Fahim was our peer, RIP Saleh
Like software, Fintech will be eating many sectors business models like ride-sharing and shipping
Fahim was one of us, you'd and old people using the medium of tech for chipping things that people use, love, and benefit from. The world of tech entrepreneurship is a unique world driven by a community of passionate people that
Fahim was among the first to surf the wave of ride shipping startup in Africa, now there many of them using the young Africans who are willing to make money using what they already loved, riding a scooter even if I am a bit dubious about the ecological concerns and lack of logistic efficiency that such kind of solution raise. Saleh with Gokada turned an African unicorn to success before joining the valley where here surely was willing to reiterate this success because entrepreneurship is about this loop of success to success with many failures between them.
Salem has built a successful startup, he succeed at what many others like me are trying years since now and this only success merit to be exposed to everyone because it shows the range of possibilities for anyone with a computer and an internet connection to do work that matter to the world like implementing a successful business model in a developing country with very few resources.
On July 13, 2020, Fahim Saleh was found dead and I will not be describing the atrocity of his ending and I am wishing every one of us a better end but in such a case better depend on how we see things. how atrocious his death is, Salem made his contribution to the world and I hope that each of us will also. I am supportive to its family and this short Memorium is about telling them that there are others who care about Salim because he was part of a bigger family than the one he came from, the family of tech entrepreneurs, millions of people base everywhere around the world with the goal of making an impact using the power of technology. Like me, Salim was writing and publishing on data-driven invest and his past articles are here for anyone to read and maybe get some insight but Salem unlike me has left behind more than some words but an impactful contribution.
Please provide me the opportunity to be insightful while honoring someone that passed away by giving a business model that applies to ride shipping. This idea that I will be exposing you is a mutation of mile hedge a tech-enabled business model idea that still applies today. Fuel is the main expense for transporter and the more the transport company or startup hold many trucks and mean of transportation and servers many routes that more it spends a huge amount of money in fuel but fuel is a commodity whose price is volatile, I mean changing overtime. Specialized financial firms saw this opportunity and offered to big transportation companies ways of hedging this volatility of the price of fuel using derivatives. Fuel hedging helped airline companies like … make millions of dollars of savings. Mile Hedge was about offering this service to the individual transporter and/or uber drive and you can see that a startup that is specialized in chipping products with bikes like Gokada can also leverage the power of fuel hedging to lower its pricing or even to the paid user acquisition model that I was describing in this article about fintech in Africa. With this paid user acquisition model the chipping startup could offer to customers 120 chipping services for the real price of 100 and use the cash deposited by each customer to invest profitably by trading the customers’ deposit for recovering losses. The profit that will be made with this parallel revenues stream that supports the losing business model which turns out to be just a business model for getting cash to invest without sacrificing customer satisfaction can be declared as fuel hedging profits in the startup balance sheet.
To use the famous sentence of Andressen Horowitz who said software is eating the world, we could say Fintech will be eating the economy starting from sectors business models like ride-sharing and shipping.
PS: I did this same kind of in Memorium article about Tony Hsieh
