Wave is a startup building mobile money—a way for people in developing countries to access financial services like savings and money transfer if they can't afford, or live too far away from, traditional banks. Lincoln is co-founder and head of product; Ben is an early engineer and CTO. We've both been part of the EA community since ~2011 (in fact, we met through NYC EA), and work on Wave for EA reasons.
EDIT: this originally said we'd start answering on Friday, but we're getting nerd sniped by the questions so will probably get to them sooner :)
About Wave
Wave is a spinoff of Sendwave, an app for sending money internationally from the US to Kenya. Sendwave used a mobile money system in Kenya, M-Pesa, to instantly deliver money transfers. Inspired by M-Pesa, we want to bring mobile money that works well to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
Wave is a for-profit, venture-backed company, but our founders and employees work on it primarily for EA reasons: mobile money has a large impact on global poverty. For example, one paper estimates that M-Pesa in Kenya lifted 2% of all households—almost 1m people—out of poverty. For a deeper analysis of the impact of mobile money, see Jeff Kaufman's Estimating the Value of Mobile Money. For our thoughts in favor of developing-world entrepreneurship more generally, see Ben's Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets.
(If this seems compelling to you, we're hiring! We have the most open roles for software engineers but are happy to chat about other possible positions as well. Message Ben on the forum or at [email protected].)
Wave's mobile money system is based around an app that's similar to Venmo or Cash App, except that it doesn't require a bank account. Instead, Wave lets users directly deposit or withdraw cash at "agents"—local businesspeople (think small shops/corner stores) who use their spare cash on hand to service Wave users. With agents, we can reach many more people than banks: the biggest banks in Senegal have ~40 branches, while we have over 100x as many agents.
We also allow users to purchase airtime and pay bills directly from the app, and are building lots of other ways to use Wave, like for salary payments and loans. Our goal is for Wave to be the easiest way to do any type of economic transaction.
We currently operate in Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire. In Senegal, which launched first, we've now reached over 1m users and are still growing quickly. We plan to expand to additional countries in 2021.
Wave is around ~400 people, of which ~300 work in our Senegal office, ~50 in our Ivorian office, and ~50 on a fully distributed remote team working on cross-country work (engineering, product development, finance, etc.).
About Lincoln
I'm co-founder and head of product at Wave. My role is to figure out what products to build and how to execute on them, mainly by leading the product teams. I’m also an engineer myself—I wrote a ton of the original code for Sendwave and Wave, but I don’t do much coding anymore (and I miss it). I lived in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Senegal for a combined 3 years and now live in the northeast US near where I grew up.
Outside work, I like cooking & baking, cycling, skiing, rationality and effective altruism. I have a personal website/blog, although my content is not nearly as good as Ben’s :P. Before Wave and Sendwave, I founded other failed startups: “Brew,” a dating app for students at NYU; “Chime,” a social/event-discovery app for college students at Brown & Yale; and “Newsbrane,” a social news app. I also worked in the video game industry. I became interested in effective altruism topics in 2011, when I discovered GiveWell through Less Wrong. I signed the Founders Pledge in 2016 to donate 10% of eventual sale/profit from Wave to charity.
About Ben
I joined Wave as the second engineer and am now CTO. I currently spend most of my time hiring and managing the team that works on our core engineering tools/infrastructure; in the past I've done everything from product work to accounting. I grew up in Boston, lived in the Bay Area for one year, spent a bunch of time in Ethiopia/Nigeria/Senegal as well, and am now nomadic.
Outside work I like to write blog posts. I don't write as much on EA anymore but some relatively EA-relevant ones include a review of Why Nations Fail, various ones on career planning / job searching (very old, old, recent, recent), and notes on running an EA student group.
Previously, I earned-to-give at a different early stage startup and cofounded Harvard College Effective Altruism. I found out about what would become EA in 2009 when Peter Singer gave a talk at my high school.
Some topics we can talk about
Obviously this list is not exhaustive—ask us anything you want—but here's some ideas to get started!
- Entrepreneurship as an EA path
- Living in Africa
- Entrepreneurship in Africa as an EA path
- How the EA community has changed over time
- Talent gaps
- Career choice and planning
- Software engineering
- Product management
- Engineering management
- Building cross-cultural teams
- Remote work
- Writing
- Self-improvement
Hi Lincoln and Ben, thanks for doing this! I would love to hear your perspective on the following topic:
Nonprofit entrepreneurship is a dominant career path within EA, with many people excited about the impact that it can achieve. Impact-focused for-profit entrepreneurship is rarely discussed or recommended by EA organizations, with a 2016 article about your startup being one of the only materials on this topic. I have also heard multiple people argue that for-profit entrepreneurship is an inherently less promising path than nonprofit entrepreneurship for various reasons.
What is your view on the value of for-profit entrepreneurship from an EA perspective? Do you believe this career path is undervalued by the EA community and its organizations today? If so, what do you believe people interested in for-profit entrepreneurship should do to found highly impactful organizations? Are there any specific opportunities you think are particularly interesting or exciting in this space?
Thanks in advance!
From my perspective, for-profit entrepreneurship seems better than nonprofit entrepreneurship in terms of making an EA impact. The main reason is that the profit incentive gives you much broader access to capital, so it unlocks ideas that will only be impactful given enough money to get started. And I think there are a lot of ideas like this -- it's not hard to look at e.g. YC's Requests for Startups and see obvious, huge-impact ideas that seem worth working on. (Linked from that page is another page about what YC looks for in a nonprofit, also a good read!)
I recommend that anyone wanting to start a company but not sure what to do, try looking at the Requests for Startups first and try to find something you have leverage on -- but keep it small, your initial idea needs to start really "niche", you won't be able to solve a giant world problem from the get-go. Then read Paul Graham's essays and Sam A's startup playbook. Hopefully this literature will give you a better sense for whether entrepreneurship is for you. As you work on growing your business, don't over-index on trying to make an EA impact early on -- just focus on growth, like you would for any for-profit business. EA impact will come over time as you grow, and spending too much time worrying about the impact while you're small is likely to be a distraction from growing as much as you can.
From my perspective, I wish more people would start software companies in Africa (presumably this is true for other places in the developing world). There's a pretty wide appeal for lower-end tech optimized for consumers and businesses in these markets: low cost; Android-based; focused on mobile money.
(I also think nonprofit entrepreneurship is great in lots of ways, and in general I want to see people in EA putting energy behind all forms of innovation!)
All the above notwithstanding, it seems like it makes sense for EA orgs like 80000 hours not to spend much energy pushing people into for-profit entrepreneurship: there's a model going around that the best entrepreneurs are driven enough that you don't need to tell them to be an entrepreneur -- it's in their blood or something :). I am not myself too convinced this should be the blocker -- I go around telling all my friends to start companies -- but if that's the working assumption, then they are probably acting correctly.
One final thought: If you rank EA ideas on a continuum from "produces no value" to "produces a ton of value," it seems like the section of the continuum where nonprofit ideas are viable is quite small. Too low and your idea isn't worth working on. But once you start producing lots of value for the world, stakeholders start to be willing to pay for the solution, and then you can start a for-profit company to do it. So from this perspective, the best EA nonprofit ideas are weird and non-central examples of value-producing ideas -- they're ideas that produce a lot of value but you can't get anyone to pay for.
Under some ethical theories, the vast majority of stakeholders (nonhuman animals, future persons) are unable to pay in any meaningful sense. Are you more positive about nonprofit entrepreneurship for organizations that serve these stakeholders?
Fair question, and your comment elsewhere (about the narrow slice being the only slice that exists if the market is efficient) was enlightening.
However: my philosophy for startups is that I would nearly always take a different approach to solving these sorts of problems in the world. I would prefer to start Beyond Meat, and try to solve the nonhuman animals problem in an oblique way, instead of attacking it directly by starting a nonprofit. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs think like this as well: look at Elon Musk's startup strategy -- he tends to go for something which has a business/profitability angle from the first version, but with a big long-term mission (Tesla Roadster, early non-reusable SpaceX rockets). And as Ben writes elsewhere, I think the startup market is highly and obviously inefficient, so efficient market considerations are not very relevant.
Thanks! Beyond Meat and SpaceX are great examples.
Hmm. This argument seems like it only works if there are no market failures (i.e. ideas where it's possible to capture a decent fraction of the value created), and it seems like most nonprofits address some sort of market failure? (e.g. "people do not understand the benefits of vitamin-fortified food," "vaccination has strong positive externalities"...)
Yeah, that seems right to me, and is a good model that predicts the existing nonprofit startup ideas! My point is that it seems like a very narrow slice of all value-producing ideas.
To the extent that markets are efficient, that narrow slice is the only slice available (since the ways of creating value for which you can easily be paid have already been exploited).
(This is one reason why I personally am usually more excited about nonprofit startups: the low hanging fruit is usually picked in the for-profit world, but there's a lot more remaining in the nonprofit space.)
Agree that if you put a lot of weight on the efficient market hypothesis, then starting a company looks bad and probably isn't worth it. Personally, I don't think markets are efficient enough for this to be a dominant consideration (see e.g. my response here for partial justification; not sure it's possible to give a convincing full justification since it seems like a pretty deep worldview divergence between us and the more modest-epistemology-focused wing of the EA movement).
That makes sense, thanks!
I agree with most of what Lincoln said and would also plug Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets as material on this, if you haven't read it yet :)
Can you elaborate on the "various reasons" that people argue for-profit entrepreneurship is less promising than nonprofit entrepreneurship or provide any pointers on reading material? I haven't run across these arguments.
Thank you both for your thoughtful answers.
To clarify, I don't have a strong opinion on this comparison myself, and would love to hear more points of view on this. Sadly I'm not aware of any reading materials on this topic, but have heard the following arguments made in one on one conversations:
Finally, the fact that I listed arguments in favor of nonprofit entrepreneurship over for-profit entrepreneurship may give the impression that this is my opinion, so I want to clarify again that it is not and I am highly uncertain about this topic.
Cool! With the understanding that these aren't your opinions, I'm going to engage with them anyway bc I think they're interesting. I think for all four of these I agree that they directionally push toward for-profits being less good, but that people overestimate the magnitude of the effect.
Despite the built-in incentives, I think "which companies get built" is still pretty contingent and random based on which people try to do things. For instance, it's been obvious that M-Pesa had an amazing business in Kenya since ~2012, but it still hasn't had equally successful copycats, let alone people trying to improve it, in other countries. If the market were really efficient here I think something like Wave would be 4+ years further along in its trajectory.
Similarly, this is directionally correct but easy to overweight—there are still for-profit companies working in all of these spaces that seem likely to have very large impacts (Wave, Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, SpaceX, OpenAI...)
This is definitely a risk, and something that we worry about at Wave. That said:
I think "nontrivial" for a nonprofit is trivial for a successful for-profit :) Wave has raised tens of millions of dollars in equity and hundreds of millions in debt, and we're likely to raise 10x+ more in success cases. We definitely could not have raised nearly this much as a nonprofit. Same with eg OpenAI which got $1b in nonprofit commitments but still had to become (capped) for-profit in order to grow.
If you look at OpenAI's annual filings, it looks like the $1b did not materialize.
Which annual filings? Presumably the investment went to the for-profit component.
$1B commitment attributed to Musk early on is different from the later Microsoft investment. The former went away despite the media hoopla.
Was there a $1bn commitment attributed to Musk? The OpenAI wikipedia article says: "The organization was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Peter Thiel and others,[8][1][9] who collectively pledged US$1 billion."
Well Musk was the richest, who notably pulled out and then the money seems mostly not to have manifested. I haven't seen a public breakdown of commitments those sorts of statements were based on.
Semafor reporting confirms your view. They say Musk promised $1bn and gave $100mn before pulling out.