years to complete. I would sometimes have thousands of people working on my projects. 90% of my people were paid on a weekly basis. It was almost a ritual, whereby we’d go to the bank on Friday morning to collect the "payroll." Each worker was paid in cash, and we would sit and pack the money into little brown envelopes, after deducting taxes. We'd then travel to the sites and pay them their money. I never ever missed a payroll… except once, and it probably s...

__Talking a good game is not enough. I was meeting with one of New York’s most successful bankers, when he quipped, "In my business we don’t rely on intellectual property. There’s nothing we do that’s so special; we’re just damned good managers of businesses!" I could immediately understand what he meant because when, for instance, you stop to think about a business like McDonald’s, you ask "What’s so special about a hamburger?" But somehow out of that humble hamburger they’ve built a $96bn business… a global business bigger than the GDP of Kenya ($70bn)! __They are "just damn good managers of business!" When we launched our Mobile Money business in Zimbabwe, it wasn’t a new idea in Zimbabwe, or in Africa. To be honest, one of our competitors was a year ahead of us, but it really didn’t matter to me. I knew that when we finally launched our own service, it would be bigger and better because "We're good managers of busine...

When you have a country in massive debt, in economic and political disarray, with loss of trust in the government, it’s only a matter of time before a dictatorial leader steps in and gains the support of the people. That’s what happened in 1789 in France, and triggered the French Revolution. Citizens turned against King Louis XVI in protest of the monarchy’s excesses and the debt France had racked up during the American Revolution, catching the elite totally off-guard. Napoleon took advantage of the situation and created a dictatorship, declaring himself “Emperor” and taking charge of the army. Unwittingly, the French public had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. What happened next? Napoleon adopted what’s now famously know as the “Napoleon complex”, proclaiming to make France great again by attacking all France’s international neighbours. The world pushed back, defeating Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo and exiling him to the remote island of Saint Hel...

Are you an entrepreneur? If so, you are one of the rising billion - the fastest growing economic sector in history. In the 1950's, the rise of corporations and the middle class grew to several 100 million, when the world had a population of 2.5 billion. Today, there's 7 billion of us, and in the 1st 20 years of the new 21st Century entrepreneurs are growing from 4% to 12% of the population.  We've grown from less than 200 million in 2000, to over 400 million today, to 1 billion by 2020 - this sector is 10x the size of the 9-to-5 workforce created in the first 20 years of the industrial revolution. This movement is already transforming the world in the most incredible ways, from how we share resources, advance technology and find solutions to impact the world. So if you're an entrepreneur, you're not alone. You're in good company. And you're part of a historic sea change that is already shaping the future in the most amazing ways. * Data from OECD, GEM ...

Have you ever been rejected for a job? Brian Acton has. After 11 years at Yahoo! and out of a job at 38 years old, Brian went job hunting... first to Twitter (rejected) then to Facebook (rejected). What do you do when you’re 38 years old, competing unsuccessfully against 20-somethings for a job as a systems engineer? If you’re Brian, you go out and play frisbee...  Two years earlier, he had trav elled South America playing ultimate frisbee with Jan Koum, who he had met while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Now, in the midst of his job rejections, he met up with Jan again for a game of frisbee. It was while playing, Jan told Brian he was working on a start-up to create a new kind of mobile app, but he had run out of money. Jan had lived on welfare with his parents when he first arrived to the US from Ukraine. Not wanting to go back on food stamps, he asked Brian for advice on whether he should quit and start looking for a job. Admiring Jan for his courage in star...

In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared a nd they went bankrupt. What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 years - and most people don't see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you would never take pictures on paper film again? Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore's law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became way superior and got mainstream in only a few short years. It will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs. Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Exponential Age. Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years. Uber is just a software tool, they don't own any cars, and a...

Which version of Facebook are you using? Did you know there are tens of thousands of versions of  Facebook running at any one time - and you’re using just one of them? In an interview this week with Y Combinator, Mark Zuckerberg explains that in today’s fast-changing world, “The key is building a company that is focused at learning as fast as possible.” “Companies are learning organisms. You can make decisions so you can either make it learn faster or you learn slower.” This is how Facebook makes that happen: “We invest in this huge testing framework and at any given point of time there isn’t just one version of Facebook running in the World. There’s probably tens of thousands of versions running.” “Because engineers here have the power to try out an idea, and ship it to maybe 10,000 people or 100,000 people. And then they get a read-out on that version of what they did - whether it was a change to show better content on Newsfeed or a UI change or new feature.” “They ...