I think a lot of impact-minded people should seriously consider working at early-stage startups - particularly in low-middle income countries.

I’m an American currently working at an early-stage startup in Kenya, so thought I would write up:

• How I got this job
• How I think about the impact of my work^[1]
• What my day to day job is like
• My advice for people thinking of working at a startup
• What would make me decide to stay or leave my company

 I’m aiming to be concise, so sound off in the comments if there’s anything you’d like me to expand on in more detail.

Context: I work as a growth lead at a company called Kapu Africa, a startup based in Kenya reducing the cost of living for Kenyans by offering cheap direct-to-consumer sales of every-day purchased items, with next day delivery^[2]

How I got this job

• After undergrad I worked in consulting for 2.5 years (BCG) - first in Chicago and then in Nairobi Kenya
• I decided I had learned enough from BCG, and that the best way for me to contribute to global development was to work at a startup. I’ve written here and here about that decision-making process
• My coworkers at BCG Nairobi put me in touch with a bunch of people working in various startups in Nairobi as well as elsewhere in Africa. Over the course of 15 or so conversations, I got a sense for what kinds of companies and roles were interesting to me vs. which weren’t
• I was very lucky in that most of the companies I was talking to were looking for someone with my background. I never had any formal interviews. I was able to have an attitude of “I’m looking for a job where I can have a lot of impact, and if I find that job I will definitely get that job.” 
• Kapu was actually in stealth mode when I joined it, so the only way I found out about it was because a former colleague worked there
• I had like 3 conversations with different people from Kapu, decided it was the best shot at impact I had (see next section), and so went with it!
   

How I think about the impact of my work

• I had decided on global poverty as what I wanted to work on in the near-term. Besides the obvious direct benefits, solving global poverty means also unleashing the potential of talented people (who happen to be very poor right now) who can help us solve humanity’s other problems
• Economic development seems like the best way to lift people out of extreme poverty
• I think Kapu is particularly good in terms of impact on a few metrics^[3]:
  • Direct impact: Our core business is making goods cheaper for end consumers - targeting poor Kenyans. Our goal is to provide $1B in savings to customers. I view providing real savings on everyday purchases as quite similar to unconditional cash transfers in terms of impact
  • My personal potential to give a lot: If our company does super well and gets a high valuation, I’ll make a lot of money I can then give away
  • Driving economic development via:
    • Low-medium skill job creation
    • High-skill job creation potentially setting up our existing team to go start great companies later^[4]
    • Increasing the visibility of Kenya as a destination for international investment capital (that is primarily profit seeking as opposed to impact-seeking capital of which Kenya has a lot now)
    • Contributing to building up the business ecosystem in Kenya by doing business with our partner companies (e.g., suppliers, logistics companies) 
  • It will help me develop skills (directly driving impact, knowing how a business works from a 360 perspective, and focusing on moving fast) that will be valuable later in my career in the business or nonprofit world^[5][6]

So what is my job actually like?

• At its core my responsibility is:
  • Have a strong hypothesis about what we need to grow our number of customers by 10x
  • Test that hypothesis by doing data analysis, visiting and talking to customers, and doing small tests and seeing if they have impact
  • After we find something that works, create the playbook for it and hand it off to the relevant team (sales ,operations, supply, etc.)
• In terms of day to day activities, here’s roughly how I spend my time:
  • 20%: Doing data analysis in google sheets or Metabase
  • 20%: Doing various operational tasks that fall to me because they don’t really fit on anyone else’s plate. For example, calculating commissions for the sales team and sending it out, sending out mass text messages with promotions, designing fliers that will pop up in our app to give information on how our agents earn commissions
  • 15%: writing / reading Notion documents related to things we are testing, changes to our playbook, new product features, communicating our value proposition, etc.
  • 15%: testing / debugging new product features in our app
  • 15%: going on delivery runs, walking in the market to talk to our agents and customers
  • 15%: In meetings with my teammates related to all of the above
• For more granular look, here is what I will be doing this week:
  • Monday: In the office. Will do a bit of analysis and then write-up of results from a customer recruitment event that we did on Friday evening. Then in the afternoon will have meetings to discuss our performance last week, and aligning on specific actions that we think will get us to our end of quarter goals
  • Tuesday: In the field visiting some of our agents who did well last week to see if I can learn anything about what we should scale up to more agents. Then make the plan to scale that up
  • Wednesday: In the field implementing something with our sales team that we aligned on in the Monday meeting
  • Thursday: At our warehouse with our customer care team improving our rules about how customers send us digital payments
  • Friday: At warehouse paying commissions to our agents and wrapping up other admin or analysis from the week
     

My advice to people thinking about working in a startup as a career path

• It’s hard to quantifiably compare the impact of working at a startup contributing to economic development to working on existential risk policy. I find it easier to think about cause prioritization on its own, and then making a decision about if entrepreneurship/policy/nonprofit work/ etc. is best within the constraints of the cause area I’ve picked
• If you care about global poverty and think you’d enjoy a startup environment, then try to join a startup in a low/middle-income country! For the reasons I shared above, I think this is a quite effective way to contribute to economic development
• Focus on a company where you’ll get strong mentorship, especially early in your career.  The level of mentorship you get varies hugely between startups. I’ve heard from friends who joined early-stage or started their own companies that get quite little mentorship. I have benefited a lot from my bosses who have 10+ years experience in e-commerce. This seems super valuable early on in my career
• It’s valuable to go to a company that is early and moving quickly. You will learn way more, and be forced to be effective. This was the best advice I got when I was deciding what company to join

What would make me decide to leave Kapu?

As a lot of people have noted, it’s very very hard to compare impact across cause areas. The thing I am least sure about in all my thinking is “should I be working on extreme poverty or on AI safety?”.
 

If I take for granted that the cause area I want to work on is extreme poverty, I think working at Kapu makes a ton of sense for me based on direct impact, potential to earn to give later, contributing to economic development, and building my own skills.
 

I would stop working at Kapu if some combination of these things happen:

• I become convinced that I can have a higher impact by working on AI safety (I am learning more about my potential to contribute to the space)
• Kapu looks like it won’t have as successful a trajectory as I now hope it will have, which means the impact from Kapu will be much lower 
• If - after continuing to learn how to build a company’s growth levers in the next 6 months - I feel like the further skills I learn won’t be super generalizable
   

If you are interested in the above and think it would be useful to talk to me, just drop me a message! Happy to talk over chat or call with anyone interested in this kind of work.

Thanks to Career Conversations week for giving me the impetus to finally finish and post this, and to Cecil Abungu for helpful comments on an earlier draft.  

1. ^{^}

   I’m partially writing this to force myself to re-evaluate my own thinking - so would appreciate any challenges on the parts about impact!

2. ^{^}

   More detail on how Kapu works at my blog here

3. ^{^}

   Most of this expected impact lies in the long tail. If we become a unicorn ($1B+ valuation) then there’s tons of direct impact, job creation, and money that I’ll earn that I can then give away. 

   This is especially true on the “attraction of investment capital to Kenya” point. Kenya has not had any unicorn startups, and VC tends to pile into a sector when they see a major success there.

4. ^{^}

   Look at how many people have started companies coming out of Paypal, or coming out of Jumia in Kenya

5. ^{^}

   I’m not extremely confident in how this stacks up to counterfactual options, but I know I am learning a lot

6. ^{^}

   More speculative - how did I compare the benefits of working at Kapu to other potential jobs?

   - vs. a Nonprofit working in global development:

   --On direct impact, I can directly compare the benefits provided by any nonprofit to the benefits provided by Kapu, (since our benefit is directly providing savings - it may not be so easy with other startups). I have not done this directly with many nonprofits, but my sense is there aren’t any effective nonprofits that have the potential to provide the equivalent of $1B in cash transfers (This is Kapu’s goal for how much savings we want to create over the company’s lifetime, and I view I view “not having to spend $1” as equivalent improvement to “being given $1 for free”. For reference GiveDirectly has given $400M so far)

   --Nonprofits wouldn’t have the same benefits in terms of sustainable economic development and potential to give. I imagine that the skill development I would get at most nonprofits would be significantly less, for the type of building for impact I want to get good at

   - vs. Earning to give: I did a back of envelope impact calculation and think that my current work is likely higher impact than earning to give. I also just am not that interested in the main ETG-type jobs at this point in my career
    

   I think starting an effective nonprofit would be the most likely way to have more impact on global poverty than I do at Kapu. I am thinking of doing this sometime in the future, but for now think the skills I am getting here would help me a lot with this career path