Kyle @ Grant&Co--Af/Acc 🌍🚀⚛️

Bribes and Investors When I came to Kenya I planned to never give a bribe; its just part of our "religion" as westerners that we take for granted (nevermind that at the highest levels of government everywhere quid pro quo is the norm). Then I joined a business group in Kenya known for its high ethical standards. We visited eachothers businesses. All them were doing better than me and older than me. It's not that some of them gave bribes. All of them did, and they were often very clever about it. Almost a core competency.... And was this really so bad? Imagine you're driving a truck of food to starving people and a police officer asks for $1. Would it be amoral NOT to give something small? And considering democracy came on a boat and people back then had a perfectly well functioning system of giving something to the local chief who protected the area. Is backlash against quid pro quo neo-colonialism? Bribes in the US only become important at the level of Boeing, Pfizer, Halliburton, etc but in Africa it’s part of everyday life for startup founders right from the beginning. But western investors don't want to know about bribes in Africa. How do you handle this? Some more thoughts here: open.substack.com/pub/grantco/p/…

@JulianFried Mythical man-month. The more people you have the longer it takes. Strong argument to acquire, fire and increase profits. Don’t know why more such funds don’t exist.

Out of curiosity what do the 500+ employees at Calendly do over the course of 6 day work week? I have a clear picture of the tonnage of weldments that can be shipped per week with that headcount but it is unclear to me how this translates to a software business. Genuine question

@adeoressi @paulg Interesting!

@paulg Your ability to use AI will go up exponentially if you know how to program. Instructing AI with JSON is better than English, as an example.

If you want to start a software startup, you should still learn to program. Even if AI writes most of your code, you'll still be in the position of an engineering manager, and to be a good engineering manager you have to be a programmer yourself.

@EACinvestor @Afro__Investor @MwangoCapital Will there be a reckoning for their family legacies? Like how embarrassing it is for some former slave holding families in the US?

@Afro__Investor @MwangoCapital Infuriating. I just don’t know where our fathers & uncles learned leadership and integrity from. Clearly they are the weak link in actualizing the Kenya we want.

"Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that in Kenya, and probably in a lot of emerging markets, if you want to scale a SaaS business, your customer has to be the government. One tender can cover your whole year. The private market just isn’t there yet." Thoughts on this?

@yoelapalkin If you’re in Silicon Valley you already optimized for a certain kind of thinker. Go somewhere else.

Silicon Valley has become full of builders who’ve stopped thinking. They chase approval from VCs, incubators, accelerators, Twitter. It’s a culture of borrowed conviction, and I can’t stand it. The best founders I’ve learned from knew when to pause, question the game, and carve their own path. That mindset’s becoming rare. Originality is harder than ever when the system rewards conformity. We need more independent thinkers in the arena. Lately, I’m seeing far too few and far too many playing the exact same game.

@stephsmithio National Museum of Qatar

@stephsmithio The Qatar history museum. How they went from pearl divers to fending off a trade blockade in 2020 was incredible. There’s a shawarma place on the street outside delicious. Also Yemeni food was a highlight for me.

Twitter, I need your help! Have an unexpected day in Doha. What’s the best food I can find here? Anything I should absolutely see?

@joliegans @patrickc 💯“We went from 500 people who could conduct and execute on research to 50,000 locked in cages”

When I tell you I inhaled this book, I mean I read it in one sitting, then 7 times over again. I've recommended it 57 times, gifted 12 copies, and lovingly annotated it on 6 flights. Donald Braben's Scientific Freedom is an eulogy to scientific discovery, autopsied while it was still alive. He predicted the current landscape of research, 17 years before it happened. We went from 500 people who could conduct and execute on research to 50,000 locked in cages of incremental work. Young scientists don't even bother anymore (they just leave). We didn't get dumber. We built a system that punishes risk. I would argue that most Nobel-winning discoveries from the 20th century would be rejected today (too weird! Too slow! Too uncertain!) Since 2008: > Peer review times have tripled > Federal grant success rates fall below 20% > First-time PI age is approaching 50 > (new!) Research funding cuts up to 43% I've spent the last few weeks mapping what Braben saw coming and stress-testing his arguments in 2025, what he missed, new challenges, and what we can adapt from here. Deep dive follows below! Very few books make me go wow, let alone restructure my entire paradigm. @stripepress knew what they were doing bringing this back. Everyone even remotely adjacent to scientific research needs to read this.

@SMB_Attorney @smblawgroup Detractor status on average is less than zero, sir.

The average lawyer has an NPS score of 24/100. That’s detractor status on average… yikes! @smblawgroup is a 98/100! What do clients cite the most as the difference? Take a wild guess…

@MwangoCapital This is a good sign. People start complaining when the issue is nearly over. Happens repeatedly throughout history.

The Economist has an article titled "Kenya’s president is bad news for Kenya & Africa." "....the business environment has become even less friendly. Local bosses complain of pressure & intimidation by government officials, for instance, to hand over stakes in their companies."

The climate change debate is dying. Everyone of us has contributed to its death and our kids and grandkids will be thankful. The younger educated population in Africa won't buy climate alarmism, unlike our corrupt leaders who did it for climate reparation 💰 💰 and green related funds to loot. From 2050, Africa will be one of the largest emitters and we will not give a damn until every last one of us has tapped water, can afford a balanced diet, has a clean toilet, is cooking using cleaner Fuels, a house with a floor, access to electricity, the last of their kids is well educated, little to no survival toil, roads, etc. These people you are here are crushing rocks to gravel for construction, manually. They dig the rocks up using mattocks and crush them using a mallet. Our Einsteins and Newtons are tied in this loop of poverty and toil, for life.

@USAmbKenya techweez.com/2025/01/01/us-…

@USAmbKenya amen

@johnrushx @listingbott We run kuzana.co an acceleration fund for the top 0.1% SMEs in Kenya. Would SEObot and listing bot work for us to get more, better applicants? Or it doesn't work in Kenya yet?

My AI Agent just landed a job 🥹

@johnrushx @listingbott @benstukenborg this looks interesting...

@johnrushx I do use Mercury and love it! It's all the other things that keep logging out like Gusto, stripe, my Kenyan bank, etc.

@thegrantdotco use mercury bank

How to be ultra productive: (I run 20 startups simultaneously) (( the tips most wouldn’t expect ))

@johnrushx The challenge with this is that by the time I come back my online banking has already logged out 😭

2. Learn to switch tasks & contexts. When I chat with someone, instead of watching a “typing indicator” I switch to another task and then come back. Think of it as a CPU that processes commands on cycles. That’s what I do, evey cycle I touch many tasks, then on the next cycle I touch them all again. So there is never any “idle” time tor me.

@johnrushx Now I feel better about task switching and not delegating. Are you diagnosed with ADHD btw?

16. Don’t be perfectionist, cut all corners. Only apply perfectionism for 1% of your tasks: social media posts, onboarding and wow effect in your app, the strategic decisions(domain name, slogan).

@baldridgecpa Use @cursor_ai for Google apps script and you can push code in less than seconds use the clasp command

A hill I’ll die on: Google Sheets is better than Excel and it’s not even close

@paulg @ianmisner Talking to customers perhaps.

@ianmisner No. Many if not most of the startups YC accepts don't have customers yet.

A high school student told me that at his school a lot of the kids start fake startups and nonprofits for college admissions. He asked how YC filters out fake ideas, and I realized this is a very complicated question.

@StephNass @createsomechaos No. Each Google Doc has an activity dashboard. It’s very comprehensive. Underrated feature. Also you could have a landing page for someone to enter their email and then redirect to a public google doc.

@createsomechaos Simple and effective. But no analytics. Or am I wrong?

Apart from DocSend and Papermark, what's a cool data room solution for startups?