So great to see this man thanks heaps. Have loved your efforts to engage the African EA community and obvious passion for those struggling.
I really liked this comment.
“If our company does super well and gets a high valuation, I’ll make a lot of money I can then give away”
I also think your expected value impact might be worth having a go at. I think (with enormous error of course). I think we can meaningfully try to quantify most potential impact. For you it might be something like.
Probability of company success x my contribution x potential company impact +
probability of company unicorning x money I could give away if successful etc.
I’m interested and surprised that there are a bunch of Kenyan startups like this which have this much money going into them. An 8 million dollar seed funding round is insane.
I’m also interested in the other startups you looked at. Maybe I’ll message you about that separately.
It would hurt me just a little to see someone with your background, passion and skills go into AI safety work, but obviously we should all do whatever we think will do the most good :D :D :D.
One small thing, I agree money saved might be comparable to cash transfers (have considered similar for our OneDay health), but assuming that is true I’m not sure that cash transfers in big cities like Nairobi, to people like your customers who im assuming must be rich enough to have smartphones would have close to a comparable impact to transfers to the remote rural poor. What do you reckon?
Curious to see how you consider AI safety vs extreme poverty to arrive at a reaction to not want the OP to leave Kapu! To hear your perspective might help OP with their own framework (and also myself) when considering which cause area to work in
Hey Jia thanks, apologies for the confusion it was mostly just a wee joke to be honest. I’m a near termist development guy who works in Uganda so I like seeing people working on interesting development work like Luke is doing.
Don’t get me wrong if you or anyone else thinks that AI safety might be the best career path for you then I encourage you to go for it!
Thanks a lot! I also always love seeing your perspective on the forum as someone else in East Africa.
I actually did a back of the enveleope calculation like that (several months after joining Kapu - so I definitely had an incenteive to rationalize my own choice) and ended up with something like “this looks better than working at an impactful US company, and comprable to earning to give but I am really excited by the work here and not at all by earning to give so I have rationalized my decision to work here”. Happy to DM on some of the startups I was less impressed with too.
On funding, Kapu had good timing in that 2021 was a big year for startups in Africa generally. Investors excited by the success of companies like Wave and Jumia (which has gone downhill a bit since), a lot of hype from impact investors about Africa having untapped potential. This year has been a lot harder, like everywhere.
The other top two “finalists” in terms of companies I looked at were Farmworks and Powergen. Powergen I ended up downgrading based on deciding that working at an earlier-stage, faster-moving company was important to me. And Farmworks is a company I have a lot of admiration for—I was just a bit more excited by Kapu (again, a big factor being the sense when I joined Kapu that it had tons of momentum and was going to go fast).
It’s a good point—on average our customers are richer than rural poor so direct comparison to givedirectly isn’t quite fair. shooting from the hip though I don’t think the impact of giving a dollar to a poor Nairobian is much less than half of the impact of giving a dollar to a poor person in a village (note: probably about half of our customers actually don’t have smartphones—you can order without one). And I think there are strong systemic benefits from that dollar coming from an economically sustainable business rather than from donations.
So good man nice to hear. Love the “shooting from the hip” always a big fan of that ;).
Also I agree instinctively with this and am keen to hear more “And I think there are strong systemic benefits from that dollar coming from an economically sustainable business rather than from donations.”, but not at all sure of the extent of it or why this might be. OneDay Health centers all run basically as close-to-self-sustaining small businesses, and apart from the sustainability and scalability potential of an economically, I feel there might be other systemic benefits too, but find it hard to put my finger on it
What do you think those systemic benefits might be?
I too am finding it hard to articulate. Maybe it’s just captured in the impact I talked about in the original post about creating jobs, helping the startup ecosystem, giving me money I can then donate, etc. So I shouldn’t pretend that in addition to all that there is some other nebulous “benefit of a company vs nonprofit” just to increase the warm fuzzies I feel.
But there’s also a mathematical sense in which a shilling saved (the way Kapu has impact) is better than a shilling earned.
Imagine someone makes and eans exactly 500 shillings per day. You can either cut their cost of living to 250, or give them 250.
It’s better to cut their costs to 250. That way now they earn 200% of their cost or living! If instead you give them 250, they only have 150% of their cost or living
The other benefit compared to giving cash is you avoid the sense of unfairness from people who don’t get given money. I think the new documentary in Givedirectly—Free Money—illustrates this downside well (though I don’t share the overall tone of the documentary which I feel is unnecessarily down on GiveDirectly).
I also have an intuition that it just feels better psychologically for a person to save a shilling vs to be given a shilling for free at random. Maybe mistaken.
So great to see this man thanks heaps. Have loved your efforts to engage the African EA community and obvious passion for those struggling.
I really liked this comment.
“If our company does super well and gets a high valuation, I’ll make a lot of money I can then give away”
I also think your expected value impact might be worth having a go at. I think (with enormous error of course). I think we can meaningfully try to quantify most potential impact. For you it might be something like.
Probability of company success x my contribution x potential company impact + probability of company unicorning x money I could give away if successful etc.
I’m interested and surprised that there are a bunch of Kenyan startups like this which have this much money going into them. An 8 million dollar seed funding round is insane.
I’m also interested in the other startups you looked at. Maybe I’ll message you about that separately.
It would hurt me just a little to see someone with your background, passion and skills go into AI safety work, but obviously we should all do whatever we think will do the most good :D :D :D.
One small thing, I agree money saved might be comparable to cash transfers (have considered similar for our OneDay health), but assuming that is true I’m not sure that cash transfers in big cities like Nairobi, to people like your customers who im assuming must be rich enough to have smartphones would have close to a comparable impact to transfers to the remote rural poor. What do you reckon?
Curious to see how you consider AI safety vs extreme poverty to arrive at a reaction to not want the OP to leave Kapu! To hear your perspective might help OP with their own framework (and also myself) when considering which cause area to work in
Hey Jia thanks, apologies for the confusion it was mostly just a wee joke to be honest. I’m a near termist development guy who works in Uganda so I like seeing people working on interesting development work like Luke is doing.
Don’t get me wrong if you or anyone else thinks that AI safety might be the best career path for you then I encourage you to go for it!
Thanks a lot! I also always love seeing your perspective on the forum as someone else in East Africa.
I actually did a back of the enveleope calculation like that (several months after joining Kapu - so I definitely had an incenteive to rationalize my own choice) and ended up with something like “this looks better than working at an impactful US company, and comprable to earning to give but I am really excited by the work here and not at all by earning to give so I have rationalized my decision to work here”. Happy to DM on some of the startups I was less impressed with too.
On funding, Kapu had good timing in that 2021 was a big year for startups in Africa generally. Investors excited by the success of companies like Wave and Jumia (which has gone downhill a bit since), a lot of hype from impact investors about Africa having untapped potential. This year has been a lot harder, like everywhere.
The other top two “finalists” in terms of companies I looked at were Farmworks and Powergen. Powergen I ended up downgrading based on deciding that working at an earlier-stage, faster-moving company was important to me. And Farmworks is a company I have a lot of admiration for—I was just a bit more excited by Kapu (again, a big factor being the sense when I joined Kapu that it had tons of momentum and was going to go fast).
It’s a good point—on average our customers are richer than rural poor so direct comparison to givedirectly isn’t quite fair. shooting from the hip though I don’t think the impact of giving a dollar to a poor Nairobian is much less than half of the impact of giving a dollar to a poor person in a village (note: probably about half of our customers actually don’t have smartphones—you can order without one). And I think there are strong systemic benefits from that dollar coming from an economically sustainable business rather than from donations.
So good man nice to hear. Love the “shooting from the hip” always a big fan of that ;).
Also I agree instinctively with this and am keen to hear more “And I think there are strong systemic benefits from that dollar coming from an economically sustainable business rather than from donations.”, but not at all sure of the extent of it or why this might be. OneDay Health centers all run basically as close-to-self-sustaining small businesses, and apart from the sustainability and scalability potential of an economically, I feel there might be other systemic benefits too, but find it hard to put my finger on it
What do you think those systemic benefits might be?
I too am finding it hard to articulate. Maybe it’s just captured in the impact I talked about in the original post about creating jobs, helping the startup ecosystem, giving me money I can then donate, etc. So I shouldn’t pretend that in addition to all that there is some other nebulous “benefit of a company vs nonprofit” just to increase the warm fuzzies I feel.
But there’s also a mathematical sense in which a shilling saved (the way Kapu has impact) is better than a shilling earned.
Imagine someone makes and eans exactly 500 shillings per day. You can either cut their cost of living to 250, or give them 250.
It’s better to cut their costs to 250. That way now they earn 200% of their cost or living! If instead you give them 250, they only have 150% of their cost or living
The other benefit compared to giving cash is you avoid the sense of unfairness from people who don’t get given money. I think the new documentary in Givedirectly—Free Money—illustrates this downside well (though I don’t share the overall tone of the documentary which I feel is unnecessarily down on GiveDirectly).
I also have an intuition that it just feels better psychologically for a person to save a shilling vs to be given a shilling for free at random. Maybe mistaken.