NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

By Jake Bright, Ingrid Lunden

It’s not every day that the CEO of a large Silicon Valley tech company decides to relocate to a different part of the world in order to learn more about it — particularly when it has been frequently maligned and often overlooked by big business.

But Jack Dorsey, the American tech entrepreneur who co-founded and leads not one, but two publicly listed companies (Twitter and Square) is not your typical CEO. Dressed down, bearded, often wearing a wooly hat and speaking in a slow, quiet voice, you might even call Dorsey the anti-CEO. He eschews many of the stereotypical trappings of the executive life and mannerisms in favor of taking silent retreats and traveling to countries like Burma.

In November 2019, Dorsey’s itchy feet took him to Africa, where he visited Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia on a listening tour. He had meetings at incubators in Lagos and Addis Ababa, and talked to a number of African tech leaders, including Tayo Oviosu, the CEO of Nigerian payments startup Paga, and Yeli Bademosi, the director of Binance Labs.

Photo courtesy of Jurgen Appello.