In his recent tweet Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and the financial services provider company Square, who was in Africa has expressed his nostalgia by saying he is sad about leaving Africa, and he will be back in the mid of next year for living almost 3 to 6 months there. He has acknowledged the future potential of Africa in terms of technology and, precisely, the Bitcoin.
Jack Dorsey was in Africa for the whole month of November, which he expressed before. He was looking forward to meeting the startup founders hailing from the world’s second-largest and most populous continent but — undervalued. During his trip, he met with entrepreneurs like Betelhem Dessie, founder, and CEO of iCog Labs, and Noel Daniel from TechNext Limited.
Jack believes that Africa would define the future landscape of tech, particularly in the field of leading cryptocurrency, i.e., Bitcoin.
Travelogue of Jack Dorsey
According to his yearly timeline, Jack is a vagabond traveler. He celebrated his 43rd birthday in Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar, where he was engaged in the Buddhist meditation technique Vipassana. To avail it fully, he went into silence on the night of his birthday.
On 3rd September, Jack said a Hello to the culturally diverse city of Melbourne, Australia. And finally, then, for November, he ended up after exploring and meeting with entrepreneurs in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa.
Not just Dorsey, in order to make new year’s resolution, CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg also intends to host public discussions on the future of technology in our society. However, media groups heavily lambasted Mark’s initiative for featuring mostly white men and ignoring the people from underdeveloped regions like Africa.
Not ok, Google!
Jack took a jab indirectly on the Google search engine today as well. He endorsed and gave thumbs up to the DuckDuckGo search engine, which he said is using for a while and called its app an even better product. He praised it and he loves it, and he has made it the default search engine. The best thing about DuckDuckGo growing popular lately is that they advocate privacy and do not sell or use users data.
Africa, the No. 1 choice of leading CEOs
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is not the first who admired and predicted Africa’s role in technology. Owner of Alibaba group Jack Ma also made a visit to Ethiopia last week, where he settled a deal with their government to establish eWTP Ethiopia Hub, a new trade platform to boost regional commerce.
Africa is now also home to many successful startups recently. Earlier this month, a startup founded by Opera OPay successfully received funding of $120 million from Venture Capitalists, including Chinese and Americans investors in series B round. Chinese tech giants clearly intend to invest large amounts in Africa. In addition to this, US-based financial services corporation Visa had also invested $200M in Nigeria-based fintech startup Interswitch as well.
The growing interest of investors aims to make Africa the next global frontier of technology and startups.
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Last updated: 3:44 PM GMT
Featured image: TED
