Next Wave: Scale Is Perspective

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Apply now. Thus, Mpesa can build remittance rails for its home user market. But its historic struggles outside of Kenya suggests that the geocentric approach of building a world that revolves around its mobile wallet is a poor model for understanding the world of financial services outside Kenya. Its the same for the many examples of failed product and/or company expansions and bruised retreat stories that we have seen in the last year.
When tech businesses begin to expand beyond their home turf, they soon discover that finding scale by building tribute products that are loosely attached to a core offering or building fully detached systems that merely orbit a star product is not enough.
Eventually, we may realise that the true universal relationships of technology businesses that will hold the stakes in Africas multi-billion dollar digital economy is not geocentric or heliocentric. Instead, we may well find out like the ancient astronomers that being geocentric or heliocentric is a perspective that will work well within localised context, but break once it transcends borders geographic and otherwise.
Realising this should be a call to action for everyone with a stake in the success of Africas fledgling 180 billion hopeful internet economy to build better definitions and support for scale. Being geocentric or heliocentric companies is not an indicator of success it is merely a perspective for assessing the market opportunity a business is trying to solve.