HeyJaredCofounders Notebook
Welcome to "CoFounders Notebook", A weekly newsletter led by Reuben Mwatosya: Sharing Notes and Ideas on fintech & tech businesses in Africa.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 8
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 7, 2026
Latest issues
How To Be A Billionaire In Africa: Build A Telecom Company. (opens the original)
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Introduction.Years ago I read a book that basically said: If you want to become a billionaire, Do what billionaires do. The problem was that most of the billionaires in those books were very far from home.They built software in California. They traded on Wall Street. They built property empires in New York and London.Africa is different. So I started studying African billionaires. And one thing becomes obvious very quickly:African Billionaires built telecoms, We are now building fintech unicorns
Do What Billionaires Do: What African Billionaires Do or Did? (opens the original)
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IntroductionMany years ago, I read a book whose advice was simple: if you want to become a billionaire, do what billionaires do.It stayed with me. But there was a problem. Those billionaires were far from home. Their stories were interesting, but I could not easily connect their starting points to mine. They were American, mainly getting rich on the US stock markets.I live between Tanzania and Kenya. I came from banking, African Banking. Now run a fintech across Africa. Like most of my readers,
Toyota Is A Bank: The $250 billion Lender hiding in the car company. (opens the original)
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I. What You See:Toyota looks like a car company. Corolla. Camry. Hilux. Land Cruiser. Lexus.And it is not just another car company. The Toyota RAV4 was the world’s bestselling car in 2024. The Toyota Corolla remains the bestselling car nameplate of all time, with more than 57 million sold.Both are Toyotas. Not Teslas!🧐We know, Toyota makes the cars people drive, the trucks businesses depend on and the SUVs that governments, families and armies trust in the most difficult places on earth. That is
NO HR, NO PROBLEM: I Hire People via LinkedIn Posts on My Profile. (opens the original)
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Introduction.Salaam (hello)! At the beginning (of Building Tembo) we needed to hire generalists, as we scale we need to hire specialists, These people are “like specialised assassins”. Their job is clear, their mandate is growth and they have done this before (very experienced individuals), they come here to do it again but with more to keep for themselves not just as mere employees. It has been over a year since I shared an article on how we hire
The First Fintech Map of Tanzania: The most comprehensive publicly available list of fintech companies operating in Tanzania (opens the original)
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Published by Cofounders Notebook & Reuben MwatosyaFirst Edition | July 2026IntroductionThanks to Atoms&Bits and Bridgit, Today, we publish the First Fintech Map of Tanzania, because Two years ago, I published this <a href="https://open.substack.com/pub/reubenmars/p/first-startup-map-of-tanzania-the?r=21axwb&a
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