Pando DAO is driving the African tech ecosystem forward with Yacob, Cheng, Michael & Zach Marks

foreign [Music] you have to change the mind hello that's oh I see yeah yeah okay what's up y'all hello I can't hear you what's up yo yo um okay so we're gonna get started you know you're welcome to sit or stand for this experience this is going to be an experience right like we want to make sure everyone is going to have fun we're going to learn something we're going to grow together here on stage uh and uh it's really loud so you know just like bear with us as we work our way through this um so just to kick things off let me just check with AV AV are we good we're good okay sick so whoa I want to hear I really can't hear y'all like yes thank you [Applause] okay awesome um okay yeah so I would love to start just like with introductions like basic stuff I'm gonna pass it over to Jacob um hi everyone my name is Jacob I am the CEO and co-founder of parity and parodies building infrastructure for entrepreneurship in Africa we help Founders raise money and hire talent and collectively we've come together to form Pando Dao which is the highest quality of Founders building Africa together beautiful that was they're so brief I feel like you have so much more to say Closer Closer like right here I feel like he has so much more to say than that uh I'm Zach marks I'm a co-founder of Gia which is providing blockchain based microfinancing to entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets primarily we focus on Kenya and the Philippines where we provide inventory financing to a range of small businesses we're a part of the Pando Dao which Jacob started which has been incredibly helpful for us sourcing talent and just figuring out all of the obstacles that there are to launching a business in Emerging Markets I'm excited to share more but I won't talk too long nice hello my name is Chen I'm also a co-founder of Gia together with Zach really proud to be a member of the Pandora and we'll tell you more about our stories there in a short bit hello I'm Michael um I'm also a co-founder of Pandora we've been working with parity for a while and full-time I'm at angelist liquid delete helped build up a lot of the syndicates infrastructure that became Angelus venture okay awesome so to everyone on stage I'm gonna ask that you keep the microphone don't kiss it but it's got to be like right here we gotta hear you you know um so yeah so I would love to just like spend a couple more minutes some more time hearing about your Ventures so if you could like walk us through Pandora and parody that'd be awesome yeah so uh parody came up when I saw the a cemetery of knowledge and resources on the continent um I moved to the continent about a decade ago and I met so many amazing entrepreneurs that could not Access Capital could not access talent to build their organizations and without doing those things we're not going to get the next JP Morgan the carnegies the people that are going to unlock opportunities on the continent and then furthermore for the founders we realized that we weren't actually learning from each other we're all making the same mistakes so the reason why the Dow is called Pando is the largest living organism in the world it's called Pando it looks like a forest but it's all connected to one route and that's what Pando is all about we uh represent five billion dollars in valuation over a quarter billion in direct foreign investment we employ over 17 000 people across the continent and we've probably paid out close to about 15 million in taxes to African governments over the past year so yeah that's a little bit about Pandora [Applause] yo clap it up clap it up yeah yes love that um so what are The Vibes do we want to sit like how are we feeling well I don't know what did the audience think is it better if we stand or is awkward yeah sit down okay cool thank you for that validation I didn't really like standing anyway so I would I would love to Dow you've talked about Pando you've talked about the work that you are doing and the work you want to do more of so I think it would be cool to hear about Pando to hear about Gia and then Michael if you could kind of talk about so Michael is actually uh an advisor to Pando so if you could talk about why and parody actually uh why you decided to advise this particular Venture especially given your background um living in China being an angelist individual so that would be really awesome so I'm gonna I'm gonna kick it over yeah who wants to start I can shout out one of the panda members his name is uh Gregory rockson he runs the startup called them Pharma I always say he's my favorite founder right now um when I mean like we're we're really trying to help build this continent Gregory's startup actually saved the country of Gabon 30 on their Healthcare procurement and like that's everyday people's lives I mean people are getting access to drugs faster cheaper and they're improving the quality of their life and and that's just one of the members within Pando just to give you a little bit of taste cool I I'm happy to give a little background about what we're building at Gia um we're basically founded to help tackle the five trillion dollar credit Gap in emerging markets and like just to put a face to that just to imagine uh this guy James I was hanging out with last week in Nairobi who's a spice Trader in a market you know in order to do his business he basically has to go and refill by his spices by his sesame seeds every two days because he doesn't have the working capital to buy a larger wholesale prices like buy every seven days or every two weeks and if he could do that then he could access lower prices he could buy more and the day I was visiting him to do some customer research he actually ran out of Sesame and he couldn't do a transaction while I was there it's a very real live use case for why people need financing so um my so Chang and Chang and I we we met because we've been spending the last decade working in microfinance um initially in traditional offline micro Finance Ventures where you're working with small community Community Savings and borrowing circles and then for the last six years at a fintech lending company which basically has a mobile lending app um what you lose with the mobile lending fintech scale is any sense of community ownership and of course one of the great exciting things of web3 is how you can enable distributed ownership at scale um and that's really what led us to to start Geo was this idea that we could provide not only financing but also a path to Building Wealth and prosperity for small businesses so they can access finance and grow their businesses but as the Gia protocol grows in value they have a piece of that ownership pie um yeah that's what we're doing at you yeah yeah so you've worked in in freaking Nations and kind of have fallen in love with the continent obviously done microfinance and International Development work would love to hear your take on why you're doing the work you're doing at Gia and what your vision for the future is yeah thank you yummy so a little bit background as yemi mentioned it's a little bit weird like I'm the Chinese that live in the States but working most time in Africa and part of me like thinking I'm self like already an African person and then so I started my career working in macro Finance through Global ngos that actually put me working Nairobi in 2011 for about half a year that's where I started like feeling like strong bound with the continent and wanted to come back to work there that's why I started learning Swahili for a couple years and which got me to working more into the microfinance base in Tanzania I think where it all started is when I'm in Tanzania working for a Village Bank project where the the because the local banks do not support the groups be the villagers they do not have like a their ID they cannot really access financing so they meet regularly at the The Village to put some of their own savings into a swift box and the leaders of the community like a couple of them would own the access to take care of their saving so that's actually like a community ownership where it's your money you sit there but you have ownership and you can borrow from that and then exact mentioned working the last deck in the fintech company and um casual in a very transactional relationship where when we encounter blockchain that's what's really different is actually going back the traditional micro Finance to give the people the rewards that they earn when they repay a loan they'll bring the interest Revenue into the ecosystem so they should be rewarded as a contributor as owner I think that's really not as excited about what we are building idea yeah yeah um so we are in downtown so I would like to spend time talking about jobs and this is a question for Michael uh because you are an advisor to Republic to on deck and to parody and so could you tell us like why you're optimistic about Dallas and just you know the structure and exactly why you're involved in Panda yeah I can I can tell you a bit so so my background uh like my base a little closer a little sorry my basic philosophy that I've been thinking about for the last 10 years as I've in my career as I've been trying to encourage more entrepreneurship is that technology and Innovation actually creates wealth um you know many people look at the economy and they think um businesses are taking a portion of it um and other means maybe other people lose but actually what's happened over the last few hundred years since essentially the Industrial Revolution is that as technology continues to grow there becomes more of a surplus and so that that helps the the entire world um at at parody like when I got connected with with Jakob um I was looking at um the content already I'd made an investment in Nairobi had worked with a company in Nigeria and and Jacob said he was starting parody with some basically a similar Mission encouraging more entrepreneurship more people who are um striving to to create better technology locally um and there are a couple a couple basically hypotheses in there one is Thailand is evenly divided around the world there are Thailand people everywhere uh number two I also had some experience living in China um I was there in 2008 and when you look at the GDP per person this is basically National Surplus um over the next 10 years some of the best companies ever were founded there like highest growth companies ever that's exactly where where Africa is today and so I think the Dow comes into it though because what was what Jacob has been trying to encourage and what I what I think is is going to be very helpful is the community aspect of it so Founders in Silicon Valley for example you walk down the street you can meet another founder who's two years ahead of you they've faced some similar challenges and they like have today's greatest insight into what what you're trying to do today better than the investors that you meet better than um reading a book about it because books are books are old um and so in in Africa there are many different countries there are people actually doing this on the on the frontiers of knowledge and this communities bring them together yes um so I would love to just like dive into the numbers a little bit more right because I think when we think about Ben or my background is traditional like sass uh building venture-backed businesses and I think that you know the the model of Dallas is a little bit different but I think that Pando has had a lot of impact on the continent and so if you Jakob could kind of share you know the types of Founders like who who qualifies to be a part of Pando and what have you done so far yeah so this is a as a collection of more mature Founders so what we realized was we didn't actually have a good knowledge here so a lot of people were learning things really the hard way having transfer pricing issues um not understanding how to hire and that's some of the things that my startup parody works on but now for the Dow we're raising a fund because we know that overall Africa is going to have the largest population in the world the median age in Africa right now is like 19 years old and if we don't collectively transfer over that knowledge to the next generation of Founders we're going to have a whole bunch of people that are eager and have a lot of energy but not a lot of opportunity and as I mentioned earlier the collective value of the Dao of the founders in it is 5 billion but if you look at the west or specific how much is the collective but I didn't hear that number so all of our startups combined represent five billion dollars in valuation uh that's what's a b right Billy okay cool and we've brought over a quarter billion in direct foreign investment and we employ 17 000 people across the continent across 16 countries um and if you look at the states one percent of GDP goes to venture dollars but 50 of the S P 500 is represented by venture-backed companies if you were to even get a 10 replication of that in Africa the amount of economic activity and the velocity of capital flowing through that economy with transformational was not even an accurate word to describe it and when I when I show examples of what we're working on uh two weeks ago we had a meeting with vitalik in the central bank and we came to a conclusion that if we were able to create 35 000 jobs in Kenya that paid over thirty five thousand dollars annually that increases the country to GDP by one percent like we can really move the needle when we've come together to solve problems but we haven't had a gathering space before this so everybody was kind of just figuring it out on their own and unfortunately making the same mistakes and it's really it's really hard to do that especially when you're in a market that does not have enough Capital with the returns and opportunity that are there um and I would say that I mean we all know that the market the market is interesting these days and you know the fact that you're raising both you're raising for a parody in parody Or Pando offender's not raising just yet but uh we're just raising for the fun right now we're raising a 20 million dollar fund for our Dow okay and then I know Zach you're also raising for geo right oh yeah well for us it's more uh we're raising basically on-chain liquidity think of it as like a non-chain debt raise to provide financing for these small businesses I think I think back like a year ago which was like Peak crypto bull market times and I felt like a fish out of the water because all these crypto Casino projects that didn't really feel rooted in the real world which is more where I worked um and now I think there's been a lot of enthusiasm into funding projects that bring real world assets on chain and one thing that's really exciting our head of engineering Ivins here and he's one thing he's he's been working on they see Denver is with uh with the pro with the Huma protocol they're actually I mean it's a simple idea but tokenizing real world invoices from Kenyan small businesses to unlock liquidity for them um simple idea but kind of a revolutionary concept and kind of an exciting thing that's happening in web3 maybe say more about the Pando fund yeah so um one of the things that we realized is I mean when you look at the continent you have 54 countries that's a lot of different currencies so we're we're pretty exposed to FX inflation and the fun is not only just trying to invest to get returns but if we are collectively working we will actually design better sandboxes things that allow entrepreneurship to grow and Foster and so to put it into perspective in the states if Michael has a startup and yammy has a startup and there's a gap in between the two I can shoot the Gap to be able to build you know a billion dollar business on the continent you you're kind of forced to build an entire vertically integrated stack so we always say like the good thing is if you do build it you have a phenomenal business that is vertically integrated but you have an uphill battle and the fund's purpose is not just to you know invest in these startups that are coming underneath us but it's also to look at the privilege that we have as Founders and be able to transfer some of that over with the knowledge and the infrastructure and also get them access to to the right resources so that they're actually able to solve these problems because no one's really doing enough work around that right now big fat okay so our time is fast spent uh so I would love to get to know our panelists a little bit more intimately a little bit deeper uh so we're gonna go to this side um yeah I would love yeah just a question like you know what's one thing that you hope for the African Tech ecosystem you could talk about it in its entirety or one particular country and this is for Michael and Chang all right well I mean for me I I hope that there are more entrepreneurs thinking bigger um like I was alluding to before in in San Francisco where I was based for many years the entrepreneurs there see each other they think big they they look at Pro challenges and opportunities and they see their neighbors have done have actually overcome them so they can do them as well so what I've been very encouraged by seeing within Pando Dao's conversation is is these uh is the founders who are there saying you know how did how did you solve the the cross-border FX issues and other people say it's not that big a deal like we we did it this way we can connect you to the right guy everybody's getting bigger and bigger and um having a bigger and bigger impact nice I think being a founder and I think that's why it's so unique about the panel is that like previously been working a dedicating Africa I've met so many great entrepreneurs but everyone's working on Silo right most of them I was working for a well-funded fintech company but most of them are so talented by them really connect or even if they do connect it's most about like a business very transactional relationship cannot be a vendor to your business but I think what really tangled up for me is like really being open-minded that's all being this if we can build ecosystem we will all be better off as partners in a more collaborative way so that's what I'm hopeful for our panel Downs like more entrepreneurs open-minded develop strategic Partnerships supporting each other growing the ecosystem economy of the whole continent then all of us are growing together so that's my hope that's good um so we're gonna we're gonna take two more questions uh and you can you can share your hopes and we will into this question but I want to get a little real because I feel like you know sometimes these panels we kind of we're on a high surface level so I want to ask you uh I'm gonna ask you to tell me about a mistake you made recently and what that mistake taught you about yourself or what you learned from it and you can answer the Hope question if you want to yeah that's a great question made lots of personal mistakes but professionally with GIA one thing we're learning I think this is like obvious startup stuff but I think we almost tried to over engineer a solution recently we're providing we're providing inventory financing for medical clinics so there's medical clinics in Nairobi we work with a partner actually it's called ilara Health another great way that the Dow is bringing us together is we have these Partners in the Dow anyway so we work with ilara to get data about these medical clinics which we use to underwrite and then we provide them financing what we built to go to market we thought it was an MVP but still it was a lot of engineering time to build a quite robust solution that could seamlessly fit into their workflow when really probably what we just needed was a human sales agent to go over to the clinics and sit down with them and and work with them um I don't think that's not a web three unique lesson it's just like a basic startup lesson sometimes just like do the Small Things in person that don't scale to build a business um yeah I mean as far as mistakes go there's a long list of them but I guess I I've said this you know a couple times but we thought too short term early on and what I'm working on with the people here on this panel and then Pando Dao and with the people that are helping us build parody is this is my life's work I'm Mary Tran my family left because of Civil War and they gave me a lot of opportunities in the states and I'm back on the continent doing my best to provide more capital and access to Talent so my mistake of thinking short term has been changed to I'm thinking in decades because this is what I'm building for the remainder of my future it's good do we want to share anything on this side mistakes wise um I think I think our time's nearly paying attention I have a shout out I want to shout out to Orange that was just on the the panel before because they were a big inspiration for us and we did work with origami as well so that's how we came up with a lot of the structure first so that was shout out to Orange down they're right here and Matt right here you can see him and Steve has they've been super helpful um very very helpful and they're also a stakeholder in Pando and just giving us a lot of information and insight and support and we wouldn't be here without them all right that's awesome so okay cool um thank you so much we're gonna wrap on that note I really appreciate you vibing with us and um yeah I guess last thing as we walk off stage is uh any encouraging words do you have for Builders like this is hard being a Founder is I mean yeah it's a lot so anything you want to say to encourage people as they keep building businesses and operating in this space keep building in public and a lot of people will come and help you when they see your hard work that's what's up thank you [Applause] foreign