What does it actually take to build something in Africa before there is a map?

Gerald Black has been a founder, an operator, an acquiree, and now an ecosystem storyteller. In this conversation he traces the full arc. From watching The Social Network in 2014 and building iFIX, to getting Parkit acquired, to a December 2023 trip to Nairobi that changed everything.

At an ecosystem summit in Kenya he met founders from Benin Republic, Zambia, Namibia and Botswana doing remarkable things that nobody was writing about. He went back to his hotel room, searched for their stories online, and found almost nothing. That absence became his assignment.

In this episode we get into how ecosystems actually form, why Nigeria's 200 million people is not the number it appears to be, why African founders need to stop thinking Lagos then Nairobi and start thinking about the full continent, and what it really means to build with distribution from day one.

This is a conversation about the shift from builder to narrator. And why telling the story is not separate from the work. It is the work.