MARCO CONCEPTUAL

In July 2016, I met Paul in the back garden of a small and slightly shabby corworking space on one of the quieter dustier streets of Nairobi. He wore black pants and a burgundy polo shirt and his hair was trimmed short. Paul was an entrepreneur who ran a small hardware startup, though he preferred to describe himself as an engineer. He had a calm, pensive, and professional presence despite his young age. As a child, Paul had done the tinkering with his parents’ electronics typical of a future engineer. As an undergraduate at the University of Nairobi, Kenya’s preeminent public university, he connected with others who had also developed childhood tinkering habits in student groups and in a larger group of “tech enthusiasts” called Skunkworks. Soon after, he heard about the iHub through other members of Skunkworks and was excited to see what was going on there and to meet the people behind the Ushahidi fame. So, he started going to the iHub’s community space to work. It was further from home than campus and cost him more time and bus money to get there, but it had faster internet and was, at the time, filled with the energy of other tech enthusiasts. He attended workshops and discussion groups there about open source software, and voice over IP, and listened to talks from people like the head of MIT’s Fablab and Bitange Ndemo, Kenya’s then-ICT Minister and key figure in Kenya’s tech scene.

A year later, a 3D printing expert from the UK came to talk to students at his university and that was it. The idea of being able to make something from his imagination, to make for

himself the pieces he needed for his latest tinkering project? He was hooked. Even though he was nervous, he entered the startup pitch competition at the university that followed the talk; he placed as a finalist. That win got him additional training in how to pitch his idea to investors and a ticket to London for the competition’s final. In London he failed to place, but eagerly watched all the other startup pitches, at least the ones after his, he’d been too busy rehearsing his 2- minute script to pay attention to the ones before. London turned out to be productive for him in other ways; there, Paul became friends with an American entrepreneur who placed in the final and who worked with him to get Paul’s own idea for 3D printed medical parts off the ground.

Soon after, Paul was able to get a small round of seed funding from British investors linked with the competition and began research and development to perfect his product. “At the time”, Paul told me, “I really felt like we could do it—we could build something people in Kenya really needed.” Talking with Paul that day in July, his desire to help people around him—to fix the things that the government wouldn’t or that NGOs couldn’t—was as clear as Nairobi’s changing skyline. For Paul, the purpose of his startup was “first and foremost to help the community. Everything else is secondary. We believe the money will follow…I honestly think if you tackle one of these social issues there’s a lot of money in it. Rather than making money out of a crazy profit margin you can make it out of the scale at which you sell.”

Meanwhile others began to see something in Paul’s idea as well. His startup was covered in international tech news, he was invited onto television stations in Europe, and to speak at conferences and events all over the world. Pakistan, Berlin, Barcelona and even back to London for Mozilla’s open internet conference, Paul was getting noticed not just for running a startup using 3D printing, but for running one in Africa. His company was hailed as “having the potential to change the landscape of Africa” and “reducing Africa’s dependence on imported goods”.

But as the coverage glowed, over time Paul’s key investor had become more cynical. “He’s working in the 3D printing space in Africa, he’s a rock star. It’s tech saves the world Africa edition. What’s not to love about that story? And yet, his business is struggling. The gap between the froth and reality can be so stressful.” By the time we spoke in July, Paul’s business really was struggling. After their initial seed funding, they’d run into problems raising additional rounds of investment, particularly problematic for a hardware company with expensive product development needs. Unlike software innovation more common in most Kenyan startups, hardware innovation is far more cost-intensive requiring expensive equipment, reliable material sources, and a larger physical space to build and store prototypes. With donor support, Paul had managed to get an American business advisor to come to Nairobi temporarily to help them with their business. She advised him to consider equity investment, where an entrepreneur gives away a portion of the company’s ownership and often board seats in exchange for funding. Paul was reluctant to do so. “Maybe it’s come to that [taking equity], but I don’t want to give away something that I built. A friend of mine got an equity investment last year and didn’t do enough due diligence and was kicked out of his own company by the investors. Maybe I’m on the extreme end, but because of such stories, I don’t want to give up anything.”

For both Paul and his investor, one key missing piece at his company had been prior experience running a startup. “I don’t really have trouble building the product,” Paul recalled. “But learning what a successful business model looked like? No, I’m not good at that. I don’t know anything about business.” “The reality of what he’s trying to do is difficult,” his investor explained. “At the end of the day, he’s a young guy. He’s never run a business. His confidence ebbs and flows. Often when he hits a problem it’s the first time he hits that problem. So beyond financing, we’ve been doing a bit of coaching and technical training, which I think is helping. Paul would say I bang on about this, but for me it’s about what I would describe as creating a quality culture. One of the biggest struggles we’ve had with the work we’ve been doing with the startups in Africa is developing an understanding of service and quality. By that I mean, how do

you move somebody’s mindset from it’s good enough for Africa, to actually this is the best product we could build full stop?”

At the end of our discussion, despite recounting all the troubles his startup was having and its uncertain future, Paul described himself as “super lucky” to have gotten the small funding that he did and to have gained the experience that he did. Yet his tone still barely hid his incredulity at the future of both his own startup, and those younger than him aspiring to become entrepreneurs too. “There are so many great ideas out there. But there just isn’t the money. Or they’re not getting what money there is. Many people have brilliant ideas but they can’t afford to experiment”.

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Paul’s story, while unique to him, echoed in others I met. Around Nairobi, I saw younger Paul in the tentative and hopeful faces of students at Kenya’s universities, in Nairobi’s startup

bootcamps, at the iHub. Many had read the news stories about Kenya being the “tech hub of Africa” or heard from someone who heard from someone about the excitement around Kenyan made tech like Ushahidi, or simply about its perceived money-making potential and wanted, sometimes quite desperately, to be a part of it. I could picture Paul nervously presenting his first startup pitch in the posture and uncertainty of the new crop of aspiring entrepreneurs under the spotlight of the new round of startup competitions. Some looked nervously at the ground as they spoke while others spoke passionately about the farms or schools or hospitals that their product was going to help, but uncertainly about how it could help others beyond Kenya. In the incubators and co-working spaces, I found echoes of the media coverage of Paul’s startup, of his optimism when seed funding and invitations to conferences came, of connections made during travels abroad and his conviction to use what he built to help people around him. And with increasing frequency over the course of the years that I’ve been going to Nairobi, I began to hear the doubt in Paul’s voice that July as he talked about the uncertain fate of his startup in my conversations with others, particularly other entrepreneurs who had seen some preliminary success, but like Paul, had struggled to progress much further.

Lave and Wenger, the two scholars responsible for the community of practice framework I introduced in the first chapter, might, if they heard his story, describe Paul, and the other aspiring entrepreneurs around Nairobi, as legitimate peripheral participants (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 14) of the GCTI. Unlike most of their predecessors in the field of education who focused largely on the internal, cerebral processes that govern learning, Lave and Wenger argued that all learning – both inside and outside of formal classrooms – was inherently a social process in which learners – legitimate peripheral participants – learn a new practice through participating with existing practitioners, full members of a community of practice, thereby getting exposed to the norms, practices, and expectations of a community they were trying to join. The most fundamental example of this is that of a child, a preteen, and eventually a teenager who, through co-participation with their family and other individuals in the world around them learns how to act and how they are expected to behave in the adult social world. By integrating this concept of legitimate peripheral participation with the community of practice framework, Lave and Wenger provided a tool that allows us to examine the social dimensions around how people like Paul do and do not gain access to a community of practice like the GCTI.

Through this lens, Paul could be described as going through a process of learning “what it really takes” to be a technology entrepreneur in the Kenyan Community of Technology

Innovators and the GCTI through his experiences, even his failures. He is learning what is expected of a GCTI “tech entrepreneur” not simply through the pitch coaching trainings he sat in on or the talks at the iHub he listened to, but through his interactions with his investors, other Skunkworks or the iHub members, other startup competition competitors, successful

entrepreneurs and investors he met at the competitions and conferences he attended abroad, and through all his failed attempts to raise funds.

But Paul’s peripherality to the GCTI makes his position, and the position of others like him, a precarious one. There are no guarantees that years of co-participation, of absorbing the practices and beliefs of the community, will lead to access in the end. As Lave and Wenger wrote “as a place in which one moves toward more-intensive participation, peripherality is an

empowering position. As a place in which one is kept from participating more fully…it is a disempowering position” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 36). Years later Wenger introduced a more useful way of making the distinction clear between the empowered and disempowered at the peripheries of communities of practice with the concept of a marginal participant (Wenger, 1998). Unlike a legitimate peripheral participant, who after training and practice based

experience eventually makes his way into the community, a marginal participant either maintains a position on a community’s margins or ends up on an entirely outbound trajectory. For Wenger, the glass ceiling, preventing women and minorities from accessing higher levels of white collar professions, is an example of the problems of marginal participation.

So, the question is whether Paul and those like him around Nairobi are indeed legitimate peripheral participants or in fact marginal ones. Is there a path ahead for them that leads to full GCTI membership, to Kenyan entrepreneurs being taken seriously by core community members back in Silicon Valley, or are they facing their own glass ceilings preventing them from accessing the community, and progressing up within it?

Despite all the initial excitement at the potential for technology innovation to take off in Africa, despite the proliferation of the Anyone Anywhere Narrative on the TED stage or in the pages of Forbes, more often than not, with important exceptions, the startups I saw and the entrepreneurs I met in Kenya were struggling. There are no Kenyan “unicorns”, no billion dollar valuations, and only a handful of successful exits. But “struggling” does not necessarily mean they are marginal rather than peripheral participants. In fact, as Silicon Valley investors are often quick to explain, a part of becoming a serious and successful tech entrepreneur seems to require fetters and failures. Failures and pivots, restarts and rebrandings, and the ability to overcome them through sheer force of will, dedication, and a lot of all-nighters--these are the things that often make up the stories in the community’s narratives about successful entrepreneurs and about how successful startups in Silicon Valley are built, what I call the Dominant Identity Narrative. Failure turned ultimately into a success is such a common refrain in the stories about successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that many have written about Silicon Valley’s obsession with the “redemption narrative” (McGowan, 2016). As one journalist wrote, “you haven’t really succeeded until you’ve failed, or at least come very close. Failing—or nearly failing—has become a badge of pride.” (McGowen, May 12, 2016). Every successful tech entrepreneur in the Valley seems to have a story about how their first venture collapsed amidst their ignorance and arrogance, a sad but necessary step towards their eventual redemptive success. Such stories, like the one told by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, have become so commonplace that some kind of failure or struggle—and a good story to go along with it that fits into the Redemption Narrative— almost seems a prerequisite for becoming a real GCTI tech entrepreneur, an integral part of the community’s Dominant Identity Narrative.

Indeed, many of Paul’s stumbles resembled the typical Silicon Valley ones. He had little prior experience running a business and despite his enthusiasm and the media attention he received he failed to raise enough money to build his company up. Echoed in this is the story that Ries tells of his own first failure in The Lean Startup: “The dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money. We tried desperately to raise more capital, and we could not…It remains a painful memory. The company limped along for months afterward, but our situation was hopeless” (Ries, 2011, p.12). But unlike Ries, Paul’s story does not fit in the Redemption Narrative, he has not yet redeemed himself with an ultimate entrepreneurial success.

In the literature on communities of practice, there are many kinds of barriers that restrict access to a community or progress within it. For Lave and Wenger, most barriers that prevent a marginal participant from becoming a legitimate peripheral one are a result of a lack of sufficient

exposure to the practices of the community that would enable the “newbie”, as they call them, to become fully socialized. New participants must have access to existing full members, to those who have been in the community a long time, to people in various different positions within the community, and to the full extent of the “information, resources, and opportunities for

participation” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p.100). Without that exposure, it is difficult if not

impossible to learn the ins and outs of how to behave that would enable them to participate in the full extent of the practice that binds the community.

Exposure to a community’s practice is restricted through a number of mechanism, including, to begin with, the structure or hierarchy of the community itself. In their original publication, Lave and Wenger cite an interesting example of this from an ethnographic study conducted by Hannah Meara Marshall, who looked at the experience of butchers’ apprentices in the 1970s. To obtain the certificate necessary to join the butchers’ union, they needed to both take trade school classes and participate in on-the-job training in a butcher shop. However, the

experience of many of these trainees demonstrated that the butcher shop often kept them isolated from the more advanced practices they needed to learn in order to become a master butcher, choosing instead to place them in repetitive tasks that would prove more efficient for the

company, but less effective for training (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Marshall, 1972). Because of the isolating structure of the apprenticeship system, many of these trainee butchers never learned the skills necessary to advance very far in the profession, in other words, they became marginal participants ever on the periphery.

Other studies, particularly from linguistics have shown how high school cliques are examples of communities that are particularly difficult to access, often due to their hierarchical structure. In her 2005 article, the linguist Bethan Davies demonstrated how access to the tightly guarded ‘jock’ communities of practice in American high schools was often controlled by those at the top who had greater authority than any other community member to determine who was ‘trendy’ enough to join (B. Davies, 2005). Moreover, because membership in the jock community was highly desirable and exclusive, access was extremely competitive and membership of those at the lower levels of the hierarchy quite tenuous. By contrast, joining a ‘burnout’ community in the same schools—a community of practice that embraced failure and rejects ‘trendy’ culture— was much easier as it was less rigid and hierarchical, and membership in it is less desirable.

Like the high school jocks, the GCTI is hierarchical and competitive. Though it embraces