How does Kenya promise great opportunities for entrepreneurs in mobile gaming?

Welcome to The Silver Fox entrepreneurs podcast, a series of interviews to inform, inspire and support men later in life, who want to start their own enterprise for profit, or for pleasure. Good afternoon, or good morning or wherever you are in the day. Welcome to the den. Today, I'm very excited to be talking to Jay Shapiro who is in a warm and sunny place. And Jay and I met each other first of all back in Singapore back in 95, 96, when Jay introduced me to Google. So Jay's been an innovative and visionary guy, especially in tech. Jay, welcome to silverfox entrepreneurs.

Thanks so much pleasure Baker.

Jay, tell us, you know where you are now, and and what you're doing.

So I'm in Nairobi, Kenya, in East Africa. And been here for a few years now. And I run a company called Secret Games, which is a mobile game, social impact mobile games company. And what you see behind me is what's called the Nairobi Game Development Center, which I've just built in is launching this this weekend, actually. And so yeah, so I'm part of the entrepreneur scene, if you will, that's burgeoning in East Africa.

That's, that's fantastic. you're originally from Canada. Yeah. So and you shared earlier on about your dad being a Professor of Entrepreneurship. And when I met you, you were starting blue interactive in Singapore. So how'd you go from Canada to Singapore, and now to East Africa.

I'm basically just working my way around the Commonwealth countries, trying to tick them all off. So yeah, so I grew up again, I left there 95 went to Singapore, where where we met, spent about 13 years there. And started one of the very first digital agencies, which as you, as you pointed out already, at the start was called Blue Interactive, blue Sphere Interactive, actually, is a very common terrible name. It just became blue. And, and I grew that from a three person, little walk third floor, walk up apartment, ad agency, into today, it's the fourth largest digital agency in the world. We sold the WB in 2007. Today, it's called Possible. And it carries on it was marketing magazine's agency of the year twice. And so I left Singapore in 2008. And moved to New York. And and was there for about eight years, where I started a couple things. One was a nonprofit foundation called 'Do good as you go', which was a network of about 500 entrepreneurs, who were traveling the world for work or for pleasure, and doing volunteer work on four continents as they travelled at thr street kids shelters and orphanages and the like, doing skills transfer workshops. And at the same time, I started my next venture with a company called the AppMaker, which became It was a drag and drop, mobile app publishing platform became the world's largest mobile app publisher with three and a half million apps. And then Donald Trump happened. And as he said, Yeah, I'm Canadian, as I was never really at home there. I would say to leave. And so I've got two kids. And and I was working remotely. We at Appmaker, we had a team of 65 people, but they were all scattered around the world. And my wife travels nonstop for her job. She runs an accelerator. And so we said, Look, we can live anywhere. And we took our kids out of school, and we packed one backpack each. And we spent a year traveling around the world shopping trying to figure out where our next location should be. And we absolutely fell in love with Nairobi. And there's there's a there's a real sort of entrepreneurial buzz that's happening here. There's a sense of optimism and Jim I know he'll relate Nairobi to me today absolutely feels like Singapore did nearly 90s. It it's it's a little rough around the edges. But there's just this this buzz there's this energy that you can feel that's about to pop. And they have very similar backgrounds. You know, they both their independence from from Britain within two years of each other. And so it's doing it all over again.

Wow, fantastic. So when we were children, I lived in West Africa in and we actually used to go to Nairobi from Nigeria, because my, my relatives are surgeons out there. So my family has quite a long connection with Africa also have some relatives still living in Kenya, I must introduce you to them. And tell me why do you think I mean, you've been an entrepreneur since you were young. But now you're an entrepreneur a little bit later on in life, not quite yet. 50. But closing in, tell us how you think it's different. Now, Jay, being an entrepreneur, you know, as a maturepreneur, rather than when you're in your 20s?

Well, I would definitely say I may be an oldpreneur, but I don't think I'm a maturepreneur. image or just an old one. Yet I look, I realized very early on in my career, that I make a really shitty employee. And so I've sort of no choice, but to be an entrepreneur all the way along. Because when I see a problem, I want to fix it. And that doesn't always work. Well, when you're, you know, supposed to be meeting goal posts that people set or staying in your box.

Tell us what, what problem are you trying to solve? Now? You meant you like to go around and solve things. And that's absolutely the case. Tell us about who siku games.

Sure. So, I came to the realization that what I'm really good at is not building businesses, but building industries. And so I think you may have actually been in the room in probably 98, 97. In Singapore, we sat in a bar forming what became the IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Yeah, I do that with Duncan on site. And you and I and a few others, right?

That's right. The head the head of Yahoo. Was there then double click was? seven of us? Yes, exactly. There's seven of us in the room, Kevin Rose, who went on to be really famous. And today, if you look in Singapore, at the, at the industry, the head of Google, the head of PayPal, the head of Airbnb, are all my ex employees. Right? And, and we literally built that industry. And I sold that agency in the same month that Steve Jobs launched the iPhone. So I knew that mobile was absolutely going to be the next thing there. There was no app industry. And so we went in, we built it and created the ecosystem. And now doing that exactly, again, in Africa, with gaming, where today in Sub Saharan Africa, there's 350 million connected smartphones. That's more than all of the US Canada and Mexico combined.

Yeah, I was gonna say this greater than North America, right?

Yeah, absolutely. By far, and it's growing at 20% year over year, whereas the US is growing 40%. And the median age today in Europe is 53. But the median age here is 19. Hmm. So you take all those connected devices and all that energetic you, and it's perfect for gaming, but there are no cane companies here. And when you talk to some of the International game companies, they're like all Africa, do people have phones is their internet, the fact that there's 4g connection throughout the country. And Saturday, it's much further advanced than anywhere else I've been. and perfect for it. And so what we decided to do was to say, Okay, how do we build that industry, through gaming, but recognizing where we are, use the power of gamification, to solve difficult social challenges. And so we're doing education, agriculture, climate change, women's empowerment, through games, to try and as what you call it, a double bottom line, although I hate that term, of doing both social impact and profit.

That sounds fantastic, Jen. So you say about, you know, you'd like to create industries. This goes quite a, you know, in the Steve, it was a Jim Collins sort of big hairy ass door style challenges. You're on what your second or third doing this? What would be some of the behaviors or skill sets that you've noticed in yourself and others that make that possible? Because that's really a big, big challenge to set yourself? Are there some tips or some behaviors that you do every day or every week that you'd like to share?

So I think the number one is connections, connecting people because no one person can build an industry. You know, Branson may claim he did, but I enlarge it takes it takes a village right? And so constantly be seeking out other people who are not yet in the ecosystem but could be or should be that offer some value and bring something to the table and then find a way for them to be Successful, because nobody will want to participate in a new industry unless there's something in it for them. And so constantly looking out for ways to help others, and to make it valuable to them, such that it's a symbiotic relationship, and they then help with your broader mission of creating that new ecosystem.

Yeah, Tony Robbins, I think says, you know, the more you serve, the more you earn, you know, seems counterintuitive, but seems to absolutely be the case. And what about on a day to day basis, Jay, in terms of you do connections but and how do you do that? Are you doing that through LinkedIn, through Facebook, you sending pigeons out? What are you doing in terms of getting Yes, connections?

All of the above, okay. Constantly through your social networks, but but also looking in odd places, you know, when you meet friends of friends, or in a social environment, whatever. You know, within our, with our company, for example, I now have a team of rappers, hiphop rappers that I never thought I would be hiring rappers. But if you want to create local African games, they have to have local African soundtracks. And so our first studio before we built this place, was in what's called the Kibera Slum. It's the largest slum in Africa, here in Nairobi. And we actually built our studio in the middle of the slum, because part of our social mission was to do economic opportunity, create economic opportunities through training, hiring, education, in the slums. And so we found all these great ghetto boys, who are rappers, and they've been doing art soundtracks. So you know, sometimes you have to look under odd rocks, to find the gems. It's not necessarily LinkedIn.

No, that could. That's fantastic. So it's sort of going offline as it were, as well. And then in terms of what you have built there, one, because it looks fascinating, john, just share with us what have you built? How, how big is it? How many stories how many people are going to be in there? What's the business role you've got behind that?

So when we started out, growing our studio in Kibera, we knew we needed a permanent home, we needed something bigger, I wanted it to be in the slum, so that we could build this sort of largest game studio in all of Africa, in the slum, where innovation comes out. And Simon unfortunately, just it wasn't practical. And so then with this space, which is the top two floors of a building called diamond Plaza, in Nairobi, it had been abandoned for eight years. And, and anybody who knows, my days at Blue, will know that we found a series of abandoned building,

I was gonna say, you did that

No, we turned into amazing offices, and they often are the most incredible faces. Yeah, so this is a 6000, square foot, two story barn, basically, that was built on the roof of this of this shopping mall. And we've created as a community space, it's much larger than we need to foresee who, but we said, you know, because of my background and funding that we have, we have the means to go out and build, you know, a green screen studio, this behind me here, and a podcasting studio that we have downstairs and a slide. Because of it, but you know, a real startup, small cottage industry game developer, who's maybe working out of their bedroom, needs all these things, but doesn't have access to them and doesn't have the capital to build them. But at the same time, I don't need them 24 hours a day. And so we said, well, let's build something bigger than what we need, putting all the resources at spruik, a little bit of mentorship and experience on top of it, and make it more of an incubator for the gaming industry. That is really just getting off the ground here.

That's fantastic. And what about the sort of the caliber of the people that you're meeting, Jay, in terms of work. Are you're having? I remember in Singapore 95 there was a lot of training that needed to be done around expectations and about skills. And the government took an active program in that as well. Are you having a hard time finding people there? Are you using the internet to find people from around the world to plug into your apps development and so on?

No. So in my last business, we had 65 people who were on literally six continents, working we and we had a mantra of of hiring not the best people who coincidentally live within 30 miles of some arbitrary office, but just we hired the best people wherever they were in the world. And this one, I've tied one hand by my pack, because we've insisted that we only hire in Kenya and hiring Kenyans, but particularly not expats, which definitely makes it more challenging. At the scale that we're at at the moment in world only 16 people for the now, it's been easy to find really great people. When we hit 200 people, I suspect it will be much harder. For the moment we've been good. And there's a lot of funding and effort and time that's going in at the moment from some of the international NGOs, like UK aid. And USA, is all going into vocational training, particularly in the IT schools. So there's great developers who are coming out of those programs. But like lemmings going off the cliff, they've then got nowhere to go. And then they're falling into the pit because they need a career, and there's just no employers. And so that's what we're trying to create it as a soft landing for those graduates coming out. And that's why, for example, in our game development center here, we give six months free membership, to any graduates from the gaming program, one of the local colleges to say, look, if you've gone through that, and know that start can be difficult, we'll give access to all the resources for free.

That's amazing. What in terms of costs, then, Jay, what we've seen in Asia over the last 25 years really is a, you know, an inflation of salaries to the extent that now Singapore is as expensive as London when it comes to hiring. It can have

Flats and food and nights out.

Absolutely. It is expensive as London now what about the cost of living and the cost of hiring in Kenya? Is that isn't can you get a sort of a margin instead of arbitrage there?

Well, because the environment here is going through a period of transition, it's really bifurcated. So you have absolutely the sort of diplomatic corps at the top and the few expats who are here, who are earning top salaries, or international salaries and having their housing paid and all that. I unfortunately, I'm not one of those, as an entrepreneur. They absolutely do exist. At the same time, you know, the bulk of the country are making less than $10 a day, right. And so, you know, those two will have to come together, I'm hoping that the bottom will come up rather than the top coming down. But I don't think we're gonna see the hyperinflation that we saw in Singapore. But But you know, it's time for this country to come up.

And then in terms of, for yourself, how do you kind of stay abreast of what's going on both in Africa, and around the world, Jay, because you're moving into a place that sounds like it's developing rather than develop. So in places like Singapore, there was an amazing cohort, as you've already explained, of people, that all move there and all kind of fed off each other. How you kind of staying in touch, how you kind of building that kind of chemistry and energy in around you, because I know you feed off that too. And you get your wisdom into that group.

One of the first things I did when moving here was to find a dad's group basically, or create a dad's group. And I did the same thing. When I moved to New York, I created the geek dads network. It was called the actually the Geek Dads Tricking Society. And I'm really trying to get that off the ground here as well. It's just finding like minded, mature printers, tech people who are going through the same challenges as we are and creating a microcosm of what silver silver foxes. right, We are circling the lunches and coffees and drinks and whatever it may be in commiserating and sharing wisdom and and that's the fastest way into the local environment. Because there are gentlemen here who are, you know, third generation here. And they know everybody. And so that's the that's the best way. I find it and and really interested, the global news and all that. Yeah, obviously, we have Google everything here. But but I'm trying to disconnect myself as much as possible from the US News, which I find to be cathartic there. It's just, it's just not helpful in any way to the daily process.

Yeah, no, that's right. I think we have to stay focused on also trying to control what, what's relevant to us. In terms of sort of practical takeaways, and this could be you've got so many experiences, both around the world. And as an entrepreneur, Jay, are there some sort of things that you think that are common mistakes that you've seen other entrepreneurs make? What would you say things over the last 20 odd years that either you've seen you've made or you see other entrepreneurs where they kind of, they're failing? Because part of what we're trying to do with this group is to help people to decide what to do, but also decide what not to do. Only if you got a new wisdom for us on that.

Excuse me, I would definitely say over the last four years, the worst mistakes in my career that I've made as an entrepreneur, were the right decisions that I made, that I just took too long to make. Where you know what you need to do, there's the person you need to fire or downsize a company or exit a market or whatever it may be, you know, you have to do it, and you just hold off too long. And in the end, you wind up doing it anyhow. Yeah. But you suffer from having delayed. And so I would say, when, you know, just do it and rip the bandage off. So that's absolutely the first one, I would say. And and the second one, which I think is connected to that is that of all the bad decisions that you can make, and the mistakes that you can make, probably 90% of them can be undone or fixed or reversed. So the actual risk of doing them is not that bad. So just do it, and try, and I'd rather make the mistake and then fix it, then wait around until I have enough information to try and make the right decision. So absolutely, I'd say that's a that's a core element of being as well. Because and this is not my line, unfortunately, I wish I had said it originally. But you know, 'If you're not failing at least 50% of the time, then you're not actually experimental'. And to be an entrepreneur, the foundation is compulsive optimization, constantly trying to find problems and solve them. And in order to do that, you have to experiment you have to be willing to get things wrong. You know, as I say, if you make a souffle, you have to break some eggs. Yeah. And, and be willing to take that risk.

Yeah, and I think that's absolutely fantastic advice. And I think that for all of us that are doing that. There's always that sort of sense of are you doing the right thing? Or not? When the results don't come out so quickly? So what would be your piece of advice? Because people that are afraid of failing? You say just do it? And how do they recover? If they fail? What what would be how have you picked yourself up? Indeed, if you have ever failed? Jay, you'd been so successful? How do you..

Today about the successful businesses, there have been others that have been less successful. No, look, failure is not something to be embarrassed. But I think failure is is is something to be proud of. It's it's a it's an absolute core element of being an entrepreneur. And and if you're not failing, then you're not really an entrepreneur. You're just you know, you're just working in a job, but you have to be the employer. And so I think the way you pick yourself up, or the way you do this, is to first recognize when you have made that bad mistake. And the only way to do that is to constantly constantly be listening and taking information and evaluating conflict, because at least the first year or two years of any venture is fumbling in the dark trying to find the light switch. And and at some point, you find a click, it comes on and great, you've got a business. But But you know, for that first year, if you think you know what the business is going to be or you think you know what you're going to do, you're full of shit. Nobody does. We're all just you gotta try and figure it out. And that requires constant using your senses to evaluate and and humbly admit that what's not working. And Jay, you're a brave man are many, many levels inspirational or may wisdom areas. Could you just tell us then if you want to find out more about you Jay? Where can they go to get in touch with you and find out more? Well, sadly, there's a lot of Jay Shapiros on the internet. So if you just Google Jay Shapiro, you'll find movie star at a dentist and a lawyer and they're not me. So don't play. On Twitter, I am letter J_Shapiro S-H-A-P-I-R-O-H, I am on Facebook. And if you google Jay Shapiroh, and Nairobi, I guarantee you I am the only one here.

I was gonna say must be the only Jay Shapira in Nairobi. And I'll also put your details.

I've met another one last week. Or you can go to the secret.games usiku.games. That's our website. You can contact me through there as well.

Great, Jay. Thank you so much for joining us on silverpop silverfox entrepreneurs podcast today. It's been an absolute pleasure to reconnect with you and to be inspired once again by you. Some 20 odd years since we first met, you inspired me back then and inspire me today. So thank you.

The reason the only reason I was willing to do this was I listened to the previous episodes, I absolutely have been inspired by them. I listen to them in the car on my way to work, and I'm happy to contribute one. And thank you for putting this all together. It's a valuable resource for all of us. And, and I'm just happy to be part of it. Right?

Big hugs going out to you in Kenya and I look forward to seeing you. Do subscribe, or leave a rating and for more information, please visit SilverFoxentrepreneurs.life and drop me an email. I'd love to hear from you. And maybe we can get you on the podcast and share what you know, or let me know what you'd like to know.

Thank you once again, have a great day.