29 min
Daniel Yu, CEO & Founder - Wasoko - Pioneering B2B e-commerce in Africa Built Tough
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- Entrepreneurship
Daniel Yu describes himself first as an international curiosity seeker, and second, as a software developer. Raised in a multicultural household in the US, Daniel dropped out of university to travel and study languages. In 2013, he was studying Arabic in Egypt when he noticed pervasive stock outs at the neighborhood retail shops. He co-founded Sokowatch (as Wasoko was called then) to solve the many problems facing informal mom and pop shops which sell $700 billion of fast-moving consumer goods a year across Africa.
Today, Wasoko serves 150,000 informal retailers across seven African markets: Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Zambia. Since its inception, Wasoko has generated over $234 million in sales and delivered more than 5 million orders.
In this episode, Daniel talks about the #1 trait of effective founders, the trade-off between founder scrappiness and seeking veteran expertise, why he’s bearish on M&A as a growth strategy, and whether he would have changed his fundraising strategy in the current downmarket.
Daniel Yu describes himself first as an international curiosity seeker, and second, as a software developer. Raised in a multicultural household in the US, Daniel dropped out of university to travel and study languages. In 2013, he was studying Arabic in Egypt when he noticed pervasive stock outs at the neighborhood retail shops. He co-founded Sokowatch (as Wasoko was called then) to solve the many problems facing informal mom and pop shops which sell $700 billion of fast-moving consumer goods a year across Africa.
Today, Wasoko serves 150,000 informal retailers across seven African markets: Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Zambia. Since its inception, Wasoko has generated over $234 million in sales and delivered more than 5 million orders.
In this episode, Daniel talks about the #1 trait of effective founders, the trade-off between founder scrappiness and seeking veteran expertise, why he’s bearish on M&A as a growth strategy, and whether he would have changed his fundraising strategy in the current downmarket.
29 min