Yellow Card co-founders share lessons learned from their work on the African continent
Rapidly growing former New Venture Accelerator company spends two days on campus paying it forward to aspiring entrepreneurs, fellow FMA students
If raising tens of millions of dollars from some of the leading venture capital investors in the financial technology arena is one measure of entrepreneurial promise and initial success, Yellow Card certainly qualifies. With more than $57 million invested to date – including a $40 million Series B funding round closed just two months ago – this recognized leader in cryptocurrency-based financial services can check the capital funding box.
If building a company with the mission of helping underserved communities thousands of miles away conduct essential financial transactions simply and cost-effectively matters – then check the purpose-driven box for Yellow Card as well.
And when Forbes Magazine names you on their iconic 30 Under 30 List, some may say you have officially arrived – recognized as rising entrepreneurs with great potential to succeed.
But as impressive as these indications are, we’d argue that being founders of a successful start-up who remember how they got to where they are and generously give back to the family of support that helped get them there is perhaps the highest level of entrepreneurial achievement.
That’s exactly what Chris Maurice and Justin Poiroux, co-founders of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Africa, did here at Auburn a few weeks ago.
Paying It Forward
Maurice, who graduated from Auburn with a degree in finance in 2019, started Yellow Card with Poiroux from his dorm room in 2016 before moving the company to Lagos, Nigeria, where they launched their mobile app in 2019.
Since then, Yellow Card has grown to become largest crypto company on the African continent as well as the first – and still the only – licensed pan-African cryptocurrency exchange.
The company has facilitated more than $2 billion in transactions for roughly 1.75 million customers while growing their team to more than 200 employees across 25 countries, and currently supports the exchange of local fiat currencies in 17 African markets – with more markets coming on board soon.
Maurice, Yellow Card’s CEO and Poiroux, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, were on campus the last week of September to share their experience and expertise with aspiring entrepreneurs, FMA members and Harbert College of Business students in a variety of classroom, group presentation and networking settings.
We accompanied both founders through their packed itineraries and were able to sit down with each of them one-one to find out why they believe that sharing what they’ve learned with the Auburn entrepreneurial community they came from is so important. They also delved into some of the do’s and don’ts they feel future entrepreneurs might want to consider and how they came to acquire some of those nuggets of wisdom the hard way.
NVA: Let’s start with what compelled you to do what no other technology-based financial services company has been able to do on the continent of Africa? Where did that idea even come from?
Maurice: I’d like to say it was all part of a grand plan – but it wasn’t. We wanted to address what we thought would be a huge market opportunity – cryptocurrency – but went through a few iterations of what that would look like before settling on our current strategy.
The story of how we came to focus on Africa has been told many times, and it’s a good one that also happens to be true! Yes, I did meet a Nigerian man at a Wells Fargo bank near campus and overheard him asking the teller why it will cost him $90 to send $200 to his family back home. We knew he could send Bitcoin cheaply and easily, but how would his family in Nigeria turn that crypto into naira, the local currency, so they could actually spend it?
Right then and there I knew that the market we needed to target was those who could benefit most from what we had to offer – individuals in developing countries who were suffering from high fees for relatively small international payments and other transactions that simply didn’t have to be so crippling.
I tell that story to this day, quaint as it may seem, because it exemplifies one of the first lessons we learned early on that might help inspire and guide other entrepreneurs: you never know where or how you might stumble across some insight, some “light bulb moment,” that will change your entrepreneurial trajectory. Engage with others – even strangers in line at a bank. Ask them questions. Networking shouldn’t be reserved for cocktail parties or organized meet-and-greets.
Poiroux: The first problem we set out to solve was the rapid currency devaluation in African countries. When we launched in Nigeria – our first market – the naira was valued at about 330 naira to the U.S. dollar. Today that has declined to 1,000 naira per dollar – meaning that in just four years their money is worth less than one third of what it used to be worth. And that’s not even the worst rate of currency decline on the African continent.
Another problem we’re solving is the high cost of transferring money into Africa and across borders within the African continent. Many countries in Africa limit how much currency their citizens can exchange to as low as only $20 a month in order to keep U.S. dollars in-country. That means that they couldn’t sign up for Spotify, iTunes, Hulu or any of the many services the rest of the world enjoys – not because they couldn’t afford it, but because their ability to pay in dollars is limited by their country’s banking regulations.
And even if they wanted to exchange higher amounts of foreign currency, they are burdened with some of the highest fees in the world when sending money across borders. It costs on average 9% to send money into Africa and almost 20% to send money between African countries, forcing people to resort to some pretty astonishing money transfer approaches to avoid those high fees.
The most prevalent of these is simply stuffing cash into a duffle bag, hiring a taxi driver to take that cash to the border between, say, Zambia and South Africa, and then handing it off – that’s actually a “thing.” As you might imagine, the risk of your taxi driver robbing you or being robbed themselves is very real. And yet they take that risk, until Yellow Card came along.
In short, the conditions that make life difficult for them are the very same problems we’re trying to solve. With cryptocurrency, we’re able to help them get around a lot of the currency control issues they have at the central bank level.
The lesson to be learned here? When trying to determine which applications for your technology, business model or idea to focus on, look to where the solutions you can provide will have the biggest impact on those most in need.
NVA: This seems like a huge opportunity, yet you and your team have managed to become the dominant – in some cases, only – company providing these essential financial services in Africa. Why haven’t banks or other financial services companies addressed these needs?
Maurice: I can’t speak definitively as to why they haven’t, but one obvious answer might be that they benefit from it being difficult through the high fees they charge. Why give up on a good thing, right?
But I think the real reason they don’t is because it is difficult to do what we do. It’s not easy to do business on the African continent. I mean, we’re working in 17 of the hardest countries in the world to operate in. Each has their own regulations and cultures when it comes to money.
On the one hand, there are large regional cultures on the continent. In North Africa, where you have a lot of the Middle East and Muslim influence, it is very conservative – they operate largely by the books. Things need to be approved. There’s no concept of “if it’s not forbidden, then it’s permitted.” It’s the opposite. If it’s not permitted, then it’s forbidden. It is just a cultural thing. On the other hand, you go to Nigeria and it’s totally different. They don’t have that same concept; they just don’t have a culture of “if you’re not allowed to do it unless you’re specifically allowed to do it.” They just do it and figure out the regulatory issues later.
One lesson to be learned from this is to never fall back on the often-mistaken thought that “if the big guys haven’t done this yet, it probably isn’t doable.”
Poiroux: As Chris says, it isn’t easy to do what we do. There are a lot of nuances that we have to constantly iterate on and learn and adapt to. When it comes to individual countries, South Africa is easier than a lot of them. Which are the hardest? Probably Nigeria, Cameroon or both of the Congo’s – Tanzania is difficult as well. I think here in in America often we kind of generalize Africa as one big country, when in fact every single one of these countries has so many differences – both culturally and in the way that they do business and move money around.
One thing we do that it doesn’t appear the big banks and financial services companies have been willing to do is recognize those differences and put in place a team on the ground to address the specific cultures and regulatory environments in each country. We hire largely in-country. As CTO, I manage 50 engineers across 11 countries. Today, 99% of our employees are based in Africa.
The lesson here? You need to experience first hand the problems you are trying to solve where they exist and test your proposed solutions right there, too. The term that applies in the software development world is “dogfooding,” eating the dog food you produce to test out what you’ve created. It is the practice of using one’s own products or services as a way to test them in real-world conditions. We do that to this day.
NVA: You’ve each touched on some big picture lessons from your journey – are there some smaller, yet important lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Maurice: One thing I’d mention is to not get all caught up in defending what you’re doing against others in your space. One thing that’s always been important to me is that we need to do business in the countries where we’re doing business in a way that will open the industry up for future as opposed to trying to do it in a way where we think we’re the only ones able to do it and everybody else needs to get locked out. I think that promoting the technology and promoting the use of Bitcoin and stable coins on the African continent is critically important to all of us in the fintech space. If we’re successful in doing that, we’ll get more than our fair share of this huge, rapidly growing marketplace.
Poiroux: My answer to that question is that some of the “small” things we’ve learned are actually big things to remember. Instead of small, I’d call them “simple,” common sense things, really. And by simple I don’t mean “easy.”
For example, one of the things we’ve done well is to seek mentors and listen to what they say. I think that as a founder, you cannot have a big ego. It is really easy to get an ego as a founder of a startup, but in reality, you have to focus on learning all the things that you don’t know yet. And that’s what mentorship provides. When you start, you barely know anything, and mentors are the ones that open up your field of vision, help you take off your blinders of thinking that you’re “all that.”
Related to that is to hire people smarter than you. I think that one of the most crucial things for us early on was figuring out that we need to hire people that have experience, maybe some gray hair, who might appear to be a little too corporate. Those are the people who will help you set up processes, policies and procedures that will guide you through the next phase of growth.
Finally, I’d say that taking care of yourself is key, and we didn’t do anywhere nearly enough of that early on. We were going full bore, noses to the grindstone, literally killing ourselves. There’s this ethos of glamorizing struggle and overworking yourself – a false bravado, really. We thought that if you’re not up at three in the morning grinding, then you don’t really care that much. That can lead to very toxic behaviors that are difficult to scale past.
That’s particularly important for college students in a transitional phase to hear, whether you are about to graduate and are thinking of starting your own business or thinking about joining an existing start-up. The habits that you’re building now in college, similar to the transition you went through from high school to college, will either make or break you. You will soon have employees whose lives and livelihoods are literally in your hands. And if you don’t take care of yourself first, you won’t be in a position to take care of them.
Maurice: One more lesson we learned may seem obvious but deserves emphasizing here nonetheless: You don’t know nearly as much as you think you do when you start, which makes the entrepreneurial expertise, dedicated mentorship, and phenomenal business support services provided by the New Venture Accelerator here at Auburn all the more valuable.
So, if you have an idea for starting a business and are serious about doing what it takes to follow that entrepreneurial calling, reach out to the NVA.
Words to live by.
The New Venture Accelerator – and the entire Auburn Family – are grateful for the time Chris and Justin took out of their busy schedules to share their insights, experience and lessons learned over the past seven years with the Auburn entrepreneurship community they came from and look forward to hearing about the next chapter in their journey.
One of the first participants in what is now known as the New Venture Accelerator at Auburn University, Yellow Card has come a long way in a short amount of time.
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To learn more about the New Venture Accelerator contact Lou Bifano, Director, at loubifano@auburn.edu or visit our website HERE.
