Matt Bowles: Hey everybody, it’s Matt Bowles! Welcome to The Maverick Show. My guest today is Maijid Moujaled. He is the Co-Founder and President of Chipper Cash, the no fee African across border payment startup that has been likened to the African version of PayPal. Chipper Cash just raised a $2.4 million seed round from renowned investors in Silicon Valley including Hall of Fame quarterback, Joe Montana’s fund after pitching the legendary football star directly. Born and raised in Accra, Ghana, Maijid built Chipper Cash while travelling the world on the Remote Year program. And after launching in October 2018, Chipper Cash has already processed 500,000 transactions for more than 100,000 active users in its first nine months of operation alone. Maijid has built his company with a location-independent infrastructure and can run his business from anywhere in the world. Maijid, welcome to the show.
Maijid Moujaled: Thanks for having me, Matt. This is really exciting and I’m really happy to be here.
Matt: It’s so good to have you here. We’ve got to set the scene. We’re doing this interview in person in your hometown of Accra, Ghana and it is an honor to be here, my friend.
Maijid: This just warms my heart. I mean I just got here about three days ago. I landed straight from San Francisco and so to be able to do this interview in my hometown is one of the biggest blessings.
Matt: Cheers to you, brother.
Maijid: Cheers!
Matt: We just opened a bottle of South African Shiraz that we’re gonna be drinking through over the course of this episode which is gonna be an amazing conversation. We should start with a little context of how you and I know each other. We have both done the Remote Year program. You and I have actually hung out in Columbia, we hung out in Buenos Aires, Argentina and now we’re hanging out in West Africa in your hometown of Accra. This is awesome.
Maijid: Yeah. And when I met you back in Columbia, it was just like there’s so much I can learn from this guy. I remember we were sitting at the edge of that table and just now that I heard you were going to be here; it is exciting to see you.
Matt: Well, it’s awesome to see you, man! And your story, since we met until now, is an incredible, incredible entrepreneurial story that I really want to get into. But it’s been so fun. I’ve been here in Accra for two weeks and I have been so enamored with this city. Genuinely speaking, I’ve been to probably almost 70 countries and this is one of the cities where I just walked into it and I was immediately, day after day, just completely enamored with the city. I mean it’s been everything from the restaurants that I’ve been to, the beach parties that I’ve been to, the nightlife, and just how incredibly friendly and wonderful the people are just walking along the street that you interact with. I mean it has really, really been a very special and very heartwarming experience for me.
Maijid: I’m really glad to hear that. So, now you know I left the country back when I was 16 and so, I’ve always wondered…I got to see the country from an outside perspective in and I always wondered what it would be like for a foreigner who comes into Accra. What is that perspective that they see? And so, just hearing your experience firsthand, it’s like we’ve got a lot going for us here in Accra. The world should notice it even more than it does now. So, that’s been exciting that you’ve have such an amazing experience so far.
Matt: And I’ve been telling people about it and I will continue to tell people about it. It is one of my highest recommendations in Africa for sure and one of my highest recommendations in the world as well, by extension. But it’s a situation where oftentimes the best things that have happened here, I just wander into them by accident. I’m wondering on the beach on a Sunday afternoon. I sit down on the beach, which by the way, are pristine, clean, white sand, gorgeous beaches. The weather here every day has been perfect and amazing. So, I’m wandering down the beach, I sit down and have a drink and while you’re chilling on the beach in the afternoon, more and more people start coming to the beach and then the sun sets and you’ve literally got lines of restaurant, after restaurant, after restaurant…bars/restaurants and they’ve all got their own DJ’s and their own sound systems. So, you’ve got…I don’t know how many restaurants there are…maybe 20 or so in a row and they’ve got DJ’s that are just bumping amazing music. Most of it is Ghanaian music mixed in with Reggae, some of it coming from Nigeria, some of it from the Caribbean. And just thousands of people come and congregate and have this unbelievable beach party. So, by the time the sun goes down, which the sun sets here pretty early in this time of year, so maybe by 7:00 p.m. the sun is down and there are maybe 5,000 people partying on the beach to these DJ’s.
Maijid: Yeah. It’s just amazing. In full context, he is referring to Labadie Beach which, growing up here, that was the beach that I went to, to just go swim in the ocean with the family. And those two dynamics are just awesome.
Matt: Yeah. It’s amazing. And then, the nightclubs have been absolutely incredible. There are amazing DJ’s! A bunch of them are outdoor venues which are really, really cool.
Maijid: The weather is always amazing in Accra. It gets hot, but it’s usually, especially at nighttime, it’s just perfect tee shirt weather.
Matt: And then, you’ve got… I love Indian food. It’s one of the types of foods globally, that I love. And so, one of the things I did in Accra is I looked up Indian food. I roll into this Indian restaurant in Accra that’s called Heritage. If anyone comes, you should go to it. And it was literally, outside of India and maybe outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, it was some of the best Indian food I’ve ever had anywhere in the world. The chef is from Hyderabad, right? But they do it so perfectly I literally have been going there three times a week. We just ordered a delivery order of $150 worth of Indian food from this restaurant and just stocked our fridge for the whole week. It’s just amazing. So, the Ghanaian food is fantastic! We’ve gone into some of the local restaurants. But also, the other international cuisine.
Maijid: Yeah. It’s on-point.
Matt: It’s amazing!
Maijid: Ghana is definitely one of those gateway countries into Africa. And so, we get a lot of foreigners coming in to setup shops and do business. It’s super safe. And so, there’s definitely a huge rise of the international cuisine and all sorts of international businesses really.
Matt: Yeah. It’s amazing just how, as you said, how safe it feels, how clean it is, and I’ve been completely enamored each day as I’ve had new experiences. It’s like wow! This is incredible! So, it’s been an amazing two weeks and I’m definitely gonna be telling everybody and recommending that they come to Accra.
Maijid: I’m super glad to hear this. This really warms my heart.
Matt: For sure, man. So, let’s get into your journey a little bit. Maijid, you were born and raised here in Accra and what I want to ask you just aa a sort of start off with this is to ask you about your entrepreneurial tendencies growing up. A lot of people have a lot of different paths to getting into entrepreneurship, but as you were growing up, maybe you could talk about where you grew up and also, as you were growing up, what were your entrepreneurial tendencies?
Maijid: So, I was born and raised right here in Accra in Ghana. And I would say my whole life I’ve definitely been in that builder category. So, I think probably the engineers among your audience, I’ll probably relate more to them. I would break toys and fix them and put them back. That’s the classic. And I think the first time I ever sold something was actually in my middle school which was literally a two-minute drive from where we are doing this podcast right now. My mother worked at the customs so she had a bunch of candy that she would bring home. And these are mountains of candy that we couldn’t have eaten it all in my family. And so, I would take a whole bag of those to school and I had a friend and I would work with that friend and we would just sell them to the students. And then we would actually make money. And it was like, no way! My mom didn’t know we were doing this so, I was basically stealing these candies and selling them. And that was the first time when we were in grade three or grade four…about that time. Then, a couple of grades later, I think that was when internet cafes had become a thing here in Accra. And so, what we would do is we would go online and download these Pokémon ROMs, put them on floppy disk drives, and then sell them to the students because they didn’t have access to the internet. It was like product arbitrage basically. And we had a whole list and catalog of all these games that you can get. These are people who cannot buy Gameboy Advanced, but they have a computer at home. And so, that was the second thing and it was just reselling stuff that you would download online. But in Accra it’s totally legal. So, I’ve always been on the spectrum where I was just like building things. And then, I think after going to high school, that was when I went on a high school exchange program in Michigan. So, that was the first time that I finally got a chance to leave the country. And so, I basically just love being in the U.S. I love the snow. I love the cold. I was kind of tired of the African heat and African sun. And so, I loved the experience. I came back home… I used to want to be a doctor because when you’re in this part of the world it’s like you’ve got to be a doctor or a lawyer. That’s the thing. But then after I went back to the United States for college, I went out to Grinnell College in Iowa. That was where my adviser at the time said… I wanted to take all sciences and she said, “No. You cannot take all sciences. You have to be more liberal.” And so, I could only take one math class. And then I somehow stumbled upon this computer science program. My first year I was at the help desk, and so, it was literally the same thing where people come in, they’re sick with their Macs and their laptops, and I fix it, and they’re happy and healthy again. And it was like wait, I give people this feeling as if I was a doctor without going to school for eight years. So, that was a transition into building things using technology. And that kind of kicked off actually building stuff.
Matt: So, I first of all have to ask you, my business partner, Valerie, is from Michigan. So, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you where exactly in Michigan was your study abroad experience and what was that like for you?
Maijid: The high school? It was in North Michigan. So, it was right on my hand…I’m doing the classic Michigan. And yeah, I was the only black kid in that school. And so, I represented an entire continent for many people who had never spoken to anyone from Africa. And they would ask me questions like, “How did you get here? Did you swim?” You know, like really…I wondered if they were joking or they were being serious, but a lot of them really didn’t know. So, given that experience and realizing being the face of Africa kind of started at that age before a group of people. So, that was exciting to see that you could spread the word about what’s happening back home because people just don’t know. All they see is what is in the media, which most of it is not true. And there is an amazing life, as you have just described, right here.
Matt: Yeah. I mean Accra is unbelievable. We’re all gonna go out tonight. We have a whole crew of like about eight people or something that are gonna meet for dinner in a few hours and then hit the clubs after that. So, my experience here is just snowballing and it just gets more amazing every day. So, you had that experience studying abroad here. And then what was the college transition like for you? And then after college, what was your career trajectory like from there?
Maijid: In college, as I mentioned, I studied computer science. I always wanted to start a company…I mean a product. But because you’re a college student who is international, you can’t actually do that. So, we started a student group in the college that was called Grinnell Aaptiv and we basically made apps for the college. We got the college to come and invest in us. It was about $150,000 to train students. And so, that was the beginning of building things. Then, after college…this was actually where I met my Co-Founders for Chipper Cash. And then, after college, we went out to join the Yahoo Mobile Team. This was when Yahoo was basically buying also some mobile startups. So, I worked on Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Mail and then worked on Flicker. And then after that Imager had just raise about $40 million. Imager is the startup that you can watch all these memes and just basically make your day better by basically watching memes which was amazing. And so, I worked there on their mobile team as well for about three years. It was in between Imager that I had this life where I had to basically leave the country because the H-1B visa was a lottery and even though Imager wanted me and I wanted to stay, there was no way to do it because the random number generator is about to decide my fate.
Matt: And so, from there what happened? And maybe explain a little bit about that for people that aren’t familiar with how that H-1B visa situation works. But how did that all go down? And then how did you respond to the outcome of that? What was your next move?
Maijid: The H-1B visa is essentially a visa lottery and there are only about 65,000 of these spots in the U.S. and an extra 20,000 if you have a master’s degree. I only had a Bachelors, so I was vying for the 65,000 spots. And essentially the company applies, and you get selected. And there are usually about 300,00 to 400,000 applications. So, it’s basically six months. And it’s not just me, every single immigrant out there in the U.S. who is trying to get a visa goes through this way. You have six months to a year of dread. You don’t know if you’re gonna be selected and you start to think about your life out of the U.S. So, in my case it was looking at all the options. Should I go back to grad school? Can I start a company and get a visa to do that? Basically, all the options. And one of those options was okay, maybe I cannot stay in the U.S. Let me do something like Remote Year. And Remote Year was a Plan B. That was how I ended up deciding to do it. So, I applied as a joke as it was my Plan B, but it was the best thing that ever happened. So, I kept my job. I pitched Imager on my doing Remote Year and traveling the world while still working for them. And then while they were doing that they would also try and figure out a way to bring me back into the country. And so, I got to travel the world and they got to work with really good lawyers. It was a lot of hard work though. And then eventually I got to go back to the U.S.
Matt: Well, I wanna hear about the Remote Year experience for you in general. I mean just for people that aren’t familiar with that, this is basically a 12-month work travel program where working professionals can travel the world for a year and live in a different city each month of that year with a community of 50 or so people that all travel together. So, the company Remote Year takes care of all your accommodations and airfare and access to your working space and Wi-Fi and everything else and has community events planned for you. And you basically go with the same community for an entire year. So, the Remote Year cohort that you went with was one month ahead of mine.
Maijid: That’s right.
Matt: You were in Ikigai and I was in Libertatem and we were sort of trailing you guys for the second half of the year, but it was cool because we did some joint interactions. So, I met some people from your group, and you met some people from my group. And then you ended up hanging out with our group for the entire month after yours finished in Buenos Aires, I think.
Maijid: That’s actually right.
Matt: So, we had a blast. There was a lot of interaction there and stuff. But I wanted to ask you, how was the Remote Year experience for you in general in terms of the travel and the community experience and all that kind of stuff? And then also, businesswise, I’m curious about how you developed and built Chipper Cash while you were traveling the world.
Maijid: So, you set the context right. I was a kid who had just graduated out of college and was doing everything I could to stay in the U.S. When I told my parents about the Remote Year, they were like, “This is ridiculous. You better stay in the U.S.” Like why are you going to travel and leave after eight years of trying hard to make it work in this country? And so, it’s a month in a different city, so we started off in Lisbon. And I remember that that flight going to Lisbon, I was literally…it was a one-way ticket, right? So, I was just devastated. It just all of my professional life was over because what’s going to happen after Remote Year? Now I’m also with a Ghanaian passport which means you have to apply for a visa essentially in every country. So, there’s so much uncertainty. Like could I even complete the program? Or how do I apply for a visa to Columbia or to Argentina? What happens in Europe when all the side trips are happening? And so, I was just in a constant state of uncertainty throughout. And I think that’s one of those grounding factors which is in life, you have uncertainty no matter what, and people just don’t know it. But you do have this time of uncertainty and sometimes you just have to deal with it and be present with that and you’ve gotta make it work. You have no choice. And so, that was basically the beginning of Remote Year where it just felt like, I’m screwed. But as soon as the program started…as soon as you meet all these 50 crazy people who have given up a lot to travel…all of them are working remotely and making things work. That sort of environment constantly fills you. It’s initially a day to day to day interaction and it fuels you on. And a lot of people quit their jobs to start their own companies because it was sort of like where you could travel and make things work. There’s nothing like it really. So, that grounds you in a way that throughout the program I had always been thinking about my whole life, like how can I do things for my home country…for my home continent. And one of the things that after you travel the world for a bit, you notice what works in certain countries and what doesn’t work. What’s possible here is just a huge source of inspiration. And so, with payments really, in Germany they are super heavy in cash. If you cross the border and go to Denmark and Norway, it’s all cards. They don’t accept cash. And even in Brazil and Colombia they just had that treatment on digital payments all over the world. You notice what’s possible. And then, you know that back home it’s just super heavy in cash as well, but we haven’t even tried to digitize a lot. I mean mobile money is huge and it’s gotten us to a certain point, but where we need to go in the next 10 years needs to be something more modern and more foolproof. And you have this inspiration to drive while you’re traveling. So, that was a huge part of Remote Year. I was still working on Imager, but I was basically moonlighting…that’s what they call it on the side…and building Chipper Cash, just an hour a day. But this is what you have to do if you’re doing something part time. You just work on it 30 minutes a day. And showing up every single day to work on what you wanna work on part time helps a lot. I can remember this because I think I was on a train from Sofia, Bulgaria to Serbia and there were these amazing rocks. It was basically a hill of rocks. They looked like crystal shining rocks. And that was on my right side, and I was amazed looking at it. The guy behind me, he mentioned, “You know what? It isn’t the power of the waves, but it’s the frequency day after day. These waves are hitting the rocks and that’s what causes such beautiful miles, and miles, and miles.” And that just…that was like, that’s it. It was just the one percent. Every single day you’ve just gotta show up and make something one percent better. So, that was how I was able to build the core of Chipper Cash while travelling. It was like okay, today I’m just gonna comment on this code. Whatever it is, every day I would touch this code base. Even if I only write one line. And so, that adds up because that’s the one percent.
Matt: That’s amazing! That’s really important advice as well for aspiring entrepreneurs who have a fulltime job in terms of how to do that and eventually transition. I wanna start off, before we talk about the next steps, and the transition, and the evolution of Chipper Cash from there, I want to ask you to sort of more clearly identify the problem that you are solving. For example, I came to Africa and I’ve been in Africa now for four months. I was in Cape Town for two months, I was in Lagos Nigeria for a month, I’ve been in Accra for almost a month, I’m gonna go on to Senegal after that. So, I’m spending a bunch of time in Africa this year. And one of the things that I noticed pretty quickly is that when you need to send money to someone to pay for something and you’re like, “Oh, do you take PayPal?” Nope. Nobody on the continent of Africa takes PayPal. You can’t use these types of services here to send money. It is incredibly difficult to transfer money on this continent. And so, I’m wondering if you can explain a little bit about that issue, how you identified the problem, and then how you went about architecting a solution for it. What is Chipper Cash?
Maijid: Let’s start with the problem, and the problem is, today in 2019 it’s, as you just described, to move money across the continent within Africa…say if I lived in Kenya and I’m trying to send money to Uganda, it’s just incredibly hard. If I’m trying to send it to Ghana, you just probably have no way. I mean even literally Western Union will not let you send money out of Ghana, which is kind of ridiculous that we don’t have that pan-African system essentially transfer-wise for Africa. Internally within the country you do have mobile money which started with M-Pesa and it’s been cloned in all sorts of African countries. And so, that helps with the intercountry movement, but it’s mostly just PTP style payments. But Africa is the most expensive country to send money to and also to send money within. And so, when you see what’s possible in terms of…I mean like in Sweden the Swiss use Venmo. We send money to each other with no fees. You just assume that your money makes it back to accounts. You send money, and you’re done. Out here, even if you’re sending $1.00 you pay a fee of about 30¢. In this country it’s expensive to be poor. If you’re sending lower amounts, you pay more in fees percentagewise, which I think is absolutely ridiculous. And so, what we’re doing with Chipper Cash, a lot of it is idea arbitrage in a way. We have a life that we’re used to and that we take for granted in the U.S. We have PayPal, and Venmo, and Square Cash and all the services. Why don’t we have that for Africa? There’s no reason why we shouldn’t. In fact, I was listening to a podcast about the Venmo founders and they described how when they were building Venmo, they kept wondering why hasn’t this been done before? They kept waiting. Someone’s gonna stop us. And two years later they were still building and thinking someone is gonna stop us. Nobody stopped them and they just kept building this product. And now that I’m learning more about the space, I too think why hasn’t anyone done it? There’s probably some regulatory reason why. But no, it’s just that nobody has done it. And actually, maybe I will sidetrack this to a conversation I had one time with a guy at MIT which is very relevant for where we are today. There’s this code with, maybe, climate change. This is such a hard problem to solve and most people like those here in Accra would say, “Well, there’s some smart kid at MIT trying to solve it.” But then you talk to an MIT kid and ask if people are trying to solve this problem, and their answer is, “No. There’s no one.” If people are supposed to be solving this problem, there’s no one solving it. So, we’re basically screwed. And because you’re there you feel that someone has to solve it, so you take it upon yourself to do it. That’s what we need on the continent where people…people know problems here. But when I’m back, a lot of people complain. Things are broken, but it really is upon people to just get up and try and solve it when you see that problem and not expect someone on the other side or some white person to try and solve it. And many of these are small problems. So, with Chipper Cash it’s… I met my Co-Founders in Grinnell. We had worked together. We had an amazing working relationship. In fact, part of the original idea was on this road trip that I took with my Co-Founder, Ham. He’s from Uganda. This trip was on Route 1 in California, so it was a good road trip where we talked about these ideas. That was the initial inspiring point. To have him on the east side and I’m on the west side. We all have our sense of communities. Let’s band together and actually solve this problem of moving money within our countries. And so, that kicked it up. Also just having the right people around you who understand that this is a problem on our continent. Let’s just solve it. We don’t know what’s gonna happen. None of us have payment experiences. We’ve never worked in a bank. We just build software. We just love building things that are useful. And every day we learned something new because things were breaking and customers were like, “Why isn’t this working?” But because the payment infrastructure is also really bad, you live and learn. But then, part of the one percent, right? You’ve just gotta make it better. And you’ve just gotta keep going. You don’t need to see the end; you just need to see the next step. And you just keep going. And it’s a slog. It’s really a slog, especially on this continent. But you just keep going. And you know you’re gonna get there. That’s really been the Chipper Cash story, that’s been the journey so far.
Matt: That’s amazing because that is a really gigantic problem that you guys are attempting to solve. I mean the contribution and the solution that you’re envisioning, offering, proposing, and now delivering is really, really substantive and significant. So, can you talk about how Chipper Cash then evolved, and then came to the point where you were able to launch and go live, and then started raising investment capital? What was that process like?
Maijid: As I mentioned, we were building this while I was traveling on Remote Year completely on the side. So, it initially started that I was the main developer on it. It initially started as a web app that we could just share the link out to people. And my Co-Founder had a partner in Uganda…a friend who ran an aggregated service. And so, we could then hook into that service and just prove our concept to see if this worked. One of the key things was getting a prototype that kind of worked but it was extremely clunky, and I was straight up like, “This is horrible, but let’s see if this works.” This was actually back in January of 2018 and I shared it with a couple of friends, and they were like, “Where will I use this? This is not gonna work. I don’t have a friend in Uganda to send money to.” Now this is my personal friend, so, of course, they may not have anyone in a foreign country. And it was the same story from my Co-Founder’s side which is he just stared at the people and like no ones’ gonna use this which is…it makes no sense because this is a fundamental human need to move money. We’re just talking to the wrong people. But then we kept showing it to people and then you just get these one or two people who realize, “Oh my god. I’ve been looking for this my whole life. I’m glad you guys are working on this.” And eventually that one or two people start to fuel all that. So, it was downhill, and then it sort of went uphill when you met the people that needed it. So, we had a prototype out there and then my Co-Founder quit his job at Facebook and came to stay with me in San Francisco. I was still working part-time at Imager. And that kicked off a lot because now he’s like, this is a huge problem. At this point we had about 20 users. When he came full-time on it, that pushed the whole process forward because now he could actually reach out to investors. We started trying to raise money for about four months. And at this point, I was working in native apps and so we pushed it out there. Now when it goes from a website to an app, there’s just something conceptual about those two that…oh, this is an app on my phone. Okay. This is more legit than a website. So, that is actually what started getting people to try it and use it and try some small transactions here and there. They’d try a little bit of the cross-border piece and they were like, “No fees cross-border? This actually worked.” And for many people if you have a new service that interfaces with the service that you already know, that just lit the fire. And then, people started sharing with each other. And this was still 100% bootstrapped at this point. So, it’s like okay, this is growing. We’re paying all these fees because we were covering the fees. There are fees, we’re just covering it the same way that Venmo and PayPal will cover the fees. But it was not sustainable to be bootstrapped at that point. Personally, I would love to do a bootstrapped company, but for the kind of product we are trying to build, you really do need to have investors. And so, that’s when Ham, my Co-Founder and I started pitching to a couple of investors. This was in September of 2018. And then we just kept pitching and a lot of it was just like, “Africa is awesome. There’s a lot of growth ahead, but we’re not there yet. But we’re doing this, and we see these numbers going up. We hear the story.” And the way people transfer money across the border right now is this system called Hawala transfers where if you’re in Kenya, you tell someone in Uganda, “Hey, you, I just need to send money to this person. If you send it over to that person I here in Kenya, will send it over to whoever you want.” So, it was completely off the books. No one really sees it. It’s very informal. No one knows these transfers are happening. The World Bank doesn’t calculate it. And so, if you have a company like PayPal or Venmo saying, “Hey, should we go into Africa? Let’s do this data analysis.” And when you go to crunch the numbers, the numbers aren’t really there because they are informal. And so, the bottom line is that it’s not there. It’s not ready. But when you talk to the people about how they move money, it’s there. And so, that’s kind of the bet that we’re placing which is we talk to people every day. We know what’s happening on the ground and we have the tech and resources and connections. So, let’s just build this. We started talking to investors and spreading that story, that it’s Africa’s time this coming decade, and it’s gonna be huge. And yes, even if we are early, it’s gonna happen. This is inevitable. So, you better just basically get on. And I mean we see it in the product. And just to continue on with the investors, there’s this thing called the ‘African Discount’ which we didn’t know about but we started to see where even if you have an amazing product, because it’s Africa…this doesn’t matter if you are black or white…because it’s Africa, investors just automatically slash your valuation. And they assume that everything is just cheap, which as you are aware since being here, not everything is cheap. And so, there’s a lot of fight and discussions that we had to have to sort of raise that awareness that it’s not that cheap. There are high margins in this industry and that was the battle. But we probably talked to maybe over 70 different investors. At some point what happened is that we got an introduction to someone at 500 Startups and that’s how we then got to pitch this guy. And he was like, “The program is already started, but I could see the promise here. Therefore, I’m gonna let you start late.” So, we started when 500 Startups was almost halfway through…it had already started.
Matt: Can you explain for people that don’t know, what is 500 Startups? What do they do? And then how did you get involved with their program and how was your experience?
Maijid: Yes. So, 500 Startups is an accelerator. They actually worldwide have accelerators in Thailand, Vietnam, and a bunch of other countries. And so, they had a program in San Francisco and what they do is you apply, you get accepted, they give you $150,000 for seven percent of your company. And the whole purpose is you are here to grow. They have a lot of mentors. You have weekly calls and biweekly calls and the purpose is to just grow the company and give you all the help that you need. And so, for our batch in winter of 2018, we were the only African startup in that batch. So, those mentors that we had in there with their experience, that was really when things started taking off with Chipper Cash. And having someone say, “You know what? I can see something here. I’m gonna let you join even though it’s late.” I remember that when he said that I was like, “No way! This is actually happening!” And that was when I finally had to let go at Imager. They had done so much for me, right? They brought me back to the U.S. basically. So, that was hard. But at the same time there’s just something ahead that I cannot not do. And so, that kicked off the process. We got into 500 and started hiring a team on the ground and just went in to build mode.
Matt: And can you talk a little bit about.. I mean I wanna ask you a number of business questions in terms of how you built and scaled, but just to stay with the investment pitching experience and when you went in to raise your seed round, can you talk about that experience? We mentioned in the introduction that your company… I think it was your Co-Founder…actually got to pitch Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana directly. And Tech Crunch did a whole article about it and everything. Can you share a little bit about that experience and the whole process of raising and closing that seed round?
Maijid: Yeah. So, it’s one of those things that you don’t know it’s gonna happen. Yes, we had gone to 500 status and we had some funding, but it was depleting like a falling rock because like I said, we were covering the fees. So, you see the bank account just dwindling and once you’re on the VC track it’s all about raising money. It’s not about being pushed up. You have to just go big or go home. So, your bank account is depleting, but you’re supposed to raise money in about a month. And you know that if you don’t do this in three weeks, you’re done. You’ve got this growth, but a lot of investors are like, “We like what you’re doing, but…eh.” And so, that was the atmosphere and the vibe that we were in. And we had not much sleep. I’m working on the core product. Ham, my Co-Founder, is a crazy trooper. I mean this guy is driving going everywhere and doing the pitching. I would come in on the second conversation because some of the first ones are just duds. They’re just like let’s just meet this guy and see what is happening. And so, usually in the second conversations…even the second conversations, you just hear, “Okay. We like what you’re doing.” Some people say yes and then they just trail on. And there’s a whole east coast versus west coast investors where on the West Coast, if they don’t like what you’re doing, they just take their phones out. They don’t tell you no. And if it’s an East Coast investor and he’s buying in, he dominates the conversation and just asks questions. But when you’re pitching an investor, you should be the one dominating and saying, “This is what we’re doing,” and seize the conversation. So, getting to the tail end of it, it just felt like it wasn’t gonna happen. And you’re mentally thinking, well, maybe this is not gonna work out because we actually do need to raise money. Yes, we could try and slow things down, but we are growing. So, why is everyone saying no? And so, you do have that self-doubt because if it was amazing, obviously everyone should be in it. And what it took really was one investor. Our lead investor ended up saying yes and it was this unbelievable, “No way! That’s not happening!” You just…they could say yes, but it’s not really yes unless the money is in the bank. And so, you’re just praying that nothing goes wrong in the process. You’re completing your due diligence, he interviews. Allen from Imager…like a bunch of people that I know. And Ham was also doing some pretty solid due diligence as well. And we were hoping that nothing scares them off, quite frankly. But it ends up pulling through and working out and it’s almost like you’re trying to swim in this water and finally you’re above the surface and you can breathe. But you’re still in this water. And now you have to swim to the shore. So, you’re in the clear, but not really. It was a roller-coaster of a zone because this is part of what I mentioned in the beginning…uncertainty. You just don’t know what’s gonna happen, but you’re just gonna take it one day at a time. That core of what Remote Year taught me really is essentially what fund raising was like.
Matt: Right. That’s amazing. And so, after you had those investors on board, and you had Joe Montana’s fund, and you had other high profile investors from Silicon Valley on board as part of your seed round, and you raised the $2.4 million, at that point, what then was your business scaling process from there? What was next up for you guys?
Maijid: So, at that point, now that we know we’ve gone from zero to we know that we have funds to push this forward, we had the story as well. That article kicked off a ton of people on the ground in Africa saying, “You are one of those stories.” There are not that many African founded. And being in the valley, and also, like I’m back home in Ghana and just pushing this product on the ground. And also, being a face to the outside world. So, you can feel the pressure. We opened an office in Kenya, so, Kenia is the home base in Nairobi because that is mobile money mecca for the continent. That’s where M-Pesa started. We started to hire a team out there. Engineering is pretty distributed, so all of our engineers are remote essentially because everyone at this point was working part-time just like I was. So, now that we actually have money, everyone came on full-time and we started paying them actual market salaries. These were people which were gonna do it anyways because they believe in the mission and we need this on the continent. And so, getting paid for them to do what they are already doing was great. And they are the most hard working, loyal, and amazing engineers that I’ve ever worked with. So, they’re all remote. We have an engineer in Berlin, one in South Africa, one in New York, and one in Ghana. And so, now that the funding is closed, everyone is full-time. And we did really now see what was happening in various countries. So, essentially, we were doing like a mini Remote Year, but for the team and having a rolling headquarters within a country where we just travel out to Ghana, to Kenya, to Uganda and see what’s happening with the product. Because this is a global product. Everyone on the continent is going to use this at some point. At least, that’s our goal. And so, you wanna be connected. So, that’s why it’s important to travel and experience different cultures. And so, we started to scale the engineering team and operations teams out because we had digital-only service. That also makes it easier. And that is part of the ethos being digital-only because you can actually do this from anywhere. So, customer support helps even though they live in Kenya right now, they have all the customers everywhere else.
Matt: Can you just explain also the profit model for the business? Because you have initially mentioned here that you guys are covering the fees in order to be able to offer free service and in order to be able to build your customer base and get people to use it. But obviously, to get the investment dollars, you guys have to show a really viable profit model. So, can you just sort of explain how that works or how that will work?
Maijid: Yeah. It’s super simple. So, for consumers, no fee. So, if you’re sending money locally within the country, there’s no fee. If you’re sending money across borders, there may be an exchange rate fee in that transaction because it’s multiple currencies. And then on the merchant side, that’s built out of the fee. So, it’s essentially just like PayPal where consumers have no fee, but on the merchant integration, if you’re trying to accept payments for your website, there will be a tiny fee on that.
Matt: Got it. And so, let me just ask you this now from a business perspective. As you’re hiring your distributed team, how are you going about hiring the right people and building the right team? What are your hiring practices? What types of tips do you have for hiring based on your experience so far?
Maijid: Other than the pre-phase that we’re saying, “At this stage in the company, we are about 20 people right now. A lot of the hiring is internal. It’s who do you know and who do you trust? This is all about money. We have an open policy, so people have access to everything because we’re early. And so, a lot of it has been who are our internal connections. This is classic for any early stage company, which is where we are at right now. What we do look for, however, is the ability to communicate in written form. Because we do work remotely, most of our written communications are in Slack. That’s what we use. So, can we communicate with you in that way? I mean, I’ve seen some interview practices where given that we work remotely, can I chat with you on Slack rather than doing a phone call via Skype because our time is spent on Slack. And so, there’s a lot of that within the engineering side. And as well, how much do you believe in this mission? Because at some point you are going to be doing overtime. I mean this is a slog. At some point, it’s not even about the money. So, what is that belief that you have for interconnect in Africa? And that’s another big one. I’m a big believer of travel for that inspiration. So, if you are someone who cares about traveling and cares about a culture that isn’t yours, that’s also a huge one because we are seven people of different cultures and different ways of thinking. Like some people ask the same questions in different ways. We use intercom in the app and so your interacting with different people in different African countries. And so that and also empathy is another huge one.
Matt: Wow! That’ really amazing! How do you manage a distributed team and run your operations and coordinate project management across different countries and different time zones and all that kind of stuff? How do you run an internationally distributed operation?
Maijid: That is a tough one and I don’t think we figured it out just yet. But when I’m in San Francisco for example, purely on the time zone side, I would have calls at 2:00 a.m. sometimes or 6:00 a.m. because you have to make it work with the other part of the world. On the product and engineering side, like I mentioned, a lot of it has to be in written form. And so, for example, in engineering we have a process called spec driven development where if you’re gonna work on something, you just first write this more detailed spec in Google Docs and it’s shared with everyone. And so, all the work is not done in silos. When it’s done, it’s posted in Slack and everyone gets to see it. If you’re one person, this is all in your head. You don’t really need to write this out. But when you’re in a group and that’s a team scale in, we’ve noticed that even the operations folks need to know what is happening in engineering. If you’re all in one single office, you just hear the conversations casually. So, that’s never a problem. When you are remote, how can you recreate that? And so, we built a process internally where the way we work by de facto standard makes everyone else be involved, even if it’s just marginally on the side. So, a lot more is written down. And that helps when onboarding new hires because once you join on, you have literally a list of the history of work that has gone on and here’s where we are today. You can catch up by yourself. I noticed this when I went remote from Imager. I was actually probably the second remote person at Imager at that time. Interestingly because I was remote, I was looking out for any documentation and there was a lot of it. And while I was on the ground, I never read it because I was right there. But when you are remote, you start looking out for things. And I feel like I learned more about the company being on the outside because you’re just digging in. And so, we at Chipper Cash, try to…we were remote first and everyone has this culture of writing things out. And that process is both for operations, engineering, and across the board.
Matt: Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I agree entirely on running remote businesses in that way. Let me ask you this, just a business question vision wise, to the extent that you can share this stuff. Do you have plans to do another round…another investment raise? And as a company, have you guys thought specifically about an ideal exit strategy? Are you eventually ideally looking to get acquired and sell this to a larger company of some kind? Are you looking to go public with the company down the road? Are the investors that are on board looking for a particular exit strategy? What is sort of your vision there in terms of the future? To the extent you’d love to share any of that, feel free to answer that however you like.
Maijid: I mean I can definitely talk especially on the personal side which is, because this hasn’t been done before, what we want is to just make this happen. That’s kind of the primary goal. I know it is bright and the standard thing to do to know where your exit is when you enter into a business, but at a point, we’re not really thinking about the exit so much as much as we are thinking about can we just make this happen. But that’s like step zero. I would say that we are…for what we do, we do need to eventually raise more money or become profitable because, like I mentioned, we are free and we are about to take off Chipper Checkout which is where the merchants get on. And so, there are plans eventually to potentially raise more money. And this is standard across companies at our stage. So, that’s in the works. And in terms of the long-tail exit? I don’t think that we want a long tail exit as much as we want to build a sustainable thing that’s just here forever that ends up powering a lot of companies. And that’s really the plan. Just to solve this payment infrastructure problem on the continent. And there is really not…probably an IPO potentially, but that’s to the extent that I know right now.
Matt: Awesome. Let me ask you this. In terms of potential competition, you alluded a little bit earlier to why companies like PayPal have not already done what you’re doing. Now that companies like PayPal which are obviously insanely well-resourced and capitalized have seen what you’re doing and they’ve seen and/or heard about your pitch, and they’ve seen other investors coming on board and agreeing with you in terms of the market that you have identified and the model you’ve built to serve it, is there a risk of those types of companies just deploying an insane amount of capital to try to replicate what you’re doing and compete with you? Have you guys seen the competition landscape moving forward?
Maijid: That is a fascinating question that I think about quite a bit, which is why aren’t other people seeing what we are seeing? And as I talk to more and more people, and I think I mentioned this before, if you look at the market from a data perspective, it’s a black hole. Not to be figurative, but there is not much. Then there’s a recent Facebook labor announcement which is another, I think, exciting piece for trying to create a digital currency that transcends countries. And that’s exciting. Now if there were… I think this problem is so bad that if there were to be external companies coming in and deploying a ton of capital, I would actually be happy because now it really means that the pie is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and you can pluck out your segment. I don’t think we at Chipper Cash would be building a mobile wallet if there was an already existing mobile wallet that was across the board and actually worked 100% percent of the time. We would probably focus on another different segment, but in just looking at the market it’s like, I can’t even do this basic thing. And the services out there that supposedly do it, don’t work. Therefore, that’s the baseline. And there’s just so much work that needs to happen on that front that I’m not too concerned about it. And here’s the problem. There have been companies that try what we’re doing. Many of them have gone under. Many of them have shut down and some of the reasons are just the bad payment infrastructure. And that’s really what we’re trying to solve is the payment infrastructure problem because you need a ton of engineering resources as well as just the people and the connections. There’s no one on the ground and no one else can do business in Africa. You just need that combination really. And so, if an external company was to come in and try and do it, I welcome them. Because we need to be in this battle. The battle is against cash, right? It’s not really against even the mobile money telecoms. It’s just really against getting more and more people into a digital ecosystem. And that problem for the next decade is just gonna get really tough.
Matt: Can you talk about your vision for Chipper Cash let’s say 10 years from now. I mean ideally speaking, you guys crush it, more investors come on board, you’re able to build what you want to build. What is your ideal vision for 10 years from now?
Maijid: In 10 years, obviously everyone is going to be using Chipper Cash. Everyone in Africa and the African diaspora. And I think right now the average cost to move money into the continent on average is about nine percent. That’s gonna go down to like two or three percent. There are some corridors to there. I think its Hong Kong to the Philippines. There are some corridors where they cost just one percent and part of that is just because they are our competitors. I think as we roll into this and invite in more people to compete, it’s gonna roll the number down which is just gonna be better for the people. And so, we’re gonna have a cost effective, super slick, super easy way to move money. So, you’re in San Francisco and you work as an engineer wherever. You can move money home for the cheap and we’re not just losing money. This is a product for everyone to be able to have access to. And this is actually 10 years. So, I’m gonna say we’re here in Accra. There is a road that when I was young, we would drive over after church and my mom would buy us these ice cream packets. And every time we drove over this bridge and there’s water beneath it. Now, quite frankly, it does not smell good. And so, every time we drove over, I would hide my ice cream because I didn’t want the smell of this filthy place to enter the ice cream. And when I see pictures of Shanghai and the progress that happened in Shanghai, I’ve seen these before and after shots. It was like a filthy dump and now it looks like skyscrapers and this amazing gorgeous place. You do know that it’s not impossible for that to happen here. There’s a lot of work both on a people mentality level and just having what works to make it happen. But I do think…because as I’m driving through Accra today and it’s like look at these palm trees. Look at all this stuff. This could be gorgeous, but it’s just not there right now. There are multiple reasons why, of course: people and technology. Those are two different problems. But I think in 10 years we can start to work toward the track where the Accra that you described at the beginning of this podcast becomes an even better version of it. And Chipper Cash really, at the bottom this, helps to power a lot of fairness and equality amongst everyone that lives here. Not just in Accra, but in Nairobi, in Lagos, and everywhere basically on the continent.
Matt: That’s so amazing! And people that come here as tourists, would be able to use it as well while they’re on the continent spending time here to transfer money to whomever they need to?
Maijid: Absolutely. And so, when we mention that we want to support the African Diaspora, that does mean that it will be open to basically someone with a foreign bank which would include a tourist. So, yes.
Matt: Yeah. That’s awesome, because I need to start using this immediately.
Maijid: Wakanda money.
Matt: Exactly. Maijid, I wanna ask you now a little bit about some of your personal productivity habits as an entrepreneur. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re able to be productive? I think in general, but also while you’re traveling and you’re in these new amazing places and the super cool cities or beautiful beaches, and you want to go explore and do stuff and all of that, how are you able to be as productive as you are as an entrepreneur? Do you have morning routines? Do you have a particular day structure that works for you? What are your productivity techniques?
Maijid: So, I definitely have a morning routine and it’s really simple. You roll out of bed you, fall to the ground and you do two pushups. Mine is just really simple. The point would be when you do two pushups, you end up doing five and you end up doing ten, and then you end up doing 50. But you’ve gotta do that too. And so, I always just still need to. And if I’m done with the two, I stop. So, mentally I’m okay with it. There are days when I don’t do those two pushups and I do have a crap day. I’m just off because I never felt like I did something that morning. And that’s as basic as it is for my morning routine. The goal is when I do travel; it doesn’t matter where I am. I don’t need a gym. I just need a floor. And so, it is everywhere that I go. Again, one percent. Other than that, this role is definitely stressful because things are breaking a lot because of the bad fundamental infrastructure. And so, it gets really stressful. But when I’m not working and there are times when I just need to get away from everything, I just love to dance. So, while I was traveling on Remote Year, I was out in Buenos Aires and the Bachata is actually really good. And in Brazil there is this dance called Brazilian Zouk which is like relatively new. It’s about five years old in the United States and it has started to make its way around the world. And that is probably one of my favorite partner dances. I could talk about how much dance is a huge stress reliever. You’re not in your left-brain head of our province. You’re in the moment for just three minutes, but whoever you’re dancing with the music just fills your body. You are working out, you are meditating, you are practicing something that you otherwise wouldn’t. You’re not thinking about money at that point. It’s just you and the person that you’re with and dancing. And that’s been pretty much the core thing in every culture. Every country you go to has that. I always do that no matter what. Best thing is you don’t need to speak the local language and so you meet people as well when you’re dancing. So, that is one of the things that being location independent, being that you can go anywhere, just like bonds you with the local community and it has all these extra pleasures.
Matt: Yeah. That’s awesome. I remember you and I actually did together a tango class in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Maijid: That’s right. That was a good time. I had never done tango and so that was also another experiment where…and that’s the thing about dancing where you feel like you’re pushing yourself to try something that’s hard but then you feel rewarded at the end of it because you actually got the move right. And as basic as it is….
Matt: One of the partner dances that I’ve been watching…I actually haven’t taken lessons or participated in it yet here in West Africa is Kizomba. And I think you do Kizomba as well, right? Can you share a little bit about what that is for people that don’t know and talk a little bit about it and what it means to you?
Maijid: So, Kizomba is actually known as the African Tango colloquially. It was founded in Angola and then made it to Lisbon in Portugal and then went through Europe. And now it has slowly spread into the U.S. and South America. And it’s typically a dance that you do with your family and especially in Angola. Out in Europe and the U.S. it is a partner dance where you are girl and guy, lead and follow. And you are really close in that embrace. You have literally six body parts of contact and you’re all moving as one body together. And it’s more about the togetherness and the earthiness of the dance. It’s just about we are here right now in this moment. That’s what it is. So, when you get thing like that with your mother or a close friend or someone like that on the dance floor, that just being still and being you is really apparent in the air and just grounds you because of that earthiness of it.
Matt: That’s awesome. And I know you and I also both have a shared love for Brazil and for the city of Sao Paulo in particular. I’m always talking about Brazil on this podcast. People know that I love it. But can you talk a little bit about what your experience in Brazil and in Sao Paulo in particular was like and why you love that city so much?
Maijid: Yeah. I went to Brazil because in Buenos Aires I was told that in Brazil there’s this dance called Brazilian Zouk that I had never tried. And so, I got an Airbnb literally a block from the dance studio and my whole thought was I was gonna work and dance. That’s it. And the thing about Brazil is really it’s the people. So, I got there to this class and literally everyone was two people start to pull you in and it’s like, “Oh, you’re from Ghana. Why don’t you join us while we go into this restaurant? Meet my new friends. Meet my sister.” And it wasn’t a sister, she was just another friend from Columbia. But that sort of family aspect of Brazil…you feel like you are one of them even though you’re obviously not. You have an instant family when you move out there. So, I thought I was just going to do this for the weekend in Sao Paulo and it’s been a month because of the people and because of that welcoming atmosphere and welcoming vibe and just learning a new dance there I never tried before. That combination was just spot on. I think other people have different perspectives on Sao Paulo. Mine was through a dance lens because that’s literally all I did almost every night. And so, I definitely want to go back and experience some of the other stuff like the graffiti art and just other things from Brazil that weren’t dance. But that was why I went. And so, that grounded that experience.
Matt: That’s so amazing. I didn’t actually take any dance classes while I was in Brazil although I would love to go back and do that…exactly what you did. But the music and dancing is so infused into the culture. I would just be wandering around by myself alone on a Saturday and you just run into street parties with DJs playing and people are taking over entire streets. There’s just a massive block long after party going on and it’s just…this is Brazil. Now I’ve been to Rio for carnival, and lived in Rio for a couple months, but this is just like not just during carnival, and not just during the festival, this is just a Saturday. I mean people in Brazil, that’s just how they roll. It’s just a part of their culture. It’s what they do. And so, my experience was very similar to what you described even though I’ve never taken any classes. I just walk around in the streets and I just see this stuff. I mean it’s amazing. The street art, and food, and… I’m just always so enamored when I go to Brazil. And the country is so enormous. Just geographically speaking, it’s so huge that I feel like I’ve only seen…I’ve been to Brazil three times now and I feel like I’ve only seen a tiny fraction of it. And wherever you go in Brazil, it’s a very, very diverse geographical landscape and there are very different types of experiences that you could have. But each time I go there I’m just like, oh Brazil… now I remember why I like Brazil so much. Oh my gosh, it’s amazing! So, I have the 10-year visa for Brazil.
Maijid: I’m jealous. I got three months.
Matt: Well, I can only be there for I think three months than I have to be out. But then I can come back, and with the 10-year thing I can be there, I think, 180 days out of the year. So, like 90 in, 90 out, 90 in, 90 out if I wanted to. And I feel like I should be taking more advantage of that because Brazil is amazing. So, I just want to ask you also about travel in general for you. Can you talk a little bit about why you travel, what you love about travel, and what travel has meant to you?
Maijid: Yeah. I definitely did the bulk of traveling during that remote period where I would essentially wade in and figure out ways to get back. I mean if I could summarize Remote Year in one year, it’s freedom. And really that’s why many people do a lot of things to be free. And the thing with travel and when you are a tourist in a different country, you can get away with so much. It’s like I just didn’t know and therefore…but you could explore a lot. You could go anywhere, and you could essentially reinvent yourself on almost a weekly basis. And that process of exploring who you are as a person is at the core of it. Because when you go out to a foreign country and you have a new experience that’s never happened…you were describing what happened when you were in Lagos, it’s just a new experience. You are like, I don’t’ know what to do. And you just have to figure it out. It’s like I don’t swim, but it’s kind of like you’re just thrown in the swimming pool and you have to figure it out. And it happens over, and over, and over, and over again. So, there’s a lot of personal development that happens in these new things that you experience. And for me it’s a combination of that and the freedom to just be able to just do it. I’ve been living in San Francisco the past six months and I’ve been working on Chipper Cash, but definitely that routine sort of sets in on a physical level where it’s like I am doing the same physical things and there are other stresses of it. Or for travel, it’s just constant inspiration, constant exploration, constant questioning who are you right now and who are you gonna be next week. And you’re not even thinking about it, but it’s happening to you. That’s why I think everyone at some point has to go through that kind of experience and constantly go through it because it just makes you naturally question a lot.
Matt: I agree with that entirely. And I find myself in those situations all the time. And a lot of times that’s the point…is to catapult yourself into uncomfortable, unfamiliar situations where you may not even speak the language or be able to…I mean everything is different and you need to figure things out. And sometimes intentionally putting yourself into situations where you are uncomfortable and you don’t know how to do the stuff that there is to do, is sort of the point.
Maijid: Yeah. Your environment controls a lot. And so, if you’re able to change your environment in a controlled fashion, of course, by changing the country, you just naturally no matter what will learn a lot about yourself.
Matt: And you just learn so much about different cultures. We were talking about Brazil and even just coming here to Accra and Ghana for me has been just amazing. Just to be so inspired and enamored and at the same time that you might put yourself into the situation of discomfort or you don’t know how to do this, and you have to figure things out and you feel like a child. There’s that, but at the same time there’s also feeling just so enamored and inspired by what you’re seeing, what you’re experiencing around you, and the music, and the people, and the landscape, and the scenery is different and it’s just so inspiring and amazing. And just the privilege to experience that and to learn about that and to learn about different cultures and different histories and all that kind of stuff in person on the ground in a place is just all so amazing. So, I feel like that whole combination together in such an enriching and amazing thing.
Maijid: For sure. And that’s actually why I ended up doing dance because I was in Columbia and salsa is… I mean you cannot walk one block in Colombia without hearing the music. I did not speak Spanish at that time so if you wanted to meet a local it was kind of through dancing. And that began that dance journey for me. And this idea of experience and culture that is not yours, but at an intimate deeper level, that’s the only way. You’ve just got to go there.
Matt: And that’s one of the reasons too why I try to stay places for at least a month or so. So that you can really feel like you live there. And then you have your regular people that know you at your regular coffee shop and your shopping at the grocery store and doing normal local things. And you’re actually living in place. You’re not just rolling through and staying in a tourist hotel and zipping around and taking selfies in front of statues and museums. You’re actually living in a place and you’re finding your favorite nightspots, and your favorite restaurants, and your favorite coffee shops and people get to know you.
Maijid: They know you by name.
Matt: Yeah.
Maijid: You’re like yelling, “Hey Matt, come on in.”
Matt: Yeah.
Maijid: And you just have your mini society. And you get that taste of what it’s like to be there.
Matt: Yeah. Exactly. I mean there are a number of places in Accra right now that I could walk into and everybody’s gonna be super excited to see me because they know me because I go there all the time. So, creating those kinds of experiences locally is just totally amazing. So, Maijid, at this point are you ready for the Lightning Round?
Maijid: The Lightning Round. All right!
Matt: Let’s do it! Take a sip of that wine and we’ll get it rolling. All right. What is one book that has influenced you over the years that you would most recommend to people?
Maijid: I think it’s a classic that’s 10 years old. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
Matt: That’s a good one. What is one app or productivity tool that you are currently using that you recommend to people?
Maijid: Well, I use Trello for both personal and professional. It’s an adrenaline rush for moving things from the left to the right. And it’s just like I use it to write things I’ve already done. Like I did two pushups. Move it to the right. And just that progress pushes you.
Matt: Awesome. What is one podcast you listen to or blog that you read or YouTube channel that you consume regularly that you would recommend people check out?
Maijid: I really love the Jordan Habinger Show. I actually met Jordan Habinger as well and he’s a great guy. I think after college that was one of those free podcasts that I had and just hearing his opinions about things and the people that he has on the show, especially just as a man. It was one of those shows that grounded you in a way. So that’s a very good resource about almost anything.
Matt: Cool. All right. If you could have dinner with any person that is currently living today that you’ve never met…it could be a celebrity, author, public figure, business founder, athlete, movie star…anybody in the world currently living today. You and that person for an extended one on one dinner…who would you pick and why?
Maijid: I would pick Satoshi Nakamoto. He’s the person that founded bitcoin. I wanna know why he did that or she or they. I know they are an entity. That would be the one person.
Matt: So, you’d have to figure out exactly who it is first and then have the dinner. That’s amazing. That’s a good pick. Because the question allows you to choose fairly unavailable people. Right?
Maijid: Right.
Matt: So, that’s a pretty good answer. Because you want to think about who would I really not be able to get access to and then you picked it for the answer for the question. So, that’s a really good answer. All right. The last two are travel questions. What are the top three travel destinations that you’ve been to that you would most recommend people check out? What are the top three?
Maijid: The top three…okay. Number One, Columbia in Metagene. I don’t know if I’d say why, but it’s just huge growth moments on multiple fronts. Number Two, I would pick Sweden. And that might be just because of who I am and where I’m from and the experience that I had when I was there. And Number Three, just Split, Croatia. I’m a water person. Even though I don’t swim, I just like to be by the beach and just be there. And so, those would be my top three.
Matt: Awesome! All right. Last question…what are your top three bucket list destinations? So, as if you’ve never been before and your highest on your list right now that you would most like to see.
Maijid: Number One would be Japan. I’ve never been to Asia. And I think the Japanese culture is different from what I’ve ever seen. Number Two would be India. There’s a lot of stuff that happens in Africa and this is also in Asia. I want to see those similarities also just on a product level, right? ATM is huge over there. Interestingly, Number Three is China, but that’s also for a similar reason. I mean these are all Asia because I’ve never been out to Asia. But the Chinese culture and the African culture are very similar. It’s almost like the default is no trust, but yet they’ve grown and expanded immensely. How do they do that? How do we replicate that over here? I wanna just see it and feel it and imbibe that. And then hopefully, we’re back.
Matt: Awesome! Maijid, it was so great having you on my show. We want you to let people know first of all how they can learn more about Chipper Cash and how they can definitely use Chipper Cash if they are coming to the continent of Africa to visit as a tourist. Or if they want to send money to Africa or between African countries or any of that kind of stuff. How do they learn more about in use Chipper Cash? And then also, how do they follow you personally a social media or contact number about what you’re up to?
Maijid: You could download Chipper Cash straight from the app store. It is free. C – H – I – P – P – E – R C – A – S – H. You could also check out our website at ChipperCash.com. And I am on Twitter at @DrJid or you could reach out to me and shoot me an email at maijid@ChipperCash.com. Just mention that you’re listening to The Maverick Show. I would love to talk to you or speak to you on Skype and have a conversation with you. And so, just hit me up.
Matt: Awesome! We’re gonna put all of that contact information in the show notes. We’re gonna link everything up at TheMaverickShow.com so you can just go to one place. Go to the show notes for this episode and we’re gonna have all of the links to everything we’ve mentioned on the show as well as all of Maijid’s contact information there. Maijid, thank you so much for being on the show! This was a blast!
Maijid: This was s huge pleasure. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.
Matt: All right. Goodnight everybody.
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Duration: 77 minutes
