Pushkin.
There are at least two ways that you can frame today's show. One frame, climate change makes the weather more unpredictable, and the people who suffer most from this are the hundreds of millions of poor farmers in the developing world who rely on rain to irrigate their crops. The second frame is a little less familiar. Poor farmers in the developing world may be the world's biggest untapped consumer market, and a company that helps those farmers earn more money and move into the formal economy.
Could be huge.
Today's show is about a company that started out with that first problem, helping poor farmers deal with climate change, and now, after more than a decade, the company is addressing the second. They're helping poor farmers get richer and starting to sell them things they can now afford. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. What's your name and your job?
My name is.
Starting easy, It's gonna get hard.
My name is so funny. No one said no one's actually asking me what's your name and your job? Before? Just like that, bam, coming at you, coming at me hot. My name is Samir Ibrahim. I'm the CEO and a co founder at sun Culture.
When Samir co founded sun Culture back in twenty twelve, he was trying to solve the problem of helping poor farmers irrigate their land. Wanted to sell them solar powered water pumps, but it soon became clear that selling pumps wasn't going to work on its own. To make solar irrigation work, sun Culture had to become a tech company, and a carbon credit company and a finance company. Ultimately, Samir realized that sun Culture really needed to solve a
deeper problem. How do you help poor farmers get richer?
A human sized solar panel on the roof of a household completely changes someone's and someone's family's life in a way that people who are living with disposable income may never experience that change. It's a huge change. It's like from someone going and saying like, I literally have nothing to like I can now pay school fees. I mean, it's just it's wild.
Sun Culture is based in Kenya, which happens to be where Samir's parents grew up. Before he was born. They immigrated first to Canada and then to Florida, and Samir was working as a consultant at PwC in Manhattan in his early twenties when he and a friend decided to start sun Culture.
It's no surprise that we weren't farmers. I didn't grow up in a farming household, so I didn't know anything about farming. So when we started thinking about how to solve this problem, we first started exploring where this problem was very big, and it just so happens that Africa
is where this problem is really prevalent. It's really prevalent because two thirds of the workforce are farmers that live on one or two acres of land, and they live off grid, and they live in rural areas, so they're the most affected by this problem.
And the problem narrowly is climate change makes it harder to grow food.
That problem, yeah, exactly. Yeah, But then they're also potentially a big part of the solution to the second problem, which is we need to grow more food to feed it growing population. Yeah, Africa has sixty percent of the world's unused farmable land. It's the only continent with an economic water scarcity versus a physical water scarcity, So we have enough groundwater to use it for growing crops and
keeping animals. Just people can afford to draw it, and you have a massive unemployed workforce that is also agrarian, so you have all the resources to sort of think this through. Because I'm not a farmer, I looked at farming as just an algorithm. You have a bunch of inputs and variables, then you have an output. So I looked at it and said, what are the variables that
have the most outsized impact on the outcome? And when you look at all the farming inputs, it is very clear that water has the most outsized impact on the output. Having access to reliable water makes sense, makes sense. I might even have guessed that one not knowing anything, yeah, exactly, having reliable water can increase your yields, but up to
five times, Like, it's pretty crazy. And it is coincidentally the variable that changes the most because water for agriculture in many parts of the world comes from the rain, which is increasingly more inconsistent and unreliable. So he said, great Africa water, that's where we have to start. Irrigation in Africa is a sixty five billion dollars opportunity because only four percent of African farmers irrigate versus close to forty percent in Asia.
So the other ninety six percent are just relying on rain.
Rain. That's why African farmers are some of the ports in the world because imagine you don't know when the rain's gonna come. So we were like, okay, why do you, Sophie farmers irrigate and we're like, oh, duh. You'll probably guess the answer as well. It's just too expensive. Not only is the water pump too expensive, but the recurring cost for fuel, which is forty to eighty bucks a month, is too expensive for a farmer that's making one thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a year.
And so the fuel is this like a deep diesel generator, I mean, is that the.
Way of petrol exactly a diesel generator of diesel powered or petrol powered water pump to move the water to give to their crops was a problem because irrigation is just moving water from one place to the other.
Yeah, so like there's a river over there, not that far away, but the farmer doesn't have can't afford to buy the gas to run the generator to move the water from the river, and by the way, if they could buy the gas to run the generator, then you're making climate change worse again.
But we don't exactly worry about that. We don't have to worry about that. That's not even, that's not even. That's just like they're just like, we need to be able to afford something, right, yeah, right, sure? Or then what happens is they just take buckets and they fill up those buckets with twenty liters of water, which is forty five pounds, which is those big weight plates in the gym, and then they walk to their farm or they pull it up from the well and just is
super inefficient. So we said, okay, we need to figure out a way to first make irrigation affordable, then we need to figure out a way to get it to people. So from an affordability standpoint.
Do you ever stop and think like this is too much Like as you're like at the talking about these things, you're just like a college kid.
Right we were twenty three, And I think that was the advantage.
You had basically never had a job. It wasn't like you had like run some company or done some big thing, right.
I think that was the advantage. I think that's why we probably didn't stop and say this is going to be really hard. I think, I think really that.
Was it the dumb kid advantage.
Yeah, yeah, I call it, what did I call it? Sort of naive confidence or just yeah, one of those, but I like the dumb kid confidence is probably more accurate. Yeah. So we're just sitting there, We're like, oh, yeah, obviously we're just gonna make irrigation cheaper, no problem. So okay to do that. That is like twenty eleven ish, right, this is what twenty eleven, twenty twelve, Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What's really interesting about that time is we reached grid
parody in a number of African countries. So the cost to connect your power to power your your household with solar became cheaper than the grid. So you have you have these like tailwinds in terms of cost reductions kind of happening. So let's figure out to make the fixed cost reasonable and a fixed cost, and then let's finance it.
So we spread that fixed cost over time, because no matter what, the upfront cost is still too expensive, which is why only four percent of African farmers irrigate with diesel petrol pumps. So we said, let's take an old technology water pumps irrigation, decarbonize it, figure out how to make it solar powered, and then deployed in a resource rich environment like Africa. That's like the summary framework. So we went and developed and made Africa's first solar irrigation company,
and we the original price of the system. If you were to go and try to buy one of these before from like an NGO, it would cost twenty five grand. We managed to get it down to five grand, okay, twenty.
Five thousand dollars, So that's like that, so twenty five thousand dollars is completely out of the question, presumably for really out of the small farmer who can't afford to diesel the generator.
Yeah, when we started, we managed to without really any technical innovation, just buying the right things from the right places and putting it together for our pilot project. We got it down to five thousand dollars. And at that point we're like, you know what, I'm sure over time we can get this to be cheaper. Like, let's just accept we can do that, and let's figure out the
other things I need to go around this, okay. And that's that's when we learned that affordability was one part, but availability was the other part, because huh, and that's the harder part. And it's because because small, older farmers don't have disposable income, no one's really selling them a bunch of stuff, which means the infrastructure to be able to get them things doesn't.
Exist, like to some significant degree. They're not in the kind of monetized, financialized economy, right exactly, they're growing food for themselves, they're treading some amount of food whatever at the market, but they're just not in the cash economy the way we think of it.
Right exactly, They're in the informal economy and it's very isolated and acute, so very village level, et cetera. So we went from thinking we could drop ship these products from China and just like Johnny Appleseed, get a bunch of these things out really quickly. So then realizing we had to figure out how to manage our own supply chain, we had to first wait to do a bunch of innovation on the power electronics.
Well wait, why didn't your first idea work? So your idea is like, we can make these things at you know whatever, eighty percent cheaper than they exist now they'll be a good deal for farmers, like you know, we'll order parts from China like everybody does. Why didn't that work.
Because financing wasn't part of the original idea. It was we thought we'd be able to do with banks, and we thought we'd be able to work with banks to finance, and banks in Africa will ask farmers for two things. One is a pay slip and they're like, well, I'm a farmer. I don't have a pay slip, job or collateral. And banks aren't willing to take irrigation or a cow as collateral because they don't know how to repossess and resell them, so farmers can't get access to loans. We
realize we have to figure our financing. We're like, okay, that's interesting, and then we figured out. We realized we had to figure out the installation because there's no third party installers, the maintenance, the ongoing after sales support. We had to figure out the digital engagement. We had to figure out supply chain, We had to figure out R and D from the power electronics side, we had to figure out how to monetize carbon credits to give them
further discounts boomom boom bom bom bom bom bom. So what we thought was going to be just a drop shipping company ended up being a company that has to build this entire physical and digital infrastructure to get these irrigation systems to farmers. And that's where the journey started.
Why didn't you give up when you realized that?
Because we only realized it over time. It wasn't all in one wa bam, thank you, ma'am kind of thing.
Do you kept being like, oh, we just got to solve this one thing.
Yeah, truly, And that's and we kept uncovering the next step over and over and over again until finally, a few in twenty twenty one, this is almost ten years later, we've figured out one of the last remaining pieces in terms of making this truly affordable and locked in for a large group of people, which is monetizing carbon credits and giving our customers discounts with those revenues. And at that point, we have a business that has shown that
you can collect repayments from farmers. We have a ninety percent collection rate from the quote unquote worst unbankable people in the world. We have ninety percent digital engagement from people who most of the world writes off as not being technologically literate.
But via text message or something, what does it mean?
They're checking their balance through our app? How much do I have left? They're asking, they're asking questions, raising tickets, they're referring friends. If you're a mobile app, They're like, really like engaging. And we get to this point where finally we said, okay, in order to make this affordable to the mass market, not just at that point, I don't know, some tens of thousands of farmers we worked with.
So it was this sort of like better off farmers. Presumably five thousand dollars where you started, it's still very expensive for a farmer who's farming a few acres and can't afford irrigation.
Yeah, and even even getting down to seven hundred dollars, which is where we got to, and even if we spread that cost over over a finance period of two or three years, even paying something like sixty bucks a month or fifty bucks a month is too expensive for most people. Huh. And we have to keep figuring out how do you make this more affordable.
So the price has gone from five thousand dollars to three hundred and fifty dollars, and those are nominal prices, right, and real prices it will have fallen even more. How much of that decline in price is the decline in the price of solar panels?
Some of it some? Yeah, most of it half no, less way less, way interesting, interesting, way less.
Tell me all the things you did to make it cheaper. Tell me some of the things you did to me.
A lot of it was working on the power electronics, so figuring out how to take a small amount of power to power a high powered appliance, So we need less solar to power a water pump.
I read and I think it was a Bloomberg News article that your pumps use something like three hundred or four hundred watts. Yeah, she's crazy, right, Like that's like four incandescent light bulbs.
Yeah, it's like you can't see me, but it's like a human size.
Like the idea that that can be transformational for a farmer, Yeah, is really something to think about.
Yeah, it's like there was one of our one of the stories are so incredible. One of our customers give a ted talk, and in that talk she talks about like talking to her plants and promising them water is going to come because they're dying, and literally not like just going to everything she can think of and bring in her being to try to convince her plants to stay alive. You go from that to her saying my cow didn't die. I expanded my farm and making kombucha.
Like I mean, it's really transformational stuff. And there's one story that will always stick with me that that summarizes and really humanizes this. We went to see a farmer
who is getting an installation. I love visiting installations when they're happening, especially for those who are using the manual buckets before, because once they realize that they don't have to spend three or four hours a day physically pulling a bucket of water from underground to the surface, whether it's one hundred feet down or beyond, and they can do that with a flick of a button, the look on their face will change your life. It is unreal.
And when we ask this customer in particular, so now what are you gonna do. You're not gonna use your muscles to pull this bucket up, and she looked at me in the face and she said, I'm going to get fat with a huge grin on her face. She was just like, that's what I'm gonna do. I was like, that's right, it's amazing.
So okay, so let's go back to you know, you got more than ninety percent out of the price of this thing, right, which seems like the fundamental thing you did.
Right.
Well, so one of the things you did to get the price down was start using carbon credits? Yes, and I don't I kind I mean, I can sort of guess at that, but I also have some questions about that. So tell me about how carbon credits work in your business.
Okay, So there is a there are official verification bodies that create methodologies that count how carbon credits are avoided or removed from the atmosphere. And it just so happens that there's an exis existing methodology under the UN framework that talks about a displacement of diesel or petrol pumps. Okay, So, because solar is an alternate to diesel and petrol, we generate carbon credits for the systems that we install.
So how much do you get paid in carbon credit credits for you know, the sort of median pump that you sell.
So the way to think about this is we generate carbon credits. The system generates carbon credits for seven years. We give customers a discount upfront, and we sell those carbon credits over the remaining years, so we raise debt to be able to do that. We're able to give our farmers about a twenty percent discount at minimum on the monthly cost because we're able to sell carbon. Now.
It might sound like a little bit of just a small discount, but we ran a pilot when we were launching our carbon business and we reduce the price of our system by ten percent and our sales went up by something like I think it was like two times something like that. Where we do st our price by twenty eight percent, our sales went up by four and a half times. Wow. So small adjustments in the monthly price make a huge difference. So we use those carbon
revenues to directly subsidize our farmers. We're not a carbon business, so it's a pass through to our customers, which has enabled us now to grow more. You know, half of our customer base was added in the last two years because of that.
So you're you know, lending the farmer's money to buy the pump. Obviously you're borrowing against seven years of carbon credits and passing that through Like you're a finance company to some significant degree, Like you're in the finance business.
Yeah, we're sort of an everything company. And that's just it's just it's funny. It's like, it's really hard to describe what type of company we are to many people because we have to do so many things in order to give people access to these products.
And it's I guess it goes back to what you were saying, which is your customers, these small farmers are just not in a market economy the way we are so used to thinking of being in a market economy. Right, there's not access to capital or to financing. Obviously, what else is there not that we might take for granted, Like what else do you have to provide that you might not have thought?
I mean, you know, when you're if your cable breaks, you call a third party installer maintenance personally, you go on task grab it to find someone to do it that doesn't exist. So we do all of the installation ourselves,
all the maintenance, all the ongoing after sales support. What's been really interesting now is and this will answer the question of what else might you know, think about our customers are making more money, like we talked about, and just like us, when they make money, they want to buy more stuff. They want to get fat, they want to get fat, but they also want to buy things like health insurance, and they want to buy things like weather insurance. They want to buy things like high quality
seeds and fertilizer. So they're coming at us and they're saying, hey, you know i've been paying you. Well, I'm paying my twenty thirty bucks a month and do it I'm paying Can you just add a little bit more to my monthly and give me these other things? So we said okay. So about a year ago we started a pilot where we bundled in health insurance. So if someone gets sick and go to the hospital, if someone passes away, the family has insurance to be able to take care of that need.
Now let me ask you are are there. You can't be a health insurance company too, right, presumably there's there are health insurance companies in these countries. You are just selling insurance and taking some weird bundle.
We're starting to bundle it to the monthly because again, the reason they come to us is because they trust us, they get duped by not good products. They trust us. We can get them discounts because we're buying in bulk basically, right, because we just added to the monthly payments and then they don't have to go and try to figure out themselves, right. So we did that. We made an investment into a
company that allows us to now finance agriculture inputs. So let's say you're Jacob as a farmer, you're paying well for ten months and you come to us and you're like, I want some seeds. We're like, cool, here's a voucher that we sent to your phone. You can go to any of these right now in Kenya one thousand to proof shops you can get your seeds and what is added to your monthly payments. And last month we started a pilot with Parametric Weather Insurance. If it floods in
your area, you get paid out as well. So we're starting to think about, okay, how do we now provide access to services that helps people protect themselves from shocks and go back to the same thesis, right, how do you increase prosperity at a small, older farmer level and rural areas to increase food supply and reduce client migration. All of these things help farmers protect themselves against the
risk of not paying for their irrigation system. Just good for your business, which is good for our business for sure, which is good for our business. And that's also just a bunch of things that will help them not have to worry about where they're going to spend money and figure that out. So's it's kind of all bundled together, and we're in the phase of thinking about how do we continue to provide services for our customers for things
that they want. Does this become an ongoing subscription that they are able to access that they want to do they want extended warranty. So we're in this discovery phase where our customers are pulling us to offer more products and services because we have a credit relationship with them, because we have their location, because we have payment history,
all these things. This digital engagement. We're now realizing that we can be the access point for people trying to get services and products to farmers, and access points for farmers who want to get access to high qualify, high quality, verified products and services versus going to go buying a bag of seeds that never actually sprout, which is often their experience.
Will be back in just a minute. Part of the way agriculture has become profoundly more productive in the United States and other countries has been consolidation. Right, It used to be the case in this country that eighty percent of the people were farmers. That it was fifty percent, and now it's two percent.
And that is.
Because basically we have substituted capital and technology for labor and that has worked out great in many ways. And yes there are problems with like you know, monoculture, farming, et cetera.
Et cetera.
But fundamental the way we have grown so much food is with uh more and more machines and fewer and fewer people. How does that idea map to the places.
Where you're working. I think about this a lot. And one of the big differences for the consolidation of land in the US and how mechanization took fifty percent down to two percent in terms of farmers is because at that time it wasn't profitable to mechanize a small farm. That's like one of the things now consolidation and economies of scales is a really good thing. So like that is one hundred percent part of the story. But also
you couldn't mechanize a small farm profitably. What we're doing now you can mechanize an eighth of an acre profitably, which means that you don't require consolidation in order for your farm to be able to produce food. I don't think there's going to be one solution for the future of African farmers. I think there's going to be a mix of consolidation. I think there's going to small I think it's going to be a whole mix of it.
But the differences are that you can mechanize a small farm, and culturally, sometimes the only asset that families own is the farm, and it gets passed down generation after generation. So it's a challenge to culturally switch people from giving up their only asset that they have in their family to pass down as an inheritance to being able to sell that off. Now there are companies who are doing that. I think they're going to do a very good job. I think there's no one size fits all. I think
there will be some consolidation. I think they'll be farming as a service. I think they'll be what we're doing. I think there's gonna be a whole mix of things. But it's not going to be because you can't mechanize a profitable and make a small farm profitable. It will be because people like to buy rent or lease cars. It's just going to be an option in the US always because you had to.
Right, because there was no way to be a profitable small farmer. Yeah, I mean you're you're making profitable not profitable, this sort of binary thing, right, But it could be the case that you can make money as a small farmer, but that land would be would produce more food, let's say, with the same amount of inputs if it were consolidated, right.
Like that seems very plausible to me. And so while at the level of the individual, and as you say, culturally people might want to keep their farms, you could imagine there being a pressure, you know, somebody might offer them a lot of money because it would be not because it's some there's some evil capitalists, but because like, their farm could be worth more if someone with more access to capital and more consolidation bought it and started
growing food on it, right, And that doesn't seem like necessarily an unhappy story, although I take your point that culturally it might be complex.
Not a bad thing at all. I think it's great. It's just it's an option, and it's I think I think it's going to be. I don't think there's a there's a better or worse here. I think there's it's just it's an option. Yeah, fair, I feel like it's gonna be. All these models have to exist at the same time in order to figure out how to solve the problems we're talking about. So I'm totally for it. It's just not our business, but I'm totally for it.
So let's talk about the future of sun Culture. When you look out over the next few years, what do.
You worry about. The biggest worry is we've added about forty percent of the people that we have today just in the last two years, and we're growing quite fast. And that's only started about two years ago. So two years ago we started growing quicker than we ever have. We went from you know, ten retail locations to thirty retail locations in Kenyans. It's really just like building all of the I hate the like figital like the physical digital infrastructure to support that scale.
I never heard that before. I don't like it.
You can't I'm so sorry that I put that in your life, but you're gonna thank me one day when you use it at a party and someone laughs. So it's all having all that in place. But we're growing faster, and it's just making sure that we continue to bring on people that align with our culture to make sure that we have the right people in place. And it's just like I think, I always think about it in terms of a sports team. I used to play a lot of soccer and you just got to sometimes change
the formation based off of who your opponent is. And we just have to make sure we continue to iterate on our org structure, where people are, who we have in place to make sure we can continue to scale. And that is a big focus of mine.
If things go well, where will the company be in five years?
If things go well? There's there's different levels of well. So level one of well is we're at few hundred thousand farmers all paying us this dollar a day to get access to services that they need. They're happy, they're making more money. Our net promoter score for our customers is seventy eight. It's so high. Our customers are so happy, and that continues to stay there. Level two is we're able to then potentially move what we're doing into different
farm sizes. So maybe we help with the folks who are operating larger plots of land to your point, maybe the tens of acres to become more efficient, to be able to produce more food, to be able to hire people and create jobs around them. And I think that's something we're really interested in. How do we take what we've learned around renewable energy and agriculture and financing and
bring that to larger farms in different geographies. So can we take what we're doing and bring it elsewhere not only from a geographer perpective, but also from a size.
Perspective Geographically, do you think you might grow the business outside of Africa?
Yeah, not for the next few years. But we've looked at We've looked actively at places in Central Asia, We've looked actively at places in South Asia, We've looked at places in Latin America. So it's not a now thing, it's not a twenty twenty seventh thing, but it's it's a thing. And it's just again going back to team. Do we have the right team in place to be able to do this and can we replicate this in other markets with the right people. It's less now about
a viability thing. It's more can we manage it as a team. That's really the question. We don't necessarily want to spread ourselves too thin right now, but there there is a moral question of like, if you can do this in other places, why not just go balls to the wall right Like it's a necessary, needed thing. You can build your business much bigger. And there's this sort of how do you how do we make sure we
do that sustainably? We don't want to run into the situation where we grow too fast and the wheels fall off. So it's this, it's this delicate balance of what that looks like, and it's it's it is a definite yes we will. It's just question is when, so your five year timeframe seems seems possible.
Now, gaze off into the distance and give me your big injury thoughts.
What I find really inspirational from a business perspective is that smaller farmers who are who are often written off as like very poor people, you can't sell to them, et cetera, are now becoming real consumers. And it's almost in Silicon Valley talk, we're almost increasing wallet size and taking a share of wallet. Like you get people to make more money and then you sell them stuff. It just so happens that the things we sell them are like insurances and access to inputs, but we're selling them
more stuff. And when you start looking at smaller farmers as consumer market, there is a view that they're one of the largest untapped consumer markets in the world. We have all of this interesting data of who they are, what they're growing, how they use their irrigations, what their payments are like, and we can now start to layer on with the demographic and geographic and payment data, the types of the types of things they're asking for, and we now start to become sort of the entry point
for an emerging consumer market. I think what we're doing is a way to do that. It's not the only way, but it is enabling the largest group of consumers or potential consumers to make more money, and I think that might be a transition. And instead of looking at this work only as impact and development work, but you think about it as sort of a way to build the
consumer industry. Things get really interesting, especially if you look at the trajectory that East Asia had in Southeast Asia that Africa hasn't necessarily had because you have, like eighty percent of their jobs are informal, and by twenty fifty, one in four people on Earth will be African. One in three working people by twenty fifty will be African. Half of all new entrance into the global workforce will
come from South sou in Africa. Like, it's just like really big consumer opportunity, but instead of starting with the ride sharing or a delivery app, I believe it needs to start with helping people increase incomes. And that's where the irrigation comes in.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Let's finish with the lightning round. So your parents, is it right? Your parents are from East Africa. They moved first to Canada and then to the United States.
That's right.
Presumably I'm making a guess here, but it's sort of the classic immigrant story of wanting to give their family a better life. You moved back to East Africa. So was that like a disappointment to them? Were they like, come on, man.
My parents are really good at not telling me when they're when things when they think it's going to put pressure or like put me down. So I didn't. I didn't find out that until a few years later that they were like, what the hell is this guy doing? They told me. They told me later that they were like, you know what, we're just going to think about it as an MBA. He's gonna go for a year or two. It's just like he's going to school, and that's fine.
And then like later they're like you're still They're like, oh cool, now they're super proud and stuff. But you know, I was living in their immigrant dream. I was self sufficient in Manhattan. I just started working in PwC. They were like, we win. We left East Africa accounting account accounting firm. I was doing consulting there for them. They were like, we won, We won the game. We won the immigrant game. We left EDIOM and was causing problems.
We left and like we won. And then I'm like, so I need to go to East Africa and I need to figure out how to borrow some money from people. So they went and borrowed money from two uncles, a grandparent themselves lent it. They never told me where they got it from, which would have also stressed about we paid it back. And I think after we paid it back, they're like, oh, wow, you're there, like, this is what you're doing? Cool? And now obviously they're really they're really
happy and proud and yeah, do they have equity? They don't have the company? They don't.
Oh you should give them some after all that.
One of the big drivers for me is to I would like to retire them.
So, oh that's very sweet. Yeah, I mean I didn't ask you about exiting. Like, is there some universe where you sell the company or sell part of the company.
Yeah, there's a universe. There's for sure universe. I mean, my job as a CEO is to provide investors' returns. Technically, that doesn't necessarily mean that it all has to go right. So there's a world in which we sell it. There's a world in which you have to pride off of me. But there's a lot of different options going forward. The most important thing is how do you get to scale fastest? Yeah?
What is the rate limiting step for you?
Now? In scaling, there are two things that would change the game for us. One is in our control. One is not in our control. In our control, it's can we have a thousand times more sales agents in the field, and if that's the case, then we can almost think about scaling linearly, but just by adding people and can we manage that growth. So that's one thing that is
in our control. The thing not in our control is does a multilateral institution come with a large subsidy and a time bound five year subsidy?
Does that mean the World Bank?
For you?
Does that mean the World Bank?
That does? Yeah, do we have a subsidy in Uganda through the World Bank? But is there a large is there a larger scale multi country subsidy for access to electricity and what people call productive use of energy? So what we're doing basically productivity.
Turning water into food class.
Water into product classic productivity, that would be that would be a huge that would be a huge game changer. If if that and and it looks like it will happen, it's just when. But that's that's the moment at which we then push a lot of capital into the system and really hire those agents skilled in new markets, et cetera. And that's that's the moment. So just making sure we're ready for that.
Back to your parents, Yeah, living in East Africa helped you understand your parents better in any particular ways.
Nobody has ever asked me that question, and it is part of what I think about most as a theme. And there's there's no question about why we started in East Africa versus anywhere else. I can tell you it's because Kenya is an English speaking country and because there's a port and blah blah blah, but it's because my family's from there, and like that's that's there's an affinity
to it. So I learned a lot about my parents are tough and smart and like charismatic, and it's it's very East African vibe and kind of seeing how they grew up has helped me understand that.
That last sentence was quite interesting when you say they're tough and smart and charismatic and that's an East African vibe, Like what do you mean by that.
Tough? As in My mom's dad died when she was seven, and she had six older brothers and they moved from Belgium to Congo to them Kenya and there's this sort of and I you know, I've met my my one of my mom's cousins still lives in Kenya and his mom, who recons passed away raised was like raised my mom helped raise my mom for a few years. Meeting her and hearing the stories and seeing where my mom grew
up helped me understand that toughness of her. But it's like you hear the stories, but then you see it and you see them in that place, and that really brings it together.
Tell me about the Buffalo Ranch sub at publics?
Where did you get this shitternet? What?
Where?
This is wild? That is so good. That's so good. Oh man, that's great. That is really good stuff. My wife's a journalist and I have a lot of respect for that.
That was awesome.
I mean, it's it is delicious. It is also something that will change your life. It's like, you know, I grew up in Orlando and Publix was the grocery store we went. It's a regional grocery store and it's just the Buffalo sub there is just so so delicious.
Samir Ibrahim is the co founder and CEO at Sun Culture. Please email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. We are always looking for new.
Guests for the show.
Today's show was produced by Trinomanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Alexander Garreton and engineered.
By Sarah Bruguero.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.