The part about training for business conduct feels a bit iffy in tone from the level of detail it goes into. I bought a company in Germany a few years back, and my Canadian sensibilities certainly offended folks until I learned the rules of the local culture. Any cross border business interactions are fraught with this.

A few of my friends are currently investing/managing a company out of Ghana. Extremely low investment has yielded a great growth curve, and they're changing how sub-Saharan Africans manage their finances. They're some of the happiest investor/entrepreneurs I know.

Sub Sahara is not pretty backward that they can't manage their finances . When a startup is doing marketing pitch let them paint the real picture. I know we are not where we ought to be but we are not lacking in the area of innovation and creativity.

If they can take what they get and run with it in pursuit of the idea that got them the investment, they've now created value where none previously existed. Commence the theoretical positive cascade of investments and growth and having an exit strategy so that investors and entrepreneurs get back a return on what they invested.

The part that's kinda taken on faith, though, is whether the value created will stay in the area. Unless there are huge incentives to stay local, I see the companies, exited founders, and investors all taking their funds and resources back into developed nations rather than staying local and perpetuating prosperity where they first laid their roots. There's hope that there'll be a will to stay local... but man, people tend to take whatever chance they can get to escape a bad place.

Are you talking about the foreign investors or locals who've succeeded? I can see locals using their new wealth to escape, but if it's working that well for the foreign investors, I don't see why they'd leave (at least in the short term - over decades the brain drain effect would be real).

Those of us who've stayed back and are actively involved in tech entrepreneurship have little desire to leave. We would have already, we have the skills.

Ghana might not have it the best, but every country started like this. It takes dedication from its citizens to grow and that mindset is catching on now.

Not to detract from the rest of your answer though.

Seems like there might be some money to be made there beyond food and water.

Well these people pay rent, electricity, phone bills, buy clothes, food, education for the kids, have cars, etc... Surely you can make money from them.

Is this really true? Where is from?

To what extent? The number is 2.9 http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-barker-millionaires-bad-...

However, this just shows that they are outliers. It may turn out to be the case that there are just as many negative outliers for that GPA (or not, I don't know).

If you are asking if it is true that this is an old saying, I have heard the sentiment before many times. I can't remember the name of the book where someone said the people who got the to the moon were lead by a C-student but all of them had perfect GPAs. However, I don't know of that particular phrasing.

http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2010/ted_20100428.png

https://books.google.com/books?id=p60tDntHVnUC&pg=PA99&lpg=P...

Because our successful American C students come from wealthy families as well.

For me I just saw it as another example of the 80/20 rule. I could spend hours studying to get an A or do the minimum and still get a B and spend my time working on more important stuff

I think the quote is implying the C students are the wealthy legacy students that are there to party, but who have the family money to name buildings.

A - To make more money.

If I remember correctly, at the time Saya was being built, GAE (google app engine) was available so couldn't they have just used that to take care of the scalability issues whiles they gradually developed local/in-house expertise?

I've always assumed the "easier path" would be to use GAE, Heroku or any other commercial PaaS until it becomes more economical to switch to an IaaS which is more hands-on and requires in-house devops or system admin skills.

That's part of the expertise he alludes to.

For example, one client had a small customer base (10s of thousands), but was already having to use Premium tier in Azure because of performance problems (P2). Very seasonal business, massive usage around Xmas.

The coming Xmas they knew they had a serious problem, triple the amount of users. The site would have gone down.

Bit of refactoring and performance tweaking from me and instead they never really went above 20% CPU and could sit on Azure's S2 tier (and realistically could have used S1).

I'm no scaling expert, but I at least knew where to look after a decade of working on real apps and reading articles about scaling on HN.

> The other is Saya, the first African company to pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt. Weeks before the event the founders didn’t even have passports!

It is very cool that there are already success stories.

Without ever being in Africa, I lack the knowledge and wonder if the current infrastructure is capable of supporting knowledge-based economy on a broad scale, but it's certainly good to see that high tech businesses could thrive there, and incubators are getting created.

In general however return on investment tends to be high in developing countries because they lack so much. There are lots of businesses you can start with minimum competition. E.g. I've seen many stories about poorely educated Chinese getting rich in Africa. They start shops, facories and all sorts of stuff lacking

Why can't educated Chinese do same ?