#74 Kemdi Ebi is thriving on products
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Kemdi Ebi 0:00
The journey is at the end of the day to satisfying the end customer, the end user. And if the end user is happy, everything that's happened in between with is from the visionary or from the person wrote the code, again, making sure that the team is aligned with the objective. And I think that that in itself, it sounds very intangible and romantic. But that's really what technology is all about. It's about solving math problems, where you're able to feel like you've you've helped so many people at scale because you build something that actually works at scale.
Tim Bourguignon 0:41
Hello, and welcome to developer's journey, the podcast shining a light on developers lives from all over the world. My name is Tim Bourguignon, and today I received Kim D AB, Kim D is the co founder and CEO of verisys. Company, solving the problem of lack of quality data on African consumers within the continent can be has a marketing background, with over a decade experience in consulting, software sales and product development can be a warm welcome to dev journey.
Kemdi Ebi 1:16
Ah, thank you. Thank you very much. Great, glad to be having this chat.
Tim Bourguignon 1:20
Hey, it's my pleasure. Unlike most of the guests I receive on this show, and you are not directly a software developer, instead, you've been working around the software products for for more than a decade. And especially you've been working on software products for the African market. And I felt that would be an angle that we didn't have yet on this on this podcast. And that could be interesting for the listeners, and to kick start this discussion. Um, maybe we could go there. When did these software world enter your professional life in the first place?
Kemdi Ebi 1:59
No, thanks for that to me. You're absolutely right. So first time it came into my life officially out say was when I had my stint at the corporate executive board. And I was actually part of a team that was, let's just say prepping for what was going to be a very large acquisition of the company that was CB that is now partner. And one of the things that I was mandated to do by my team was to essentially decipher our CRM system at the time, and migrate into Salesforce, which was, I'll say, still early, at that time when I was in the market. And I just so happened to delve so deep into Salesforce and doing all the, you know, imports, and you know, exports, and just, you know, going into just the customization for the whole Salesforce of our organization at the time. And I just fell in love with it. And I knew that there was so much potential and right after that, I literally decided to build my own, along with some friends, build, build out like a social media activism platform, to educate the Nigerian youth on voters education. And that was when I knew that I was definitely on the road to understand or if done understanding, basically being very close to the software universe, it just became infectious. From there,
Tim Bourguignon 3:33
what I would say define, but what made you particularly interesting for your team back then to give you this deciphering the CRM onto Salesforce?
Kemdi Ebi 3:45
Well, I think for me when, you know, obviously, because of the the time the company was going through a massive growth plan, and the growth plan involves expansion into new markets, including Asia, Pacific, Europe, and even just solidifying their operations in the United States. And, you know, when companies usually are doing that, sometimes they also looking at right sizing, and so they're, they're, they're trying to cut down, you know, on maybe too much sales, I guess on the ground folks and work more on the client centric side. So whenever you start to see a shift in your organization, that nature, then it requires having a robust system that can allow them to have a way of entering data for the clients or customers or if or if not customers prospects, and have a very robust system that can allow them to track activities to track you know, information, just so that they can feel a lot closer to the prospect or customer which obviously would eventually convert to sales or just a continuation of that relationship. So It was very important to obviously choose the right platform. And at the time, Salesforce was that and I just happened to be, you know, part of the team also leading the efforts of integrating it into the organization. So once, once I, once I got a hold of just the power, the power of that CRM, and of course, even just the automation side of things, and the beauty of just, you know, putting out reports and extrapolating reports that were, you know, just making life easier for the executives that I worked with, I knew that this was, and again, this was in the early stages of Salesforce, which was probably back in 2007 2008. So, you know, it was, it was definitely still a phenomenon that was still yet to sort of have this explosion. But I definitely knew that it was I was onto something. And then from there, I fell in love. I'm not
Tim Bourguignon 5:55
entirely familiar with Salesforce, I know what it is, but I've never played with it. Um, can you describe it for for, for the listeners? Sure.
Kemdi Ebi 6:03
So Salesforce, really, I would say, is probably arguably the best customer relationship management system that's out there. And so what it really helps organizations do is understanding their customers better by giving them a robust system that can allow them to put in entries of their customers, or prospects in this case, and you know, just a lot of ways of, you know, connecting internal systems that can also have this, this this, have the information shared in this one platform. So essentially, you can also integrate accounting systems, you can integrate, you know, other CRM systems that are maybe smaller and not as powerful and sophisticated as a Salesforce. But the idea really, is to just have organizations have complete transparency, and as detailed as possible ideas of how, as detailed as possible, how you know, how their prospects, who their prospects are, where they are the industries who they link to contact list, and the list goes on. So if that makes sense, it's really just a very, very trusted, and probably the best customer relationship management software system that exists out there.
Tim Bourguignon 7:20
And it's very flexible and customizable, right?
Kemdi Ebi 7:24
Yes, that's one of the things that they that they're definitely known for the idea that you can actually have any system whatsoever you're using, and you want to share that information in one common platform, and you can literally just insert it into Salesforce. Now, obviously, you would juxtaposes Salesforce to SAP and you know, that's usually the you know, I'd say, the the next step comes in mind in terms of that same size of robustness. And maybe I'll say no notoriety in the, in the, in the space in that particular industry. So, so yeah, so I'll say flexible, reliable, and definitely the one of the strongest, if not the strong,
Tim Bourguignon 8:08
if I understood your Well, well, and customizing the Salesforce instance for your for your customer. Was your your your gateway drug into customizing and producing software for somebody else, right.
Kemdi Ebi 8:22
Absolutely. Yeah. Because I was able to essentially build a product within a product.
Tim Bourguignon 8:26
No, no, no, I get it. Okay. And you then said you you build this social media for use in Nigeria? How did you make the jump from Salesforce to building this product as a as an entity? Oh, yeah, that's a great question.
Kemdi Ebi 8:41
So if you can imagine just being able to be part of this, just creation of a solution within a product or product and in a product, you know, it just made me itch to know how much more I could, you know, just go out there and use existing systems or tools to also initiate things that I felt like I was also more passionate about. And it was, for me a natural organic jump into what I did, because I had left the company that I was working with, and let's just say I was sitting in my bedroom in Washington, DC, and called up a friend and she was telling me telling me about her. Her interview she did with Krishna mon pore, and she said, Look, after the interview, the only thing I saw that was a needed solution for the Nigerian country or for our country, Nigeria for Nigerian people is to teach them about the importance of voting because there's so much apathy. So in my mind, I just sort of looked at it said, Okay, so what then becomes a solution? And what came to mind was, how do we essentially use existing digital tools that are like mediums in this case to amplify a message and alongside my other co founders of the of this, of this initiative, We then decided, Okay, let's basically push, you know, the right messages so that we can sensitize the, our target or our target demographic on the importance of voting, we use like, this was more content driven, but the idea was, how do we essentially utilize the digital tools we had? For me, I was also then going beyond that, and actually tracking a lot of the stuff that was going on. So I was also tracking, you know, to some degree sentiment analysis of what the customer, not customers, but the people were saying at the time about what they felt about the voting felt about the country, but they fought about issues, what they felt about the political candidates, and at the time, they were involved in a whole lot of other things. So, again, I took that experience that I had, and just being very malleable with you know, and out, say, very, what's the word out, so I'll probably use the word NIF nifty with the tools that I have in front of in front of me to produce something that obviously, you know, becomes like, you know, what I'm trying to achieve as far as an objective. So in this case, it was using existing social media tools, which included Twitter or Facebook at the time, Blackberry messenger, to amplify a message and get enough data that could tell us a bit about what the Nigerian youth thought about politics at that time. So you write
Tim Bourguignon 11:30
a lot of code as a as a company, or is it a company at that time?
Kemdi Ebi 11:36
So interestingly, so we didn't actually have to write code, but I'll say, because of so. And this is something I art because like you rightfully said, You know, I, I don't, I'm not a developer, but I understand enough to know how to guide the, you know, software development, where you can get the best results. And that's why I think it's important to bridge the gap to bridge the gap between who people who are in the front side of the business, and who also have some operational experience that can essentially help guide, you know, the best software products that could be, you know, used. And so in this case, again, you know, what I did was, I got all this information from the voters from this, this whole voters cycle. And that was actually what led me to know that actually, if I'm using Western tools to try to, you know, decipher African data, it wouldn't actually help me translate accurately what the sentiment was. So that's how we're able to know that we actually have to build something that can actually translate local sentiment of the African consumer. And looking beyond politics, obviously, I realized that this issue probably spans across other different industries or verticals. So that's where me as the as the business of software, had to bridge the gap in and I found my, my co founder, who I was a Googler, at the time, and I said, Hey, we need to figure this out, because this is a big problem. And he was like, yeah, this is it, this is a big problem. This actually, is something we need to we need to fix. And so alongside him, I was able to obviously, sort of build out the framework, build out some sketches, very rough designs I was doing, I became a broke, broke legged UI UX guy. I do. I do. I was I was, I was the best at the time. But I definitely was able to be sketched something enough for him to say, Aha, and, you know, and I think, just because, you know, there was a natural fit for the vision matching what he also wanted to do. And similarly, when we built a team, everyone else felt the same sort of inclination to building out this vision, we were then able to get, you know, because I think writing the code is just the execution part. I think the very first step in being the best software developer is understanding the solution and being at one with the solution, and then coming up with ways that you can ensure that you're maximizing on solving the problem involved with that particular product. And that's where I think it then naturally guides those developers to research and go even above and beyond to produce the best possible whether they're working on the back end or the front end. Whether they're doing just a just a design, whether they even just doing a website, the idea really starts from how in touch Are you with this solution? What What is your What is your your your I'd say what, what, what's what's what's your push is your push Is it enough to make sure that you're going to produce the best that the end consumer, in this case, the end user, rather, would actually feel very happy with what you've done. And that's where you, you then start to almost differentiate the best developers from the not so great developers, the ones who actually build for the end users. So again, I kind of went through all of this, just to say that yes, I don't code. And I, at the time, when we built this campaign, I wasn't coding what I did was was using existing tools. But it led to us building our own proprietary software as a solution, product and versus that now is the only one that exists as far as how we do online and offline tracking for the consumers in the African market, just as a result of this one instance, where you were using tools that was able to guide that solution. That is awesome,
Kemdi Ebi 16:08
thank you.
Tim Bourguignon 16:12
I'm always impressed with this, I talked to to sarin Goldberg, a few months ago, and she's the the creator of the developer, community code newbie. And she organizes a conference, I think, in New York City, called called land, and the subtitle as really, really stuck with me, it's celebrating the power of code. And by this, she means what all the cool things we can do with code. So all the solutions, all the cool problems we can solve. And I find this a very interesting twist. When you go to software conferences, it's usually people talking about how cool technology is, I'll cool this framework is and how cool this piece of technology is. And quite often, we forget about the problem we're trying to solve, and absolutely having problems etc. And I find it fascinating that you, you really went at it from from this angle, saying, well, I'll use whatever tools I have at my disposal, and I'll make it work. But the focus is, is those customers and what they want to achieve or what I want to achieve with them. And this is a very healthy relationship. That's why I went at it. Mm hmm. Yeah.
Kemdi Ebi 17:33
And just to also add to what you said, You're absolutely right, you know, when you become a good student of existing products that work, and you're using them to also kind of get creative and solve problems, there's no way inevitably you can build products yourself. And, you know, if I became the visionary of many products that stemmed from the African continent, or from, I'll say, stem from common African problems, and we had the best products that came out of Africa that actually helped to solve these big problems, you know, I will be completely fine with that, even if I didn't write one line of code, because, again, it's about the, you know, in your work, the journey, the journey is at the end of the day to satisfying the end, customer, the end user, and if the end user is happy, everything that's happened in between with is from the visionary, or from the person wrote the code, again, making sure that the team is aligned with the objective. And I think that that in itself, it sounds very intangible and romantic. But that's really what technology is all about. It's about solving mass problems, where you're able to feel like you've you've helped so many people at scale, because you build something that actually works at scale. So, um, so again, I think you know, why I probably stand out, you know, from maybe typically, some of the interviews you've done with actual developers is that I consider myself a visionary of sorts of how to build the best products. And in this case, because my primary expertise is with the African continent, you know, being from Nigeria, working a lot of companies within Africa, Nigeria, especially, I've studied a lot of what's going on. And because I've delved into things like Salesforce and built solutions, within that I've delved into, you know, using existing digital media tools and things to, you know, galvanize 66 million registered voters to go out and actually learn about voting or be part of the process. I can then say, Okay, let's build this because I've identified that this is where problems problem lies. Someone from a bank or from the banking industry can come to me and say, Hey, I don't even know why this transaction doesn't go to these many people. Can you came, came maybe sit with me and told me what I can do and I can literally sit there and say, maybe we need to do This, this that and then it's just about saying, Hey, you know, here's my development team, we can build that for you. And then we're now coming up with ways to actually satisfy the end user by making sure that we're completely eradicated the problem as best as we can, obviously, and giving them the best product possible. Out of that helps them make sense to I am very passionate about this, as you can tell.
Tim Bourguignon 20:26
Yes, it does. And it totally rings a bell. I did a presentation, a very polemic presentation a few a few weeks ago, called the paradox of the no code developer, when presenting tools like air table and Zapier and Microsoft Flow, and such a tool like this, which pretty much nowadays allow you to build workflows completely online without touching one single line of code. And I can tell you that ever present around in the room where we're kind of having hard time with this without code, you know, but I want this discussion this very right discussion about, um, well, you want to solve a problem, you don't want to write code, you want to solve a problem, you want to match what your customers really need. And, and and work on this and not not totally rings a bell during the same time.
Kemdi Ebi 21:27
But But I will say what I what, but I will say this, though, just I will say this, I actually did write some HTML when I was building the website.
So, so I did I did I doesn't count.
Kemdi Ebi 21:43
I know, I know.
Kemdi Ebi 21:46
I figured I figured it doesn't. I just I just thought I'd say it just to make just to make me feel like I'm part of the Yeah.
Tim Bourguignon 21:54
Yeah, I gotcha, gotcha. explain more details. I'm not too many details, but a bit more details. How this work, the social media campaign to get us to vote? What did you lever tear? How did you make it work? Um, obviously, at
Kemdi Ebi 22:14
that point, it was really about the strength of, you know, the content, and knowing how to effectively understand the platforms and how to engage maximally the people that existed in those, in those in those universes, that's a good way to put it. In those planets, I look at Twitter as a planet, I look at Facebook as a planet. And look at the time, Blackberry messenger was also a very popular means of communication with the Nigerian voters population at the time. So so what we did was, you know, again, we had a very stellar team of people who would also have very, you know, one of our co founders is she's a awesome, awesome pr, pr, just guru, and then all of us had a decent level of like experience in that field. So I think just the creativity of the content was what really pushed it. But for me, personally, I already had experience with just understanding how to, you know, like, for instance, amplify a message to a certain group and knowing how the system itself ran to get the maximum sort of output. So I wouldn't know how to time certain tweets out know how to, you know, baby, sometimes even, you know, positions or post on Facebook, things like that. But again, it's just the interaction with, you know, just many at the time, I already had interactions with a lot of products, but I was also very eager to test and, and I was in sort of an experimental mode. And that was kind of where I was learning along the process. And even just, you know, just seeing how certain words would be, you know, influential in getting X amount of retweets. Or if we could get this one thing, you know, working in a way where, you know, we got basically enough people that would share the hashtag, because we have a hashtag that we created, that was easy for us to track, just the effectiveness of the campaign. And so again, those are things that, you know, because of the, this was very early stages of even social media and its existence in Africa. We were actually cited by Brookings as one of the most notable if not the, you know, the most influential digital activism campaign that happened on the continent. And it was really awesome because, you know, we then started getting a lot of other countries asking, you know, how you know, to almost share our templates. And how we did it. And obviously, there's no one set formula in how you do these things. Because, you know, I can argue that democracy is not really something that exists, you have to create it. So, so. So with that, I think the contents I think, was one of the biggest players. But again, personally, for me, it was about understanding just how each of these mediums worked within themselves, and just understanding the personalities of these mediums so that we could get the best results out of each. Yeah,
Tim Bourguignon 25:33
I thank you for the explanation.
Kemdi Ebi 25:35
No problem.
Tim Bourguignon 25:36
When I read your bio, I think you were trying with it with versus you were trying to solve the problem of lack of quality data. And what do you mean by that?
Kemdi Ebi 25:45
Oh, yeah. So. So interestingly, and this is kind of going with what led me to having the Eureka moment when we said, we need a vs for the African continent, because when we when we hit done the campaign, and like I said, I was more concerned with understanding how to automate sentiment from the African market. If I just wanted to know, all of this information, we gather from all these people tweeting and sending Facebook messages and sending all these messages to us. I just want to know, when aggregate how'd you feel about this issue, this person and tell it tell me what it is. Some people were a lot of people actually not some people, a lot of people were were writing their text data in pidgin English, which is a different language. So if you were to have that data be streamed into a Western sentiment engine, you may not give you a spit out the right accurate sentiment, right? Because you may not understand that, and now is at the point where we said, there's going to be a lot of these kinds of conversations happening. So how are even multinational brands, you know, being able to be? How are they able, knowing fully? Well, that they have a lot of, you know, presence just by sheer fact of having their goods and services across many, many strategic parts of Africa? And having consumer goods everywhere? How are they even able to have constant conversation with the consumers on ground to know whether or not they like certain products? How are you even going to know how to even initiate or launch new products? How does even a local company know how best to serve and continue to sustain a business within a new sort of local African terrain? If they like, for instance, Nando's, so Nando's, back in 2000? And I would say seven or eight or something like that. There's South African restaurant chain, they attempted to open in Nigeria, and it felt like it was going to be easy, right? Because, hey, every African knows chicken and the chicken, the spicy the chicken. And you know, the more West you go, the better because it will make spicy, right? They thought it was a simple, simple formula. But no, right? That's the idea. There's never all one size fits all, you can't have that. So, and it's very, you know, important in this day and age for global brands to think local, and even local brands to think even more local when going into other local African countries. And this is just, you know, within the continent, and being able to understand that there's so many nuances, that goes into just understanding trends, they need to be dynamic, as opposed to just do a one off and think that you've, you've solved it all. Like you have to have a dynamic approach. So which is why we then develop the listen and asked methodology, which allows us to track online and offline. So online was where is where we can, you know, we can listen in, we can listen in to Facebook, we can listen to Twitter, we can even listen to regional base blogs, like the Nigerian Reddit and we can take the information we get there. And if they're speaking in different languages that are not English, we can understand it and translate that sentiment so that companies and people have this information and the dashboard is a lot more accurate. And then on the on the offline side, we're able to utilize scouts so respondents really who are part of our community, and they can also receive credits while answering questions directly from the dashboards that the brands with the end users in this case will be sending to them. So we've created this way of almost just giving them a one stop shop and having them just have this active conversation, or if any, if anything, just an active communication line with this huge market that's so complex, and we're trying to simplify it for them as much as possible so they can now have the insights to know Okay, this is how I orchestrator product launch Going into a market like Nigeria, or even going into a market like Kenya, Ethiopia, etc. That make sense?
Tim Bourguignon 30:08
Yes, it does. And actually, that's something that should work in every country that has kind of an English language as a basis, which is not the US and not unity kingdom and maybe not Australia. So thinking about India, for instance, is also a very dialect at English. I think the the sentiment engines that you mentioned, would have a hard time getting in there as well,
Kemdi Ebi 30:35
absolutely, even. And you make a good point, I always pair the case of China with when we talk about Africa. And now we get in China and Africa are not like, you know, we're talking about a continent and a country, China's just very special, because they have so many people, right. So it's almost the size of a continent. But the idea is that China is also very, very, like, dice, I'd say complex, because they have so many different types of people, cultures, dialects, within their own just country. So clearly a sentiment engine will have to be built for that particular market. So similarly, I feel like any practice of research, or in this case market research, and I, I, I beg to be, I guess, I bet to be
to be
I guess, yeah, I basically, I beg, I beg to be, you know, I guess, challenged, that the African market is similarly very difficult to penetrate, because all of these complexities also exists. And then you even throw into social political. So sometimes instabilities that already also comes with another different kind of complexity that you also need to be wary of when trying to find or, you know, get information from certain areas and how to go about it without it being, you know, too biased. So again, I don't want to get too deep into the weeds without but the idea is that, like you said, India would need a sentiment engine, if you were going to try to understand that market, you know, China would need one, and they would have people who built their own. I mean, China has their own WhatsApp, they have their own Google, they have their own, you know, everything because things just don't work the same way as they would in anyplace else. But it doesn't mean that they don't I mean, I still completely am a fan of globalization, but the ideal so is understand how you basically can think globally, while acting local, that's kind of going with that same, that same mantra.
Tim Bourguignon 32:43
Yeah, make sense? make sense. Um, just to turn back the discussion on you. For bed. What do you think are the key skills that make you particularly fit in attacking this problem,
Kemdi Ebi 32:56
um, I think for me, is just the personal experience. So for every founder, I've just really seen that when you kind of have a personal experience that just sort of organically leads you to solving a problem that already qualifies you, for inevitably, the lifetime of whenever that product exists, or if you're able to materialize it, but the idea is that you will set the vision, you become the number one employee to that vision, to execute the, you know, what's coming from it. And I think, you know, for the for that one bit was what is definitely we'll make sure you qualify, then beyond that, in terms of how best to materialize, you know, this vision of versus, you know, my my background in marketing, definitely helps, I had a very stern focus on consumer behavior, I definitely was very saturated with just the idea of how to understand people sentiment, watch what triggers their, their, their decisions to buy and things like that. And then obviously, as I went through my career in software sales and product development and consulting, I realized that, you know, I needed to now become the one to bring the best possible team together to execute such a large mandate. And in this case, it was about building something for, for the for the continent, and starting with a potential, you know, 200 million, you know, target consumer base, we needed to know like, okay, we have to have the right sort of skill set. So I was able to recruit, my co founder, who's the who's a, like I said, an ex Googler. And then we also have another, our founding members. He's probably one of the best product designers was our product director based out of Africa, Nigeria, to be specific, and we also have another guy who's our Data science officer who actually is a Google Developer expert, the first ever certified by Google for machine learning and AI, from Sub Saharan Africa. So he's probably the the best person that obviously is equipped to do the job of building our sentiment engines where we should. So again, bringing together a team, that organically also is very, very committed to this vision, because they also see that it's very important to, to execute in our lifetime, is what also again, I would go back to kind of what Ben Horowitz, he kind of says, there are three things that qualifies a startup CEO. Number one is know how to communicate your vision, know how to attract and retaining the best talent. And then the third one is just not to raise cash. So usually, you know, that's the sort of the, I guess, when you're looking at it from the entrepreneurs side of things that you should be like, the top three things they say, maybe qualifies you to do the job of leading such early stage, you know, or just a start up in this case. But again, beyond that, I just feel like, once you've come come to terms with incepting, a vision that you know, is beyond you, and you've been almost seeded with something that you have to know materialize, you're qualified to be the one to do it. And if you don't do it, and somebody else does, let's just say you're probably the best person to do it. And you'll probably if you do all the things you have to do and stay persistent, stay, you know, committed, you will definitely get the results that you that you that you're they deserve, you get the you deserve.
Kemdi Ebi 36:52
Amen.
Tim Bourguignon 36:53
Hopefully, I'd say
Kemdi Ebi 36:58
yeah, yeah. And you and you will you will get the right people to code as well. Absolutely.
Tim Bourguignon 37:05
Did I get that right? That your team is spread out around the world and working on on with a with a target in mind where only a few of you are actually living or having food in the ground. So the team
Kemdi Ebi 37:23
actually, we are all based in the headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria, but we all do have a fully in some way, some shape or form around the world. You know, everyone on the especially in the founding team, has some level of experience, you know, beyond being in being being in the headquarters are so again, our headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria, so we do travel quite a bit between ourselves for a lot of engagements with prospect clients, with events that are obviously tied to, you know, Mar tech and technology in general, software in particular. So yeah, so I don't know if that answers your question. But while we're, we're definitely you know, we don't shy away from traveling the world when the opportunity comes, because our job kind of makes us do so as a matter of fact, we're, you know, we're currently in London. So my guess is we kind of, you know, register a company in London, just to be closer to a lot of the brands that obviously we are looking to work with and partner with a long term. So again, we are definitely, you know, global wide it in that that makes sense with Africa forms.
Tim Bourguignon 38:40
Yeah, that's exactly what out what I wanted to hear. This is absolutely awesome, I think, to have a company registered in in London having foot in the US in the ground, being in Nigeria and traveling the world. It's just insane what you can do nowadays, but, but it's awesome.
Kemdi Ebi 38:57
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That is cool.
Tim Bourguignon 39:01
Um, we're in our time box is slowly coming to an end. I have to pick my last question wisely. I'm gonna go with that one. If you were to, to talk to, to 20 years old Kennedy, and tell him Well, this is the advice I would give you. What would you say?
Kemdi Ebi 39:22
Well, yeah, okay. So if I if I got to see myself again, that's when you as a 20 year old. What I would tell myself is, you know, don't seek for perfection. Just get the job done. That's something I'll tell my 20 year old self. It's important to the worst decision is obviously also indecision, which is no decision, but I think, you know, it's better to get the job done that perfect. So I would say that's, I think definitely advise anyone listening to this to always, always just focus on getting the job done. And perfection can always
Tim Bourguignon 40:07
come later. Why do I have the feeling that there's a story behind this? Yeah, of course there is assuming
Kemdi Ebi 40:14
you wouldn't give me more time we can do a part two, we can do a part two.
Tim Bourguignon 40:24
Do Part Two about about that. Sorry, explicitly.
Kemdi Ebi 40:28
No problem. No problem. I'll be happy to be voting.
Tim Bourguignon 40:32
That's the way to end on a high note. Right. You know marketing.
Kemdi Ebi 40:41
They say he feed the crackers to sell more goods.
Tim Bourguignon 40:48
Fantastic. So if people cannot wait for part two and really want to get in touch with you and know what's, what's the story is all about, where would the right place be? No problem. So
Kemdi Ebi 40:58
my my Twitter handle is at kempster damas s, at symbol ke, and str a DAMAM. us so that's again KTM str a da en us captured on this. And my other Instagram as well for our company is our at enter five, which is the Add symbol MTR number, the number five I ve. So hopefully, that's, that's memorable. And you remember would love, love, love to connect with other like minds out there? And, you know, please ask as many questions as you can.
Tim Bourguignon 41:40
It'll be great. Any chance to see you in real life? Where would that be? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So
Kemdi Ebi 41:47
this week, I am in Lisbon, Portugal, I am part of the web summit, we are showcasing vs to the largest web event in the world. So if you're in Lisbon, and you happen to be coming to the web summit, it'll be lovely. If you could stop by our booth and say, Hello, we'll be there and
Tim Bourguignon 42:10
speaking to a lot of people about what we're doing to change to bring the African potential forward. And when you say this week, it's exactly the week of the release of this podcast. So the first week of November of November 4, right? Correct. Yes, exactly. Anything else coming up? In the next weeks a month and E on your plate?
Kemdi Ebi 42:31
Well, I will be taking a break after right after the web summit. a well deserved break. And just looking forward to ending the year well, but I would say if there's anything, please, please get in touch with us. And also, just so I can add, please also look up more verses. The website is vs dot Africa. So it's ww vs. ve RS US DOT Africa. Very simple. And please definitely drop us a line. We're very communicated on that platform as well.
Tim Bourguignon 43:06
And listeners, as always, you will find all those links in the show notes. So just scroll down and they're all there. It's been a fantastic discussion. Thank you very much.
Kemdi Ebi 43:16
Thank you, Tim. It's been a lot the Thank you for having me on the show. Thank you. And this has been
Tim Bourguignon 43:22
another episode. Next week.
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