Afridigest Curated Content: How to sell your company

Ideas that matter for Africa-focused founders, executives, and investors like you.

Emeka Ajene

Jul 13, 2023

∙ Paid

Hi, friends 👋🏽! Today’s edition features ideas that matter on how to sell your company, what it takes to do great work, why Africa doesn’t need tech (& what it needs instead), how investing in Africa is misunderstood, how to kill a social network, and more.

And in case you missed it, here’s the previous curated content edition.

(P.S.— Should we kill or keep this new curated content feature: 😡 Kill • 😑 Meh • 😃 Keep)

If you’re new here: welcome — the Week in Review is sent on Mondays, the Fintech Review goes out on Sundays, and Wednesdays are for Intelligence Briefs or Curated Content like this. (We’re late today. 😔) And from time to time, an original essay goes out on Saturdays. For past essays and digests, visit the archive & Afridigest.com. And with that said, let’s get into it!

💡 How to sell your company (video)

Pan-African identity verification & digital KYC platform Smile Identity acquired its Ghanaian counterpart Appruve in Week 17.

And in the interview below, Appruve’s co-founder & CEO Paul Damalie discusses his journey and the Appruve acquisition. Some good nuggets here on dealing with co-founder conflict and how deals actually get done.

“For a very long time, [Smile Identity Co-Founder/CEO Mark Straub] & I would regularly get on calls and talk about the industry and where it's going.

In the back of my mind sometimes I'd think, ‘Oh, you are really stupid. Why are you doing this? Talking with your competitor?’

But in hindsight, it was probably one of the best things I did. In fact, if you think about it, it was exit strategy on a very tactical level because we had the opportunity to integrate APIs together, pursue customers together, pursue opportunities together throughout the years, and that's what basically led us to start thinking about building a single entity to go after this problem.”

🌐 Link

Refer a friend

💡 How to do great work (article)

This just in: a fresh, new essay from Y Combinator’s Paul Graham. It’s dense with ideas and well worth the read. And while generally geared towards the young & ambitious among us, there’s value here for everyone.

🌐 Link

✨ The rest of this newsletter is available to premium members of Afridigest whose support makes this work possible. Next up, a contrarian idea: Africa doesn’t need tech, it needs trucks.✨

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