
Iain Usiri
238 posts

Iain Usiri
@iusiri
CEO @ Ramani (YCW20) | Stanford CS | Finance Marketplace for SMB | Credit | Emerging Markets | Embedding AI in African finance 💪🏾


everyone I know is working more than they’ve ever worked, or at least in many years, it’s so fun and the leverage is so high, can do more interesting research in an hour than in days 3yrs ago… per tab. my avg friend is working 7 days a week now. too much opportunity cost

Like recover all business controls ... tracking royalties ... locating money ... finding reg flags ... planning ... organizing years of information ... creating family office structure... business navigation ... I've been waiting my whole life for tools like this!


Tanzania has millions of entrepreneurs, yet most businesses are just copies of someone else’s business. Why? Do we lack innovation?



We* built the first ever Turing-complete Swahili programming language — Nuru. And we just secured a $40,000 contract to bring it to 5,000 learners in Swahili-speaking classrooms. And I know what you’re thinking: Why build a Swahili programming language?Aren’t there already a dozen “better” languages than Nuru could ever be? Yes. “You’re absolutely right!” Now buckle up and hear me out! As AI systems get stronger, the “how” is getting “cheaper” every year. Implementation details are being trivialized. The real advantage shifts to the “what”: knowing what to build, why it matters, and having systems understanding at a high level. The winners won’t be the people who can write the most syntax from memory, they’ll be the people with strong fundamentals and the confidence to build. That’s why we believe the programming language of the future is going to be the one you already speak.... For the millions of us from the so-called “3rd world countries”, that language is Swahili! When we started teksafari.org, one thing became obvious fast: integrating into public schools in Tanzania would be hard. Most technical learning is delivered in English, but for many young Tanzanians—especially outside big cities—English is a third language. We don’t really do excuses. And we couldn’t sit around waiting for policy to catch up to the urgency. So we built the Nuru Playground, on top of the Nuru language that @AviTheDev had been working on, so we could finally deliver our technical programs in Swahili-speaking classrooms without the translation tax. We have already reached hundreds of students with a couple schools on our waitlist. Read the full article -> linkedin.openinapp.co/65go2 The future remains exciting 🫡 CC @costechTANZANIA @Said_Hozza @Afruturist @VenturesSahara

African customers don’t value software that much. Their low willingness to pay compresses TAM for traditional Saas. It’s why many African startups turned to fintech (willingness to pay). But with AI you go from selling software to selling a service...


This Startup Is Putting an Accent Coach in Your Pocket inc.com/maria-jose-gut…


IShowSpeed just unlocked the world’s eye on the beauty of Benin 🇧🇯

Politics in #Tanzania supersedes meritocracy to showcase same, example @ifakarahealth use of high-tech against #Malaria; -Drones for mosquito surveillance -AI for malaria detection & diagnostics -AI for predicting malaria outbreaks Read: malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles


Rio Ferdinand reading out Sir Alex Ferguson’s text message to Ravel Morrison is heartbreaking. Ravels response is even more so 👇 🗣️“If I could go back in time I would change 90% of my life.” 😢

Presumably ChatGPT is trained on corpora of things written by humans, and yet it doesn't sound like any human I know. Is there a population somewhere of people who write in chirpy bulleted lists that I've somehow managed to avoid?



