That Startup

If you're building in an emerging market, stop looking for the conditions to be right. The broken infrastructure IS your moat. Build the missing layer. Jumia raised $750M because they understood this before anyone else did. #startups

In 2011, Jumia didn't exist. By 2019, it was listed on the NYSE. But the real story isn't the IPO. It's the two German guys who built Africa's biggest e-commerce company from a Lagos apartment with no local connections.

The insight: infrastructure gaps aren't obstacles. They're the actual product. Jumia didn't wait for Nigeria to have reliable postal services. They became the postal service. That's why copycats couldn't touch them.

They launched in Nigeria in 2012 with one core bet: Don't copy Amazon. Build the logistics layer Africa never had. They hired motorcycle riders, built their own payment system, and offered cash on delivery when no one trusted online payments.

Most people think Jumia was built by Africans who knew African markets. Reality: Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec were McKinsey consultants from France. They had never run a business. Never lived in Lagos. Never shipped a package.

In 1999, Rediff.com raised $30M at a $1B valuation. Everyone said portals were the future. They were wrong. Google killed portals. But Rediff survived by ignoring Silicon Valley playbooks and going deep on Indian languages. It's still live today.

In 2023, $ENGIE sold its Vietnam solar assets for $1.2B. They bought them for $300M in 2019. The buyer was a local fund most people had never heard of. Southeast Asia is the next big climate trade. #climatetech

Before you spend a dollar on ads, answer this: Where does your customer go the moment they feel the problem you solve? That's your distribution. Cook built a $7B company standing outside tax offices with floppy disks. What's your equivalent? #startups

In 1987, Intuit had $0 for marketing. So Scott Cook did something nobody else tried. He called 1-800 numbers for competing products and listened to every complaint customers had. Then he fixed exactly those things.

The insight isn't guerrilla marketing. It's location arbitrage. Find where your customer already goes when they feel the pain your product solves. That place is your distribution channel. Everything else is expensive guessing.

Cook's hack: he stationed himself outside H&R Block offices. He handed Quicken floppies directly to people walking out. No stores. No middlemen. No ads. Just a founder finding the exact moment someone realized they had a money problem.

Everyone assumes Quicken won because it was better software. It wasn't. Lotus and Microsoft had more features, bigger teams, and real distribution budgets. Intuit won because Cook found customers before they knew they needed him.

In 2011, Doctolib was rejected by every French hospital it approached. They had no users, no revenue, no credibility. By 2019, 1 in 3 French doctors used it. It's now worth €5.8B. The hospitals eventually came to them.

In 1999, Alibaba had $0 revenue and Jack Ma couldn't get a bank loan. eBay entered China in 2003 with 85% market share. By 2006, Alibaba's Taobao had taken 67% of that market back. Free listings beat transaction fees every time.

The lesson isn't 'be contrarian.' It's that consensus in healthcare pointed at workflow problems. The money was in financial problems wearing clinical clothes. Before you build, ask: who loses sleep over this? Then find their spreadsheet. #startups

In 1996, a Stanford doctor told insurers his software could cut hospital readmissions by 30%. They laughed at him. Five years later, that doctor was Jeffrey Rideout, and his data proved them wrong by a factor of 2.

Most 90s health tech founders chased the EMR market because that's where the RFPs were. TriZetto ignored the RFPs and chased the CFOs. CFOs don't buy software. They fund things that move a number they're already measured on. Readmission costs moved that number.

The core move was brutal in its simplicity. Rideout's team at TriZetto pulled claims data that insurers already owned but never analyzed. No new data collection. No new hardware. Just a different question asked of existing numbers.

Everyone believed healthcare IT meant digitizing paper records. Rideout believed it meant predicting which patients would end up back in the ER within 90 days. One of those ideas made hospitals buy fax machines. The other built a company worth $400M.

In 1999, an AI startup called Yseek got zero traction online. So founder Gil Elbaz rented billboard space in Manhattan subway stations. 100k daily commuters saw it. Within 60 days, enterprise leads tripled. Foot traffic was their algorithm.