 Next, I'm delighted to introduce to you a woman who was called by Forbes one of the 20 most powerful women in Africa or youngest power women in Africa. McGot Wade is a serial entrepreneur and the founding CEO of Tio San, which is an organic skin care company that's taking traditional Senegalese recipes and applying them to organic skin care for women. Last summer, when I took on this role as the director of the conference, I was pitching around campus to my ideas for speakers, and McGot was one of the speakers that I was asking people about. And when I asked, people said this, oh, we have an Africa conference for that. And from that moment, I knew I needed to get McGot to this conference because too often we try to put people from Africa in their little Africa box. We say, no, we have an Africa conference for that. We have an African club for that. This is venture capital innovation. And there's that implicit bias, that implicit paternalism. And as I said, a big theme of this conference is breaking out of that. And there is hardly anyone I know who breaks that mold, who breaks out of that paternalistic box more than McGot Wade. Please welcome her. Thank you. Can you guys all hear me? Take my gloves before I start the beating. Anyway, so my name is McGot Wade. I'm very happy to be here. It's very interesting when Mark said that, you know, people are like, oh, we have an Africa conference for that. What do you think got us in this mess in the first place? You ask what got us in this mess in the first place. What got us in this mess in the first place? This populism that is rising everywhere. You see, I'm also a French citizen. And in France, we may have Marine Le Pen coming in a few months. You have your Trump here. There is Putin somewhere. We're going to have Le Pen going on somewhere. And the rest of European countries are also getting their pick. And I'm actually very afraid that maybe some countries in Africa may follow suit. Why do we have such populism? Because so many people are left out. So many people. Yeah, put me in an African conference all you want, but I'm not going away. I am here, and I'm here to stay. And if you don't want me, I'm going to come and I'm going to force the doors. That's when actually frictions happen, because I'm not going to go down without a fight. No underclass goes down without a fight. That's just human nature. So I empathetically agree with Kat this morning when she said that, you know, VCs, and I would like to add, entrepreneurs, are a major force for good. In my book, I think entrepreneurs and the people who support them constitute the best force of good we know in society as of now. So I want to make that clear. That being clear, I also want to make it, I also want to recognize, and you know, it's always weird for me speaking at MIT because I feel like I come to beat you guys a little bit because it's all tech, tech, tech, tech, tech. And I love tech. Don't take me wrong. But most people complain because we're like, oh, these tech people, they're going to come up with one more app, one more game. Really? Well, billions of people are suffering out there. And I have to give a crap about your latest pizza delivery. I mean, really, start to think about these guys, right? So I would like to see more venture capitalists. I would like to see more tech people focus on solving human issues. I will now take you on to a little journey. The journey of my reality is being an African kid who traveled her way through and where you guys get to play a role, because there's a role for everybody in it. Maybe you didn't see it, but I'm here to share with you what your role could be if you choose so. You see, I was born in Senegal, the West Coast of Africa. And then my family moved to France and then to Germany. Sorry, to Germany, then to France. After I graduated from business school in France, I decided that France was going to be too small for my ambitions. So I took off. When I went to this land, and everybody said, oh, it's the land of opportunities, you will always be rewarded at the level of your input. Your output will match your input. I'm like, that's the country I need to go to. I don't want to make any to earn more than I deserve, but I definitely, definitely don't want to earn less than I deserve. You betcha, that's my motto here. So I came to America. I first landed in Columbus, Indiana, a little town where we have more cows and maybe more churches than people. But I loved it. They embraced me. The people that oftentimes people in this room maybe would make fun of, those are the people who welcomed me in this country. So I want to honor them. We can say what we want about their leader, because I know what their leader is saying. I heard them say things. I know what it stands for. But I always try to make a difference between the leader and the people that they're supposed to represent. As an African, I know that better than anybody else. And if you want to win, you work with the people, you put them together, and you stop making cleavages. So I came to America, and those people welcomed me. And everything I hear about the news is not something, is not what I've seen from them. But that's what it means to live with someone and to get to know them. I decided, I guess love called me to San Francisco. So I moved to San Francisco. And I arrived in the Silicon Valley in the heyday of a dot-com boom, and I was fortunate enough to be a headhunter in finance. And I was fortunate enough to be able to staff companies like Google, Netflix, WebEx, all of those companies before they became house name brands. I got to watch and to envision. I got to watch and to really see the power of entrepreneurship, this amazing ability to create something literally out of nothing. To understand this ecosystem and the role of VCs in the ecosystem of entrepreneur. And it was amazing. I did really well for myself, but eventually I had an existential crisis. Because as I was there, living my great life, and I was 22 when I started making six figures salary, doing really well. Bought my house in one of the most expensive zip codes in Silicon Valley, in Los Altos Hills. I was doing very well. I earned it. I worked for it. But it was not enough for me. Why? Because every single week I was getting news from my country of people who were dying at sea, trying to make it to Europe to find a job. Only recently, most of you found out and heard about the story of migrant people. There are many categories of migrants. Some is climate migrants. They're moving because wherever you used to live, the climate is unfortunately not so good anymore. They can't stay there. Others, we call them war migrants. You may call them aka refugees. Others are simply economic migrants, my people, and countless of them. They're moving away from their continent, from their country, because where they come from, there's not enough jobs for them to support their families. I had a crisis because I was living this amazingly privileged life. Yet my people were still struggling in this most abject way, in human way. So I decided, and at the same time also my culture, people not respecting Africans, and also my own people, thinking, anything but indigenous to us is no good. So on one end, I have my culture dying because we're too complex. We have a complex of inferiority to feel like what we have is good. And on one end, my people are dying. What is one to do? Because I guess my father raised me and my grandma raised me with this notion of criticized by creating. It's not his, it's Michelangelo's. But that's how I was raised. Don't complain. The only form of complaint is alternatives. They don't have to be right, but I want to know what you thought of solutions. So I decided, culture dying, people needing job back in my country. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna start a consumer brand that's gonna have embedded in its DNA the very best of my culture. I would modernize the very best of my culture and embed it into this amazing brand that I'm gonna come to the United States and sell to the culture creative demographic, aka people who shop at Whole Foods. That's why Forbes calls me the woman who sells African recipes to Americans. And it worked. It worked so well. I started my company to basically say a few, sorry, to Pepsi and to Coca-Cola. Because my beloved drink of Senegal that I grew up in was disappearing. And the women who used to grow the hibiscus were losing their livelihood. And getting deeper into poverty. I said, I'm gonna create this brand. And as this brand succeeds, I'm chairing of everybody a part of my culture. And also as it succeeds, I'm putting back 4,000 women to work. That's what we did, 4,000 women back to work. Worked so well, who shows up few days, few years later after at that point, maybe after $7 million of financing, Pepsi is interested. They come up, the company ended up raising more than $32 million. But at some point I found myself into a nasty proxy fight. Those of you in this room know that proxy fights are the last type of fights that anyone wants to get involved with at their company. I want it, but by the teeth of my skin. The skin of my teeth. English is one of my fourth languages. Sometimes I say words that don't make any sense. So in any case, that happened. And while the fight was happening, we got weaker. And that's when people who were never meant to be in the capital showed up, including Pepsi. Now this brand that I started in my kitchen has on its board, the whosoever world, including the ex-chairman of Pepsi, Roger Enrico. And I had recruited out of retirement the founder of Odwala. And later when I left, the founder of Sobi was running that company. The reason why I'm saying this is not only tech can get you to take care of things like that. Now, I did the same thing after I left. I started another skincare company that focuses on indigenous recipes again, but I modernized using clean chemistry. But you know what? It's not easy to do this. Because each time I do this, I try to get the jobs done in Africa as well. We have sales jobs here, R&D jobs here, but then we need sales jobs back in Africa. So in this situation, we are right now almost finished with setting up our operations in Africa with the skincare company. We have now been in market in the US, everything is there. But guess what? Besides my ingredients, I can almost get nothing in my country at least. Why is that? And now we're starting to think about where you guys are going to come into all of this. Why is that? Because it is so hard to do business in most parts of Africa. Has anybody here paid attention at all to the doing business index ranking of the World Bank? I hear one yes. I hear nobody else. Welcome to my life. The doing business of the World Bank is one of the only, I think, indexes that I respect from the World Bank. And basically it measures how friendly is the environment to businesses in any given country. And systematically we find that it is easier to do business anywhere in Scandinavia than it is anywhere in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. And then you wonder why we're poor. Do you know that right now, I'm trying to get some ingredients coming from France for my products. And most European companies won't sell to me. Not because they're racist or anything. Why? Because our laws are so screwed up at the import, export level that their product can be stuck at port. I'm not getting my product so I'm not paying him but he already shipped and the product is stuck there and we're all waiting there as stupid people. So now they're saying, you know what? I'm not sending it to you. And if you want me to sell to you, it's going to cost you at least five times more than it would cost to an American buying from me. I let you sit with that for a second. You go to the Congo, 18 pieces of document required to import or export anything in that country. And by the way, each one of those documents the signature it needs is from a notary, requires a few hundred dollars. Who, I ask you, who in this room can do business that way? And of course you have to pay bribes to make it. Because otherwise it doesn't happen, right? Senegal, my country, you marry two employees. I was having this huge argument this one time when I talk at the UN and I told the head of the ILO, international labor organization. And I said, the argument ended with me telling him, in the end, if I cannot fire you, I can't hire you. It's that simple. If you can't divorce her in the first place, will you marry her? No. But if you don't have a job, a stable job, you can't make a loan, you can't have an apartment, nothing. Your life basically starts at school. And we can go on and on and on and on. Time to register a business, almost a year. Costing you only, God knows how many thousands of dollars. In the United States, you're at your computer. You start an LLC, within 15 minutes your LLC is done. Almost cost you nothing, you're good to go. Compare that with two years of going through stuff, trying to set up your company in most of these places. So the doing business index ranking is telling us that basically, Africa is massively, most of Africa is massively over-regulated. We are choking. And by the way, you don't have to go far. In this country, what are the industries that are the most, the crappiest right now for all of us? Education and healthcare. Oh, they happen to be the most, they're under government monopoly. They happen to be the most regulated areas in our country. Well, when something is over-regulated, you just don't get innovation. You see what's happening with Uber, they're trying, but you're seeing what's happening to companies like that. Multiply that at every level for us. Now, how can you help with something like this? Do we sit here and be like, oh, we'll doom, doom? No, we're not. What we can do with your help is finally maybe take the power of tech and help people leapfrog over some of these regulations or go around them or go underneath them. That's why when I found this one company, this one company, these young founders came to me. One of them is an ex, when I met them, one of them was a Y Combinator guy, I'm one of the founders, as well as a Teal fellow. His partner is a law-trained guy. And I meet them and they're telling me, they're so excited about the great people, very smart. And they're telling me about how they're working on creating a Bitcoin ATM for New York. I'm like, you guys are wasting your time. This is so not cool. We need you in Africa. Forget the Bitcoin port, the blockchain technology, we can use it and really go after underserved communities in Africa. That inspired Vemti Pivot. Now, they're called Atlas. They have been in Africa for the past two years. Building this company, creating new markets that didn't exist before, helping people go around regulations. Basically completely nixing some of these bad laws. That's where I need you. I'm working in a hackathon in my country, for example, to help with what's gonna happen to the taxation method. It's nearly impossible to pay your taxes. Forget about the fact that the laws are bad. But even if you wanted to pay your taxes, it is a nightmare and she's saying yes. It's a nightmare. So most of us end up illegals. Our businesses are not viable. There too, we know that eSolutions are some of the best ones to help with that. So you have these amazing minds, these brilliant minds, they're huge, they're big, and hairy. That's Branson who said that. Use it, use it for something that's really gonna help billions of people, them to get on with their lives. Because if I can get on with my life in Africa, don't worry, don't worry, those of you who don't want me here. Don't worry, those of you who don't want me in France. Guess what? I get to stay in my country, live in La Vida Loca surrounded by my people with the language that I know, food that I know, a culture that I know, and most importantly, dignity. This is how you guys can help. Now compare that with the next app to go deliver pizza. And for those of you who want to know more about this, I encourage you strongly to watch Poverty Inc, the documentary it's on Netflix. Mark Weber is the co-producer of it. It's an amazing documentary, it will open your eyes and it will help you get out of a social fact. Because too often, we try to fix solutions within an accepted box of social facts. And that, my friends, is a problem. If you want to make a new painting, you ideally start with a brand new canvas. That's the best way to get something new going. With that, I thank you all.