New York Marathon...Boston Marathon...London Marathon...Tokyo Marathon...you name it! It seems every year, no matter the city, it’s a Kenyan runner bringing home first place. And that’s because, well…Kenyans are really, really good long distance runners. And as we’ll hear in this episode, it’s because…yes…the high altitudes, but also because runnin…

All right. I know what you’re thinking. Another grocery delivery app? I mean...come on! DoorDash, Seamless, Instashop, Instacart, Talabat, Swiggy, UberEats, Delivery Hero…man...wherever you are in the world, chances are you can order your groceries from home, at the click of a button. But it’s not just the app store where we’re…drowning in grocery …

Let's start with some pretty staggering statistics: About 22-25% of Pakistan’s GDP comes from agriculture. That makes it - depending on how you measure it - an industry worth between $60 and $100 BILLION. 40-45% of Pakistan’s eligible workforce works in the agriculture industry…from farming, to trading, to transportation & logistics. That’s nearly …

There are stories. And then there are stories. And for Denise Sandquist, her story could - and should - be chronicled in a movie. We start with Denise's "gap year" -- that is, the year some 18-year-olds spend between graduating high school and starting university. Most backpack Europe or Southeast Asia...or volunteer...or intern. But Denise? Her ga…

The BRICS. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. For much of the 2010s, if you were to ask any global investor or geopolitical pundit what the hottest emerging markets were, they’d likely point to one of these BRICS countries. More recently, countries with big, young populations like Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Vietnam have caught inv…

Four letters: BNPL Buy now, pay later. It’s all the craze these days. Square, for example, just announced plans to buy the Australian BNPL company Afterpay for...get this: 29 BILLION dollars. On the side of the equator, Swedish BNPL player Klarna raised $639 million in their recent round at a $45.6 BILLION dollar valuation….and the US based BNPL Af…

It was 1994. Nelly Diop was a little girl living in Dawala, Cameroon - when all of a sudden, at the drop of a dime, France devalued the CFA franc -- the currency used by more than a dozen of its former African colonies. What’d that mean? Well, in countries like Gabon, Chad, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, and many others -- just like that, over nig…

It started as a frustrating day at a small 'mom and pop' grocery store in Casablanca, Morocco. Ismael was busy buying a carton of milk until the store's shopkeeper had to turn around and take delivery from his Coca-Cola supplier, leaving Ismael to wait idly by, in line...milk-in-hand. "One minute," the shopkeeper said. But one minute became ten min…

It was 2014. Carlos Andrade had just gotten his degree in Mechanical Engineering and was ready to start a demanding, yet lucrative career as an engineer in Peru. And after accepting his first job offer, a routine medical exam revealed something Carlos had never expected -- especially at the age of 23. He had cancer. So Carlos, for the time being, c…

In 1991, as an 8-year-old boy, Javad Rezabaksh and his family fled Afghanistan for Iran during the Afghan Civil War. 20 years later, in 2011, Javad returned to open his own small-scale gemstone cutting factory, where he trained countless Afghans - mostly women - to both identify and polish gemstones, especially emeralds. Why gemstones you ask? It’s…

Around 800 million people worldwide don't have access to a toilet. That means over 800 million people - everyday - are defecating wherever they can: behind a bush, on the side of a road, in a hole, or walking what could be miles and miles just to find the nearest toilet. The problem gets worse (much worse) in densely populated areas, such as refuge…

Population of Haiti: ~11.5 million Number of Haitians living abroad: between 2 and 3 million Known as the 'Haitian Diaspora', around 20% of Haitians have migrated ... outside of Haiti, to the likes of the US, the Dominican Republic, Canada, and throughout South America. And unfortunately, it's quite understandable. Plagued for centuries by foreign …

E-commerce is already a USD$5 trillion market. The likes of PayPal, Stripe, and many others have helped the global e-commerce space grow exponentially, serving effectively as the payment bridge between consumers and online retailers. Whilst e-commerce has boomed in the US, China, and throughout Europe and India, there's one area of the world that h…

In 2015, the minimum wage in Mexico was $4. No, not per hour. Per day. So when Melina Cruz Villafaña met Fernanda, an office cleaner, she learned of the harsh schedules that millions of Mexican women have every day: 1. wake up at 5am 2. commute three hours to Mexico City, the capital 3. clean officespaces or homes for an entire day 4. commute three…

1 in 10,000: The physician to person ratio in The Gambia, one of the lowest in the world. 4%: The percentage of Gambians that has health insurance. ~USD$0.50: The cost to visit a public hospital in The Gambia. USD$1 billion: The size of the counterfit and sub-standard medication market in Sub-Saharan Africa. Healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa is ridd…

In 2019, when Eja Batbold posted on Facebook that she'd be launching a platform that would help Mongolian students access study abroad opportunities, she got over 1,000 downloads in the first day. She knew she was on to something. Less than 2 years later, what started as a 'side gig' has turned into TomYo (meaning formula in Mongolian), which now w…

In 2014, Erickson Mvezi, as an MBA student, decided to pitch to his class the idea of bringing the first delivery-on-demand concept to his home country: Angola. Think: Deliveroo, GrubHub, Door Dash, etc ... but for southern Africa. At first, his classmates laughed at him. Now, seven years later, his idea for a school project has evolved into the wi…

An online payments system in Nepal. A cybersecurity business in Kazakhstan. A food-delivery operation in Angola. Founders from emerging and frontier markets face unique challenges when starting and scaling their businesses. These are their stories.