Founder | ZambeziX | @shona_tech Authorized @Starlink Retailer | https://xitter.cf/t.co/qP21Jxm4ht | StakeStreet | StakeBoss 🇲🇿🇿🇼 🇱🇸🇿🇲🇷🇼 🇰🇪 🇧🇼🇺🇬🇸🇳
Africa
Joined May 2018
- Tweets5.5K
- Following3.1K
- Followers11.5K
- Likes10.2K
Victor Mapunga retweeted
JUST IN: Saudi Arabia announces plans to store crude oil in Singapore starting in 2027.
Victor Mapunga retweeted
Revolut founder Nik Storonsky says one of his investors tried forcing him to fire his best person:
“He was forcing me to fire my best person, because he was too hardcore.”
“Of course I didn’t fire him. I said no.”
“Pretty early on I realized that quite a few VCs, they are not very operational, and they can be actually dangerous for the company if they have enough power. So every single investment round, we just remove VCs.”
“Now I don't have any VCs on the board. I think that's the best. You always need to have operators rather than VCs on the board, people who actually build business and who know how to do things.”
Nik Storonsky is one of the most hardcore and competitive founders I’ve ever talked to. He’s the founder of Revolut, a $115 billion company, and wants to be the number one bank in 100 countries.
When someone asked Nik if he was coming for Jamie Dimon's lunch, he said “I’m coming for his dinner.”
“We want to dominate, otherwise what’s the point?”
He removed every VC from his board, and when one investor pushed him too far, he started his own fund to compete with them.
Nik has a lot of ideas on talent, product design, marketing, constraints, and what makes founder-led companies special.
This is a fascinating conversation about competition, speed, and building a machine-like company.
0:00 Coming for Jamie Dimon's dinner
2:04 Building the #1 bank in 100 countries
6:12 Why founders beat professional CEOs
8:45 Revolut's biggest mistake
12:47 Why legacy banks can't innovate
17:20 Running a company like a machine
20:28 Funding winners and cutting losers like a trader
23:31 How AI is changing Revolut's team structure
25:23 50 direct reports and spreading innovation fast
29:59 Hiring self-guided missiles
33:31 Too much money makes founders weaker
37:38 What Europe's constraints taught Revolut
41:08 Why VCs are like football cheerleaders
49:28 Starting a fund to compete with VCs
54:28 From zero marketing to buying Europe's airports
1:00:21 Funding moonshots like a global tech company
1:03:58 Building an unstoppable machine
Includes paid partnerships.
Victor Mapunga retweeted
The perfect storm is frontier models finding obscure security vulnerabilities at breakneck pace while voice models become indecipherable from human speech.
When a model hits a roadblock, it will just spoof Caller ID as your bank and call you, pretending to be your banker.
Wait until they start reaching out to your suppliers or even investors to push their own thing and call themselves 'CEOs' lol.
It's not just a lack of integrity, it's a complete lack of originality as well.
'I cannot teach you integrity': How employee theft is hurting small businesses in Africa bbc.in/4i5Nj5d
Victor Mapunga retweeted
I have a completely unscientific theory about Michelin restaurants:
1 star: Fantastic. Great food, serious cooking, no nonsense.
2 stars: Often unbearable. Haute cuisine at its most self-conscious. 14 courses, tweezers, foam, and an elaborate philosophical explanation of a carrot.
3 stars: Somehow fantastic again. The absurdity becomes so extreme, the execution so extraordinary, that it transcends pretension and becomes art.
The Michelin paradox: 1 is great, 2 is terrible, 3 is sublime.
Victor Mapunga retweeted
People often want to ask me if their startup idea is good, as if my opinion means anything.
I think 99% of ideas are good if the team can execute well. The problem is, 98% of teams fail at execution.
So, no need to sell me your idea, show your execution.
Victor Mapunga retweeted
BREAKING: Hedge funds are betting against stocks at near-record levels, per Goldman Sachs.
Short sales outpaced purchases by about 5 to 1 across global stocks.
Short positions on Goldman’s books are at the 99th percentile of the past five years.
Victor Mapunga retweeted
Everyone worried about AI hacking crypto, but the internet and banking systems rely on weaker encryption.
That said, AI doesn’t need to break Bitcoin’s cryptography to cause damage, leaked data already enables more phishing, social engineering, etc,
Stay SAFU!
Victor Mapunga retweeted
Zambia Launches First In-Country Gold Refinery
By ZANIS
Zambia has launched its first gold refinery, capable of processing gold to 99 per cent purity, in a move expected to increase government revenue and promote local value addition.
More in the following report….
Victor Mapunga retweeted
🚨 BLOODBATH in Asian Markets
Over $600 BILLION has been wiped out from Asian stocks.
Here's why Asian markets are falling:
1. US stock futures drag Asian markets lower as S&P 500 futures fall -0.8% and Nasdaq futures drop -1.6%.
2. President Trump said the US is "not negotiating" with Iran, escalating geopolitical uncertainty.
3. AI and semiconductor stocks fall across Asia as concerns grow over returns on massive AI spending.
3. Rising oil prices above $100 per barrel fuel inflation fears and concerns that central banks may keep interest rates higher for longer.
Victor Mapunga retweeted
If you worry about how much you spend, you probably aren't making enough.
If you are concerned about where you spend it? You are probably making too much.
If you are worried about when or if to spend it. You probably have a wife and kids.
Money grows over time if you make the right decisions, but spending never stops until you are dead.
Victor Mapunga retweeted
As Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is that eventually they run out of other people’s money to take and they come for you
It was great seeing you again my brother, Asia is the place to be!
It's mid week and there is like a drillion people out. Hong Kong is a melting pot. Thanks @victor_mapunga for showing me around yesterday.
Victor Mapunga retweeted
It's mid week and there is like a drillion people out. Hong Kong is a melting pot. Thanks @victor_mapunga for showing me around yesterday.
Victor Mapunga retweeted
The ability to access, mix, and mesh content from a variety of sources identified by hyperlinks, at Internet scale, is one of the most remarkable features of the communications medium created by the Web.
AI agents are exceptionally effective tools for harnessing the architecture and open standards underpinning the Web.
For instance, I can seamlessly incorporate a video presentation into a previously published article without changing the hyperlink that identifies it.
That's the power of hyperlinks, loose coupling, and the Web's enduring architecture.
Now live on the URIBurner Weblog, an AI Agent-created blog based on an HTTP/ WebDAV filesystem and HTML docs that are loosely coupled to underlying Knowledge Graphs informed by a variety of ontologies.
linkeddata.uriburner.com/web…
Victor Mapunga retweeted
💯!!!
The disruption of software is ultimately a disruption of an obsolete approach to handling the information processing limitations of humans.
Software 1.0 (pre Internet and Web) and Software 2.0 (GUI-SaaS) are now being fully replaced by a new kind of software that's equipped with the following unique selling points:
Development Side
Easier design, development, qa, deployment, and support.
User Side
Easier demonstration, installation, and use.
This is the reality that's fundamentally changing the software industry as we've all known and experienced it, across demographics.
Blocking is futile because it only works when a user's identity is conflated with a conventional browser—a primitive agent now being demoted to a feature of modern AI agents equipped with richer, machine-computable identity semantics.
She proved you can hyperscale to millions of users in Africa now with minimal investment & a good product, that's a more valuable validation of Africa than people realize. Retention is another thing, and why she got funding, she now has to work for it. Whatever happens, something was cracked here, I think I saw it, many other people did too and we are actively taking advantage of that insight.
Victor Mapunga retweeted
One of the things that hasn’t been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes:
She was created in the era of the Ted Talk Entrepreneur.
Between 2011-2015 (after the release of the Social Network), there was an entire apparatus built around “Child Prodigies”: college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations, etc.
I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as “faking it ‘til you make it.” But Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else.
When the Ted Talk Era came to an end and people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook—and in the most scrutinized field there is: medical technology.
When people ask how she got so far, it’s largely explained by the period she did it in. And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up.