SoCap08: Investing in Social Entrepreneurs

When Google flew me in to represent Appfrica.org at Barcamp Africa I could never have known how much the trip would actually impact my work. There was a lot of one degree of separation going on while I was in the Bay area. For instance, I met my business partners in Question Box (Rose Shuman and Ken Banks) for the first time face to face at SoCap. I met Lila from Samasource and Emykah from TED for the first time after having had conversations with them both via email. One of the big highlights was finally meeting Nathaniel Whitmore of Assetmap.org. I also met six people from six unrelated groups that were all headed to Uganda in the next three weeks!

The fact of the matter Social Entrepreneurship is an incredibly small space with few influential people all sort of defining the conversation. When you talk about investors that circle gets even smaller.

Ironically Barcamp Africa and SoCap08 (Social Capital Markets 2008) happened only a few days apart and I ran into many of the same faces at both. This was good. The general feeling at BCA (which was one day) is that it could have used one more day while the general feeling at SoCap08 (three days) was that it could have used more ‘unconferencing’ and less lectures from keynotes. So a mash-up of the two event-styles would have been perfect.

My observations of what people were interested in at SoCap from various conversations and eavesdropping:

• Are African tech ventures profitable?
• Why is there so much attention on Africa?
• What is China’s stance on Social Entrepreneurship?
• Legal loopholes of being a for-profit social enterprise.
• Raising money as a social enterprise.
• Social investment exit strategies.

One very interesting conversation panel I attended about Diversity and Inclusion in Social Capital literally had a woman (Caucasian) bluntly ask the following: “Why are there so many white people here talking to other white people?”

Her point was that Social Investors and Entrepreneurs run a real risk of making the same mistake a number of development organizations have made for years. There’s the potential to unintentionally (or intentionally for that matter) exclude the people who’s problems you’re attempting to solve from working with ‘the problem solvers’. When this happens there isn’t much distinction between social ventures and colonial movements of the past. One of the ideas that came out of the following conversation was to make an effort next year to find social entrepreneurs from around the globe and sponsor their attendance next year. Despite the question I felt SoCap08 was actually quite diverse with a number of interesting social entrepreneurs represented from Beirut to Brazil.

Another interesting panel was Peter Kaminski’s ‘Social Media for Social Entrepreneurs’ which had a lot of talk about how to avoid overwhelming non-early adopters with too much information. Amy Benziger made some interesting points about aggregating an entire brand on the web versus filtering and delivering only relevant bits to the right people. Someone else made the point to say a lot of groups don’t engage social media because it’s a never ending conversation that they don’t know how to ‘get out of’. For those people and groups, that inability to control a conversation is intimidating.

The most relevant panel to what I’m trying to do with Appfrica Labs was ‘New African Capital’ which featured Modibo Camara, Samuel Alemayehu, and Jo-ann Pohl. Jo-Ann talked about the adverse affects of ineffective social ventures, “You’ve got a willing bodies that have a feel good factor but not enough being effective.” ^[t] She went on to frame a key difference in business thinking in the region, “Africa is community driven…you’re only as good as your network and your networks network.” ^[t] Samuel specifically works in the VC, angel investor, incubator and technology space and advocated that there needs to be more initiatives in Africa by African as well as foreign investors.

Like most conferences, the best…most valuable information often came from casual conversations with other attendees. I met the founder of two technology incubators, one in Beirut and the other in Bangladesh who had particular insight in operating such ventures in non-traditional, high-risk emerging markets. Rose Shuman did a remarkable job framing our project Question Box for people and found some potential partners. She and I brainstormed on the idea of using a custom version of Afridex as a CRM for all the business cards we’ve collected. We’ll hire one of the Appfrica Lab participants to do the data entry if they’re interested in doing it. If anyone who attended SoCap would like to offer up their contacts I’ll be happy to give you access as well.

Lastly, I increased my client/partner network by 200%. A number of groups are interested in having either me or Appfrica Labs pick up their excess overflow work in web application development. To be frank, I’m boot-strapping a start-up company in Uganda and so all of this work is invaluable. It’s directly impacting how effective I am on the ground and people are starting to stand that I’m asking for donations….I’m raising seed capital one way or another (through investments or work).

Also, I should mention that this, for me, was largely a lesson in how to present and how to sell my ideas more effectively. When you’re sitting at a table with the deal-makers, people who command thousands (if not millions) of dollars, there’s an art to making them listen to you. So if it’s an art, I’m still drawing stick figures but it was great to be sitting next to the Rembrandts!