Their efforts in technology business have helped Kenya earn the tag ‘Silicon Savannah’
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Their efforts in technology business have helped Kenya earn the tag ‘Silicon Savannah’. Photo/GRAPHICS
There is money in IT, and this is how we make it
Posted Thursday, February 23 2012
They are ambitious, aggressive and tech-savvy. In their efforts, they’ve shown that one can turn technology into a successful business. Below, meet six ‘techpreneurs’ who have ventured and conquered the virtual world.
Hilda Moraa, 24, Head WezaTele Company
WezaTele is a solutions provider that applies mobile technologies such as SMS and USSD — a technology that is used to send text between a mobile phone and an application program in the network.
She honed her business skills at Strathmore University, where she was a student. After her studies, she set out to take advantage of the many opportunities that she saw in the innovation arena.
“My love for technology and innovation spurred me to look at my school projects in an applied dimension. My curiosity and self-determination also inspired me to become one of the solutions providers,” she says.
The young techpreneur, who employs seven full-time staff, says she hopes her firm will break even by June this year.
The firm now has clients from several companies in Kenya, including Mamamikes.com, a local e-commerce company.
Wezatele has been featured in global circles, and was most recently featured in TedX — a global set of conferences held around the world for thought-leaders and innovators.
‘My-Order’, an application developed while she was still a student, has gained continent-wide attention.
Mbugua Njihia, 28, CEO Symbiotic Media
The technology company focuses on mobile business, mobile entertainment, custom Web and mobile application solutions.
The company, Symbiotic Media, is a leader in this technological field, and its product ‘Sembuse’ was recently named one of Forbes Africa Top 20 start-ups.
Mbugua’s techpreneurial skills were fostered early — since his university days in 2006 — and he says his love for business and technology meant that he would eventually start his own firm.
Among the firm’s achievements is building East Africa’s first mobile social network, which achieved a base network of 250,000 million users by 2009.
His advice to others venturing into techpreneurship is to first seek a niche, and settle where one is most comfortable
“Will you be a solutions creator or a reseller? Will you develop from scratch or will you support and distribute? Such are the questions that one must answer. A real business means cash flows and margins,” he says.
Kamal Budhabatti, CEO and founder, Craftsilicon
CraftSilicon is a global software firm based in Kenya, providing software solutions to core-banking, microfinance, switching, electronic and mobile payments across four continents.
The company is worth Sh1.7 billion, with an annual income of over Sh500 million.
Mr Budhabatti used to moonlight during office hours, often writing software all night long, until he got his first big break in 2000 when a friend told him of a local bank that needed software.
He grabbed the opportunity. When his boss found out about his side job, he was fired from his work as a data entry clerk and deported to India.
He struggled to raise money to buy a ticket back to Kenya, as he still had to finish the software.
That is how his story in techpreneurship began.
Now the firm has over 200 staff, housed at the Sh420 million Craft Silicon Campus, off Waiyaki Way in Westlands, Nairobi.
It also has offices in New York, India and West Africa, serving over 200 clients.
The company also has an office in Silicon Valley, in Palo Alto California, a feat few African founded companies can claim.
Mike Macharia, group CEO, Seven Seas Technologies (SST)
Mr Macharia founded SST in 1999, aged 25, based on a strong belief and faith in himself.
The company has since grown steadily over the years, evolving from a humble infrastructure-based firm to a full IT services company that has 100 employees and three offices in Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia.
Last year, it generated Sh2 billion in revenue. He has steered SST to the heights through innovation, vision, commitment and passion, rising to become one of Africa’s respected technology entrepreneurs.
He has always been passionate about technology and how it can be used to leverage and transform Africa in the way people live, work, play and govern.
SST has won global recognition, including the VMware Africa Channel Partner of the Year in 2011, in recognition of the firm’s cloud computing efforts in East Africa.
Moses Kihumba, CEO Partech Solutions
Partechs Solutions, a firm worth Sh4 million, has found a niche in providing customised software solutions to businesses in Kenya and East Africa.
As an active member of student club activities, the Nazarene University alumni dealt a lot with entrepreneurship and empowering communities through business, where he earned the skills to start his own firm.
“I started exploring what sectors were profitable and offered high growth potential. That is how I ended up in ICT. Though I was doing finance major, I decided to look for some friends who had studied computer science and convinced them to establish an IT firm. That is how Partechs Solutions was founded,” he says.
Last year, the firm was declared the winner of stage one of the Ericsson Application Awards — an annual, global competition for application developers on the Android platform.
Remaining disciplined in personal, financial and social aspects during the first few years of building the company are some of the challenges he faced.
“Mobile apps in the business sphere are the present and the future; that’s why Partechs has already embraced the future,” he says
The anatomy of millionaires
Most are self-made, launch their enviable business empires from almost nothing, writes ANTHONY NGATIA
Millionaire! The term conjures a number of images in the minds of most people. Flamboyant, proud, snobbish, lazy people vacationing in glamorous locations.
Well, while one or two millionaires may be described in some of these words, the stuff the average millionaire is made of baffles. A peek into their lives reveals a different story: hard work, sacrifice, frugality, sheer devilry risk taking coupled with a steely determination to succeed.
We would like to say luck was on their side or some tall or well heeled relative put them in ‘the stead’ hence they had a head start in life unlike most of us, but yet a keener look at them reveals the stunner stuff they are made of.
In terms their outlook, they are a different breed altogether that sees the glass as half full; and never half empty, hence their resounding success.
They are persistent and focused, bold, entrepreneurial, patient, creative, disciplined among other attributes. And their stories run the gamut from inventors, celebrities, industrialists to struggling entrepreneurs who over years built enviable business empires.
And while few became millionaires from their fast lane jobs, nearly all of them rose from the low-rated jobs.
Warren Buffet, for instance, started as an itinerant supplier delivering newspapers to people using a bicycle. Today, his business empire is valued at around $47 billion.
Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest and powerful women in the world and whose net worth hovers around $2.7 billion, started off in a humble way as a grocery store clerk.
Girgio Armani, the eccentric Italian billionaire, whose net worth today stands at $5.3 billion was a photography assistant.
Even stories of our very own is a portrait of a humble beginning. The late Gerishon Kirima was a carpenter then a butcher and this confirms that there is something: a rare business acumen that propels millionaires from the bottom end of society. At the time of death this year, Kirima had built an empire worth more than Sh750 million.
And it is this rare trait coupled with ‘smart thinking’ devoid of even impressive college certificates that probably saw Njenga Karume manage to pull himself up and build a massive business empire from the unenviable lowly-rated menial job of a charcoal seller, according to his biography: Beyond Expectations; from Charcoal to Gold.
But perhaps one of the most outstanding traits of millionaires is their clenched teeth determination to pursue whatever they focus on, and do not care about the opinions of others, and without fearing any failure.
When asked about how people reacted to his intention to resign from teaching a few years ago, the late Kenyan poultry millionaire Henry Muguku said: “my principal thought I was crazy because my job was stable. But I was determined.”
It is this ‘craziness’ coupled with steely determination, traits common with all millionaires, that saw him build the biggest hatchery in the country estimated to be worth more than Sh3 billion.
Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group of companies epitomises how determination to pursue one’s passion regardless of one’s weakness (he was dyslexic can take a person far.
As a teenager school drop out, Branson started with his passion: starting his own newspaper. Today, he is a quintessential billionaire, with over 400 companies under his arm and ranked as the 254th richest person in the world by Forbes Magazine in 2011.
But as the number of self-made millionaires seems to rise even amidst the worst global financial crisis in recent times, scientists are weaving another strand in the whole question about the stuff millionaires are made of.
A June 2006 article published in The Mail Online quotes a research done in Britain and the US on entrepreneur-millionaires, which found that self-made millionaires’ success could actually lie in their genes.
This is contrary to the generally held notion that family environment and upbringing influence going it alone.
Stacy Kiruthi, an entrepreneurship consultant, argues that it’s a combination of factors such as planning, thinking big, superb management acumen, and the people one associates with, chance and fearlessness that make the millionaire tick.
“They are penny-wise. They combine frugality and always live below their means. They seem to fully ascribe to the rule ‘look after your cents and the shillings will look after themselves.”
What of education? A peek into most of their resumes, such as Bill Gates of Microsoft, Richard Branson, Michael Dell (the University of Texas drop out who has built the world known, Dell, a computer company and is today a magnate estimated to be worth about $13.5 billion), Apple’s Steve Jobs, and off course some of the local millionaires shows they went through the ‘school of hard knocks’ or street school but emerged wiser than most of us in the subject of money and wealth making.
But there is never a shortage of ‘eccentrics’, even crazy few within this class, perhaps a tipping point of the genius bubbling in them.
Graham Pendrill, a British millionaire traded his £1.2 million mansion in his native town Almondsbury for a Maasai mud hut in Kenya last year having been adopted by the Maasai as an elder.
Karl Rebeder, a French millionaire who grew up in poverty decided to give out his entire fortune valued at £3 million claiming the money “did not give him happiness” as he had thought when he was poor. He opted to retreat into a small wooden hut into the mountains from a luxurious Alpine retreat.
Stacy says that this is unexpected from this ilk “as at they are first and foremost ordinary human beings like everybody else. The fact that they are millionaires is because they concentrate more and unrelentlessly on investing and the experience has made them wiser.”
Too many descriptions and conjectures as to what makes millionaires exist, yet no single word or as compelling explanation exists apart from probably the horse’s mouth.
Richard Branson says many people ask him what his secret is and what they can do to be millionaires. The reply: “I always tell them the same thing. I have no secret. There are no rules to follow in business. I just work hard and, as I always have done, believe I can do it. Most of all, through, I try to have fun.”
http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/InsidePage.php?id=2000039338&cid=4¤tPage=3
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