Hey, hey, hey everybody. It's John Hope Bryant and this is the Money and Wealth podcast series on the Black Effect Network on iHeart Radio season 3. Thank you for making this podcast top 1% in the world. Thank you for making it one of the top 70 entrepreneurship podcasts in the world on each continent. And the book Capitalism for All, my new bestselling book, thanks for making it number one in several categories going on five months now. It's proving that we do want aspirational success. We do read. We do want to succeed and we do want to and can take the levers of capitalism and free enterprise, the honest ones, the integrity rich ones, and we can build something on our own that has real value. You know my story, otherwise you wouldn't be here. You know that I mostly do this podcast on my own for 45 minutes riffing on a topic of I think importance.
When I bring a guest on, you know, they are top of the mark in their area or sector. I've had Michael Milken at this mic. I've had really the creator of modern alternative finance, the guy who financed Reginald Lewis, the Martin Luther King Jr. of Wall Street, we call him, first billion dollar deal on Wall Street in the 80s. That was Michael Milken. We've had Reid Hoffman, the creator of LinkedIn and so many other things on this mic and it goes on and on and on. Heroes and champions. Well, we've got that today because I've got a guest and it's a first on many levels. We're talking about the African century. Buckle up. Lock in. Pull out your pen and paper, your mic close to your ear for listening. You're going to learn something today. You're going to be inspired by this man.
I'm going to stop it and say the name Strive Masiyiwa. What if I told you you could build a billion dollar business in Africa and then take it around the world? Building billion-dollar businesses, creating wealth, and changing a continent and its aspirations. This is not a conversation. This is a master class. Let me tell you a little bit about him.
One of the 10 wealthiest men on the African continent. Probably makes him a little uncomfortable for someone to talk to in this way, but people understand numbers. He's a billionaire not in African currencies, in US currency. Strive Masiyiwa is one of the wealthiest and most successful entrepreneurs ever to come out of Africa. One of the most respected philanthropists and thought leaders and one of the continent's leading voices on business leadership, technology and economic development. We call that silver rights as you know, from civil rights to silver rights, from the streets to the sweets. Follow Strive, by the way, on his Facebook page in particular. He writes very compelling pieces. One of the most read people I know, by the way.
He's always sending me every week a book example of what I should read. He sends them faster than I can read them. So, it's amazing. He reads faster than speed. He's taught me to speed read. Also born in Zimbabwe, trained as an engineer, he built his success by taking on and ultimately defeating a government telecommunications monopoly in one of the landmark business and constitutional legal battles in modern African history.
Yes, this is literally a history maker. The victory though didn't just simply create a company. It helped to liberalize and liberate telecommunications across much of Africa. He really was the first mobile technology pioneer in Nigeria as an example. We'll talk about that today. He's the founder and chief executive of Econet Group, a multinational telecommunications and technology company with operations and investment spanning Africa, Europe, Asia, and beyond. He's here in the US as well.
His business interests extend well beyond telecommunications where it started. So, mobile technology, digital infrastructure, financial technology, renewable energy, education, he has a foundation. We're going to talk about that. His wife helps to run that. It's with his children. Healthcare, impact investing. He's got a beautiful resort or resorts in Zimbabwe at the falls.
He's offered to let me stay there once, but when I tried to stay, it was all booked out. They had too many guests. They don't want a freebie like me coming around. They're like, 'John, we love you, but we're all sold out.' And I mean, it's beautiful. And I think his daughter runs that and his influence extends even further alongside his wife, who is amazing, I might add. And through the Higher Life Foundation, he's helped to provide scholarships, educational opportunities, health initiatives, and leadership development to hundreds of thousands of young Africans.
He has advised presidents. He has worked alongside global CEOs. Still does to this day. He has served on numerous international boards and advisory councils. I believe he's on the board of Netflix. Also, the Bank of America Global Advisory Council. I met actually the person who's president of Bank of America International at his house or one of his events, a black man by the way. Of course I didn't know that till I met him through Strive. And has become one of the world's most respected advocates for ethical leadership and entrepreneurship. My kind of person, good capitalist.
For me though, what makes Strive remarkable isn't simply what he's built, it's how he's built it and how God has built him. He takes God with him everywhere he goes. If you don't like that, you don't like him. In fact, it's a great way for him to separate himself from who wants to do business with him. If you don't know God, he doesn't want to know you.
I met Strive through my mentor, my absolute hero, civil rights icon, Ambassador Andrew Young, who I believe is the Nelson Mandela of this time. And our friendship has done nothing but blossom. So, integrity, faith, long-term thinking, service, a belief that capitalism works best when it creates opportunity for everyone, not just wealth for a few. That's my book, Capitalism for All. That's why I'm excited about today's conversation.
I just spoke to two people in the last couple days that are making groundbreaking change in Africa. My friend, none other than Oprah Winfrey, who's number one on the Forbes 250 self-made list and Strive today, Strive Masiyiwa. They are cut from the same cloth. He isn't simply about one extraordinary entrepreneurship story. He really is about the future of Africa using that story as a catalyst. The future of technology, the future of capitalism, and the future of opportunity itself because Africa is home to the youngest population of survivors in the world. I believe it's Nigeria has that designation.
Ladies and gentlemen, if this extended introduction has been longer than normal, it's intentional because I love this brother. I mean, I knew the man before the billions. My brother Strive.
Hi John. Thank you for that amazing introduction. I'm truly humbled to hear that from you, a fellow fan. You know I'm a great fan of yours and I love what you do and what you represent. You are very much the future of the American promise. You are the light that just reminds us what the American promise was always about. Thanks for being who you are, John.
Great. Well, let's talk. I'm here to listen and learn from you and as we exchange.
Thank you, Strive, for your kind words. I'm a little hesitant to say which company because I think you've got your hands in so many public and private entities. I want to talk about where you, your backstory, where you came from, where these values came from growing up. I want to get into that, but tell the audience your, you know, the top three entities of yours that they can search and research. I know you have an AI company that's separate from your telecommunications company and you've got, you know, tell us, tell the audience the two or three entities that make up your conglomerate.
Thanks, John. Well, you know, I'm very much a technology guy. I'm not in resources. I'm not in mining. I probably would have made a lot more money if I had gone into resources and stuff like that. But I've always been about technology and innovation. So the top of my group is what we call Econet Group.
Yep. That's what I mentioned. Yep.
Yeah. The one you mentioned, which is a privately held group through which we invest in what you Americans call mobile communications.
But we have always been a builder of networks. So you got to see us like a Verizon in Africa.
He's basically the Bill Gates of Africa in this regard. And he's on Bill Gates' board, I believe, by the way.
Yes, I am. I'm on the foundation board. But I build, you know, we built the first mobile communications businesses right at the beginning. We're going back to the early 90s. So I was blessed to be a young entrepreneur as that revolution broke out.
I spotted it primarily because I read a lot.
So you know by the time stuff gets out into the newspapers, remember there are people who have always been following, who've been following something for five years.
Yeah. It reminds me of this, I was in South Africa in 2016 doing a fireside chat with a guy called James Manyika from Google and we started talking about artificial intelligence. Everybody says, 'What are you guys talking about?' We said, 'Just wait and see.' And five years later it breaks out, but by that time I have a business in artificial intelligence.
Yes. So, so, so you got to get in early.
That's right. That's the first lesson. So stay in your passion. So, my passion's always been engineering. So, I got in early in the communications revolution, but was at a time when all the communications was controlled by governments.
You remember those days, huh? When America AT&T...
Yes. Well, Africa had that too, and they were state-owned telephone companies. And the idea of young entrepreneurs pitching up, I was in my 30s, and saying, 'Hey, I'm going to build a telephone company.' It was...
It was just off, you know. They couldn't decide whether to put me in jail or the local sanitarium.
I mean, Strive was a threat. Strive was a... See, people thought no different than people thought I wanted to run for mayor or something for the city of LA because I was young and visible and raising money, giving speeches, all that stuff. And politicians thought I was a threat. No, I'm just an entrepreneur. I'm just a builder. Well, Strive in a much bigger way was a threat. And I had to leave LA because people just were getting in my way. They thought I wanted to be a politician. And I didn't. And Strive was a threat to certain folks who perceived him as a threat in his own home country because they thought he had some aspirations he really didn't have. But he was just such a force of nature that everybody's so used to anybody who wants to do something in Africa or in community coming through politics that they just couldn't get out of their head that there's no way that this guy doesn't want to be a politician. So, he became, I'll say it, a threat to certain people and he just ignored it and stayed focused, ignored the noise and stayed focused on building. And he's now the biggest entrepreneur in a country he doesn't live in.
In 1994, when I approached the government of Zimbabwe and I said I wanted to set up a mobile business, basically the president was so spooked he went on national television and he said that I was a security threat.
And you know, that wasn't nice.
No. And that's a big deal in Africa. My god.
Because I was soon picked up and interrogated and given a pretty rough time. But I kind of stuck at it and to their credit they eventually, once the court ruled that I was correct because our constitutional court, the Supreme Court, ruled that I had a right. So I went all, you imagine going to your Supreme Court equivalent. And nine judges in my country voted nine to zero that I had a constitutional right to set up such a business.
In spite of the political pressure. Yeah. So, I was licensed by a court, by the Supreme Court, not by the state.
Yeah. Only license in the world issued by a Supreme Court. Our constitution was such that it said that they could issue a writ, they called it. And they said to the government, 'His license, you just got to give him the spectrum.' And the government says, 'Fine.' And they gave me the spectrum. And so we built...
Describe, Strive, what a spectrum is for the audience.
Oh sure, sure. This is kind of, you know, with mobile phones you are communicating like a television, like a radio, right? So you've got to be given your frequency at which you're transmitting. So I built that, but although they allowed us to operate, the political attacks became very intense, John. So about 26 years ago I moved to South Africa and I never went back.
And from South Africa, one of the main reasons I went to South Africa was of course South Africa is an outsized capital pool for Africa. All the companies in Africa are in South Africa and I was looking for capital.
So Strive, just to be clear. So, South Africa is or could be what I'm hearing you, the London, what London is to the European continent, or what the UAE wants to be to the Middle East, or what New York is to America, is the source, is the capital for capital. Is that right?
All right, yeah, I mean...
Hong Kong for China and so on so forth.
Yeah, 40% of the industrial capacity sits in South Africa of the continent.
And by the way everybody, 50 plus countries in Africa. I've got on my chest, I'm wearing this rust colored shirt in honor of Mother Africa. I'm wearing my Mandela bracelet, which is the prison number for Nelson Mandela on my wrist. African bracelet. I've got my African crushed carbon fiber necklace on. This is intentional to honor my brother Strive Masiyiwa. So 54 countries I believe in Africa. You can fit most of the world's continents, major continents inside of the African continent. People, geographers, historians have over the years on maps made Africa smaller, much smaller than it actually is. It's quite large on a legitimate map and you can fit America and other places inside of the African continent. So when he says 40% of the capacity for the continent is in South Africa, it's a big deal. All right.
It's big. So you know, we just kind of talk about Africa numbers a little bit, John. You know, because people often they don't think of Africa as a big, as a serious economy.
If I said to you the African economy is twice the size of the Russian economy.
Yes. We're much bigger than the Russian economy.
Okay. We have no nuclear weapons, but we're three and a half trillion dollars of GDP.
1.4 billion people. Our population is about almost the same size as India.
No, I think we're ahead of China.
It's India first now, Africa then China population.
But our population is growing much quicker.
China is in reverse gear now.
That's right. The one child policy reversed.
So when you kind of look, although we are 54 countries, they're independent countries, a bit like South America. You know, if you think of Africa, South Africa is what Brazil is to South America.
It's a good way of kind of looking at it.
Okay. So, whilst we probably come from a country that's, you know, medium-sized, but anyhow, I moved to South Africa. I moved my headquarters to South Africa and began to invest in mobile communications across Africa. So I built the Econet brand investing in different African countries. Of course the big one is Nigeria. And back in 2001, John, Nigeria had just come out of military rule.
And nobody wanted to go there and they didn't have mobile communications and they were the largest country by population on the continent. Now give you a statistic. 20% of all black people in the world are Nigerians.
20%. And I said, 'That's the place I want to go.'
So, I want to say this. I want to say this again for the audience to slow it down. Since post 2000, or in early 2000, there were no mobile phones in Nigeria, 2000, the year 2000, if I heard you right.
So people who are listening to this were alive then, most. There were no mobile phones. Now mobile phones are everywhere. People have mobile phones when they don't have a car. They have mobile phones when they don't have keys to their house. They have mobile phones when they have... And this man, this man here did that. Now talking about origin and grit, okay. And you think you've got problems and challenges. This man is an engineer's brain, very precise and he literally re-engineered with God's grace and his talent and grit, re-engineered rainbows after storms. He literally turned a negative into a positive. Run out of his own country, exiled in 2000, built an empire from outside the country again, based in South Africa, and then went to another country he really had no currency in, if you will, no cultural currency, Nigeria, and made it work. You're talking about living history here. Continue, Strive.
No, thank you. Thank you, John. Yeah, Nigeria was fun. President Obasanjo had just come out of prison. He had won an election. He was looking for something exciting to really get his people around and he sent for me and he said, 'I hear you're the only black guy in this industry.' I said, 'I am?' He says, 'Yeah, that's what my people tell me. I want you to build a mobile business in Nigeria.' He says, 'But it'll be a competition. You'll have to win the license.' And I said, 'No, I can do that.' And I put a consortium together. And the interesting thing that I did, John, that people don't often understand is I built my consortium in Nigeria.
Strive, let's just say what's a consortium so people understand.
Look, I needed the funding, John. The license was going to cost $300 million US in 2001.
And for from 2000 for a whole year I had one of the largest banks in the world doing due diligence on the wealthiest Nigerians to see who would join me to form a consortium. So a consortium with 20 investors. It's kind of like you're going out to find investors like you would do in a series A, B, or whatever. But this was just to buy the license.
And we were one of three licenses issued. And we paid $285 million for the right.
You're not even in business yet. This is just for the right.
And my investors said, 'Strive, they all had one condition: you will live in Nigeria until you make it work and you will run it, otherwise we lose our money.' I said, 'Fine.' So I lived in Lagos, Nigeria.
I got stories about Lagos, Nigeria, brother. I got stories.
Good and bad. They're brilliant, they're brilliant. Some of them. Some of the most brilliant.
Oh my goodness, they are smart. We had a lot of fun. So anyway, we got that going and I had a playbook. Now I was doing this in different African countries and then I said, 'Why do Africa?' And in fact I got a call, John, I haven't never shared this publicly. I got a call from a bunch of guys in New Zealand and they were Maori. And they said to me, 'We read about you. We would like you to come to New Zealand and help us do the same.' We actually went, I went with these Maori guys, the New Zealand government, and we said, 'Listen, the indigenous people of this country would like to get into this business.' And the government said, 'Yeah, sure. Will you help them?' And they issued us a license.
Yeah. There's a company in New Zealand that I set up. It's still running.
You're a baller, man. You're a baller.
Business is still running. I made a, you know, I wouldn't call it a ton of money but I did very well with it. Sold it.
That by the way, audience, that means it was just a few hundred million dollars. Not a ton of money is what he means.
That's my brother Strive.
Yeah. Because you got to cycle the capital. So I sold down from that. But then really we get into the mid, we're now into sort of mid 2000s and I begin to see a very different trend and I said to my people around about 2004, 'I'm not going to do any more mobile.' They said, 'What?' We said, 'No, we're going to keep what we have, but sell out some of our assets. We need to build for the internet.' That's where everything's going to happen.
That's where everything's going to happen.
That's when you put out down fiber optic cables across Africa, right?
I started to build fiber optic. So I set up a business called Liquid Telecommunications, which was basically what we saw was the internet wasn't going to work unless we put in cables, cables at sea, cables on land. We had to get satellite communications going. So I set up a satellite division and basically worked on helping to get cables landed onto the African continent and then distribute from these landing stations because most of these countries are landlocked.
Countries that are not at sea.
Yeah. Like Rwanda. Great country.
Great country. That's how I got into... great president.
In fact, he called me and said, 'You know, we're selling our telephone company. Don't come and fight me. I'm selling the telephone company. The government is not going to be in telephones. We've got a public auction. Will you come and bid?'
I love that. You got so much reputation and so much credibility that the president of a country says, 'Please come and bid for participation in my country.' They want your brand, not just your business acumen, not just your capital. They want your brand associated with their country. Everybody listening to this, this is what you want. You want the kind of reputation that... It's not about your money anymore. It's about your brand association. And people want to be associated with your brand. There's a halo effect with how she walks into a room. It says something about somebody standing next to her. It says something about them. What is she endorsing? A book? You, you're the same thing. You're just in a different sector. When you walk into a room, when you associate, when you align with somebody, it says something about them. And that's what Kagame, President Kagame saw in you in Rwanda. That's what New Zealanders saw in you. That's what Nigeria saw in you. That's what the folks at Netflix and Bill Gates and others still see in you. That's what Ambassador Young sees in you. You are a walking brand.
I don't want to get you off track at all, but when I first met you, you're the definition of a quiet storm. You speak without words when people first meet you. You're checking me out. So, you had heard good things from Ambassador Young, but Ambassador Young is a softy. He has a soft heart. He's a warm soul. You're a hard-nosed businessman, and you're not going to let anybody separate you from your wallet easily. So, you checked me out. You looked at me up and down. You quietly assessed me. You're a man of few words. You wait for me to trip up and blow it, say something stupid, talk. You know, people have verbal diarrhea. So, you give them enough chance, they'll talk themselves into incompetence. It's better to be quiet and be thoughtful and open your mouth and remove all doubt. And most people will just open their mouth and remove all doubt. And so, once you figured out this guy is real, we instantly became dear friends. But I remember what you were wearing. It was a beautiful African black shirt. I mean, you were just smooth. You were just smooth. And I'm like, 'Man, this guy is making smart sexy.' This is my brother. Okay, back to the story. So now Kagame calls you and you're doing this deal in Rwanda maybe. Go ahead.
No, I just literally, on Rwanda, doors almost like we're passing through. You know, my system is simple. If they call me, I always say it's got to be a public auction. I don't want any behind the scenes deals. I'll participate in a public bid. If I win, I win. If I don't win, that's good. I'll be cheering from the sidelines and I'll move on.
Ladies and gentlemen, that means you cannot call him up for corruption. No. It means you cannot suggest that he was doing something inappropriate. If it's all out in the public then fair exchange, no robbery. I'm just translating. Go ahead.
Yeah. And so anyhow, so it became really for most of, you know, from about 2004, John, people barely heard of me because I was busy digging trenches across Africa. We built about 150,000 miles of trenches. You know, my favorite build by a long, long way was when we took a call from the leaders of Angola and the president of Angola invited me to go there and he had a map and he said to me, 'What's wrong with this map, Strive?' He says, 'Why isn't my country connected to all these other neighboring countries by fiber? Because all fiber now,' he says, 'Can you connect us to all our neighboring countries? Why don't you connect us from the west coast of Africa to the east coast?' I said, 'That's because there's the Congo forest, Mr. President. It's the world's second largest rainforest after the Amazon.'
And he says, 'You know, there are people who live in the Congo forest. They need to be connected as well.'
We met with the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo and he set up the meeting. We met, we discussed and I still came to it. It took us three and a half years. We trenched from the west to the east coast connecting the African continent east-west for the first time and now we've crossed it three places east-west. So we have a route that goes through the north near Egypt across the Sudan into Nigeria and parts of it through the Sahara.
Oh yeah, that was an easy build.
The hard build, brother. The hard build was the one that we went through the Congo forest.
That was really, really difficult. You're not just battling the forest, you're battling militants, you're battling the locals in all these different factions. And it's like, you know, you're battling poverty.
Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, I don't want to even go there.
No, we don't. That's a whole podcast by itself.
Issued under decree and confidentiality agreement.
But the thing is, we have incredible people. It's not about me. We employ about just under 10,000 people across our group, John. So, and I have leaders in the group that have been with me 30 years.
So, I don't really do the work. We kind of almost telepathically talk now. Oh, okay. We grant each other and everybody knows what to do.
That's called culture, everybody. When you build a culture, culture eats strategy every day of the week. When you build a culture that is the ethos, the operating plan for how you, your value system, then you can wink at each other and get it. I have members of my senior team that operate. I basically work like Strive on my companies, more than in my companies. Because the operations are led now by yes, really smart people but they have a culture that they've embedded. That's what he's talking about.
Yeah. Sure. And basically we've kind of followed the trends. So by the time we get to 2015, we realize that the big thing now is going to be data centers. This is before AI. We're beginning to see that the demand in the amount of data flowing through our networks for our customers. And our customers, by the way, are all of Africa's mobile networks. We build for them. We build for Microsoft. We build for Google and these guys. So we began to shift our focus to building data centers in places like Kenya, of course Nigeria, Egypt, these places across Africa. So we have different companies, we have data center group, we have our people in the satellite communications group, we have...
EcoCash, we started doing a bit of the mobile money stuff they call it. But we also make acquisitions, John. And sometimes our acquisitions are kind of to fill in gaps. So we're in the Middle East. So we have people in place like Abu Dhabi, we have people in Israel, we have people in India.
So, and then of course in 2010 I moved to London.
That gave me a very different perspective because I now wanted to really be ready to do things that are more global.
Okay. So we made a couple of acquisitions. Some of our acquisitions took us to South America.
That means he bought companies, everybody. When he will come into a country and buy some furniture. They buy a coffee maker. They go buy a Keurig machine. My brother went into a country and bought some companies.
Yeah. We just, you know, we're closing on a very interesting deal in the US at the moment. So, we have our people in the US. We're really trying to get closer at where the action is. So, we have now an office in Palo Alto.
Yep. By the way, audience, I don't let Strive come to my house. Strive can't come to my house because if Strive likes my compound, I may find that my grant deed has been transferred, bought out by Strive Enterprises. So Strive can't come to my house. You may...
No, Strive ain't playing.
We can always turn your house into a nice business, John.
