Grit & Growth
Stanford Graduate School of Business
1 Creator
1 Creator
Meet intrepid entrepreneurs from Africa and South Asia, hear their stories of trial & triumph, and gain insights and guidance from Stanford University faculty and global business experts on how to transform today’s challenges into tomorrow’s opportunities.
From securing investment and planning family succession, to mindful leadership and managing in adversity, you’ll learn firsthand from entrepreneurs and experts on how to develop the grit you need to grow your business — in times of crisis and calm. Walk away with actionable information, new perspectives, and fresh inspiration to take your business to the next level.
Listeners can also take a deep dive into entrepreneurship with masterclass episodes featuring interviews with Stanford faculty and global experts. It’s a unique opportunity to hear about cutting-edge research, get practical business tips, and learn proven leadership strategies from some of the world’s leading thinkers and practitioners.
Grit & Growth is brought to you by Stanford Seed, a Stanford Graduate School of Business-led initiative that partners with entrepreneurs in emerging markets to build thriving enterprises that transform lives.
About The Host:
Darius Teter is executive director of Stanford Seed, a Stanford Graduate School of Business-led initiative that partners with entrepreneurs in emerging markets to build thriving enterprises that transform lives. Darius has held leadership positions at Oxfam America, the Asian Development Bank and with the US Government where his experience included advising governments on economic policy, developing human rights programming, and financing infrastructure megaprojects across Africa, Asia and Latin America. All the while, he remained intrigued by the human experience and our universal drive towards growth and prosperity.
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Top 10 Grit & Growth Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Grit & Growth episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Grit & Growth for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Grit & Growth episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
06/11/24 • 32 min
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on AI — a practical guide for experimenting and engaging with artificial intelligence. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, AI visionary, and best-selling author walks us through the hype, fears, and potential of this transformative and complex technology.
AI is reshaping business, society, and education with unprecedented speed. Ethan Mollick urges business leaders and educators to get in there and figure it out for themselves — to experiment and discover, rather than sitting on the sidelines waiting for AI to come to them. His latest book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, is a practical guide for thinking and working with AI so you can determine how and where it can be utilized most effectively.
Mollick believes that AI can help entrepreneurs at every stage of business, including coming up with the very idea for the business itself. “AI out-innovates people in most cases,” he says, “so you should probably be using it to help you generate ideas.” In fact, he encourages us to think about AI as a co-founder to bounce ideas off. Mollick also acknowledges that people need to push through those initial couple hours of resistance when exploring AI. “There's a lot of reasons people stop using AI. It's weird. It freaks them out. It gives them bad answers — initially. You need to push through, like there is a point of expertise with this, where you start to get what it does and what it doesn't. Ten hours is my loose rule of thumb for how much time you have to spend using these systems to kind of get it.”
Mollick’s Four Essential Rules for Integrating AI into Work and Life
1. Always invite AI to the table.
“You don't know what AI is good for or bad for inside your job or your industry. Nobody knows. The only way to figure it out is disciplined experimentation. Just use it a lot for everything you possibly can.”
2. Be the human in the loop.
“The AI is better than a lot of people in a lot of jobs, but not at their whole job, right? And so, whatever you’re best at, you're almost certainly better than the AI is.”
3. Treat AI like a human
AI models are “trained on human language and they're refined on human language. And it just turns out that they respond best to human speech. Telling it and giving tasks like a person often gets you where you need to go.”
... (but tell it what kind of human to be)
“AI models often need context to operate. Otherwise they produce very generic results. So a persona is an easy way to give context. ‘You are an expert marketing manager in India, focusing on technology ventures that work with the US’ will put it in a different headspace than if you say you're a marketer or if you don't give it any instructions at all.”
4. Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.
“We're early, early days still. I mean, there's a lot of stuff still being built.”
Listen to Ethan Mollick’s insights on how AI can level the playing field for startups and how entrepreneurs and teams can use it to enhance creativity, efficiency, and innovation. Also, be sure to subscribe to Mollick's Substack blog/newsletter One Useful Thing, a research-based view on the implications of AI, where Mollick offers free resources and prompts.
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02/20/24 • 13 min
Meet Grace Macharia, a speech and language therapist and founder of SLT Support in Nairobi, Kenya. She created a social enterprise with a mission to support not only her patients, but also the profession of speech therapy in Kenya as a whole.
“In 2011 there were about five speech therapists in Kenya, and all of them were trained out of the country. Can you imagine only five speech therapists for a population of 21 million?!” she recounts. When Macharia eventually found her true career calling in speech therapy, she realized that she couldn’t deliver the kind of impact she wanted without the help of others. So, she created a business, got the training she needed to formalize her business structure and organization, and began lobbying policy makers to give the profession the recognition and support it deserved.
Not everyone is born an entrepreneur. Grace Macharia certainly didn’t think of herself that way. But she had the persistence of an entrepreneur and a deep concern for her patients, many of whom needed more than just speech therapy services. Today her company treats patients, trains new therapists, and offers a multidisciplinary, holistic approach to care that is yielding better outcomes. And she’s created an association of speech and language therapists in Kenya to support each other and lobby for reform.
Of course, Macharia is still pushing for more. Speech therapy, she says, “is a profession that still needs a lot of attention. A lot of the people who need our services actually don't get it. When we have access to all this in every county, not just in Nairobi, not in just the cities in Kenya, but in every county, and not just in Kenya, East Africa, that would be a success and a dream come true.”
Hear how Macharia got the entrepreneurial training she needed to run a business and promote her profession so that other therapists and patients succeed.
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Early-Stage Financing
Grit & Growth
04/20/21 • 37 min
Meet Arun Iyer, CEO of Alpha Direct Insurance Company, and Zach George, general partner at Launch Africa Ventures, and learn what it takes to transition your funding from friends and family to angel investors and venture capital.
Like most entrepreneurs, Arun relied on friends and family to get his Botswana-based insurtech company off the ground. But bringing insurance to the masses — both within Botswana and across the region — required more substantial sums. And thinking small was preventing him from making it big.
“I believed that only these three people would finance my business. Today, I'm raising money from funds that are located across the world. You know, part of our pre-series A was a fund from Switzerland, Launch Africa Ventures is in. So, now the whole world has been opened up. And technically you can do that at any stage, there's nothing preventing you. The only thing that was preventing us from doing it was my mindset. And once I removed that self-doubt, now the world became my oyster.”
Arun learned that building relationships based on mutual trust is key to securing capital. And Zach George agrees ... along with what he calls the ‘napkin test’. Zach looks for founders who can explain in just a few minutes how they plan to get to $100 million. “The majority of founders can never do that. They fail miserably at it, or they'll say, "hey, can I open up my spreadsheet or I'll talk to my CFO". If you give me the, 'let me talk to my CFO', you've lost me.”
Listen to Arun’s capital raising strategies and Zach’s investor insights to help fund and grow your own company.
Resources:
Alpha Direct, Botswana: https://www.alphadirect.co.bw/
Stanford Seed: http://stanfordseed.co/Grit
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05/18/21 • 43 min
Meet Naomi Kipkorir and Annette Kimitei, the mother-daughter team leading Senaca East Africa, and Peter Francis, lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and hear about finding success and navigating succession in a family run business.
Family dynamics can be challenging, not to mention, emotional. But when you add in a business, things can get even more complicated. Especially when the entire family is involved. That’s the story behind Senaca EA, a private security company headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. Founded by Naomi’s husband, an ex-policeman, the business started in 2002 as a side hustle and now it’s a full-time, all-in-the-family-of five affair.
After a failed merger with a European company, the family literally came together to pull their company back from the brink. Thinking about family succession came next. And as Annette learned, “succession is not one event, it’s a process.” Formalizing corporate governance is key to that process, which for Senaca begins with introducing advisory board members that have skill sets the business is missing, and eventually independent directors.
Peter Francis fully supports that plan. And he knows from experience; his family run business has been going for six generations. Peter uses that firsthand knowledge to teach a class called The Yin and Yang of Family Business Transition at Stanford. Because issues that arise in a family business can often turn emotional, Peter advises seeking outside expertise, and relying on education, transparency, and communication to handle tough issues.
“If you're having a conversation about the business at home you might say, "you know what, we're home, we should be wearing our family hat, not our business hat". And then communication... I don't mean just communicating, but also learning how to communicate. That is a muscle that we can strengthen in the family.”
Listen to Naomi and Annette’s family story and Peter’s business insights to help think about your own company’s succession and governance plans.
Links:
Senaca East Africa: https://senacaworld.com
Annette Kimitei: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annette-kimitei-70594249/?originalSubdomain=ke
Peter Francis: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/peter-t-francis
Stanford Seed: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/seed
Resources:
Poza, E. & Daugherty, M. (2014). Family Business, 4th Edition. Mason, OH: South-Western Centage Learning,
Gersick, K., Davis, J., Hampton, M. & Lansberg, I. (1999). Succeeding Generations: Realizing the Dream of Families in Business, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press
Ward, J. L. (2004), Perpetuating the Family Business: 50 Lessons Learned from Long-Lasting Successful Families in Business, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan
Montemerlo, D. & Ward, J. (2011). The Family Constitution: Agreements to Secure and Perpetuate Your Family and Your Business. Family Business Leadership Series, No. 20, Marietta, GA: Family Enterprise Publishers
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Masterclass on Communicating with Confidence
Grit & Growth
10/19/21 • 23 min
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on communicating with confidence, featuring Matt Abrahams, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in strategic communications. Whether pitching to investors, reporting to your board, or motivating employees, Abrahams has tips and tricks for managing anxiety and making an impact with both what you say and how you say it.
Abrahams knows a thing or two about communicating. Whether he’s teaching MBAs at Stanford GSB or hosting his podcast “Think Fast, Talk Smart,” he advises entrepreneurs on the value of “Speaking Up Without Freaking Out” — which is also the title of his best-selling book.
Abrahams believes confidence and mindset can be developed to alleviate anxiety and improve almost any pitch or meeting. He’s also on a personal mission to stop entrepreneurs from beginning their presentations with “Hi, my name is _______, and today we're going to talk about_________.”
“That is boring. It's silly because you're showing a slide that has your name and your topic on it. I like to joke that every good pitch should start like a James Bond movie. No, not with sex and violence, but with action, get people participating and focused ... and that's what will help people get interested in what you're saying.”
Top Seven Masterclass Takeaways
- Some anxiety is a good thing. It can give you energy and focus. Abrahams suggests using cognitive reframing to use your excitement about your business and vision to manage your fear of pitching.
- Use nonverbal cues to convey confidence ... even if you’re not feeling it. Gesture more slowly, make direct eye contact, take deep breaths to slow your speech rate down. These nonverbal cues will make people think you’re confident, which will actually make you feel more confident.
- Record yourself and watch it. Rather than judge and evaluate based upon your own internal dialogue, try to see what others will see in the pitch or presentation.
- Mindfulness can help you manage anxiety. Give yourself permission to be nervous — it’s only human. And forgive yourself if you’re nervous or make a mistake. That’s human, too.
- Create a compelling hook. Make sure it grabs people’s attention and is relevant. Abrahams explains, “If you do something different, you automatically stand out. You've got my attention just because you did something different.”
- Learn to tell your story fast and slow. Have a two-minute, 10-minute, and 30-minute version to deliver depending upon the situation.
- Consider cultural differences and pay attention to social status. Low context and high context cultures require different approaches. And hierarchy and social status should impact how you communicate.
Listen to Abrahams’ insights, advice, and strategies for how entrepreneurs can communicate with greater confidence and learn how you can improve your next pitch, board meeting, or presentation.
Please take a few moments and provide us with your feedback on Grit & Growth. We would love to hear what you’re interested in learning about and how we can make the content we create relevant to your growth journey.
Resources
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Introducing the If/Then podcast from Stanford GSB
Grit & Growth
01/30/24 • 33 min
If/Then is a new podcast from the Stanford Graduate School of Business that we think will be of great interest to Grit & Growth listeners. This episode features Stanford GSB Professor Jonathan Levav analyzing the premise, “If we want to generate better ideas, then we need to get people back to the office.”
To Zoom or not to Zoom? That is the question on many leaders’ minds, nearly four years after the COVID-19 pandemic emptied offices around the world. While remote work has become the new normal, Jonathan Levav, Professor of Marketing at Stanford GSB, believes video conferencing is no substitute for face-to-face communication — especially where creativity is concerned. When it comes to the spontaneous and collaborative nature of coming up with new ideas, Levav says, “Screens are just too constraining.”
Levav’s insights come from a research study where pairs were asked to devise alternative uses for everyday items. “Pairs that worked face-to-face generated 15 to 20 percent more ideas than pairs that worked on Zoom,” he notes. What’s more, in-person brainstorming helped people consider a wider and more diverse range of possibilities. “Working on Zoom was a double penalty,” Levav says. “Fewer ideas — and a narrower set of ideas.”
Hear about Levav’s insights and research on remote work and how to keep your creative edge in our post-pandemic world.
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Profile of Purpose: One Stitch at a Time
Grit & Growth
11/02/21 • 9 min
Meet Linda Ampah, founder of KAD Manufacturing and a fashion brand called Cadling Fashions based in Ghana. Linda’s entrepreneurial journey has had all the typical hurdles plus the extra challenges of being a female business owner in Africa. That’s why providing job opportunities for women is central to her mission.
Linda has always loved the sound of sewing machines. Now she gets to hear them all the time in her factories where she manufactures school uniforms and makes garments for U.S. brands like Anthropologie and Brooklyn Industries.
“In Ghana, in the marketplaces there are women and girls who sleep on the streets. We went out asking them whether they'll be interested to come and train? And the response we got was just amazing. We invited them over and then we started training them. Now the challenge though was that because they didn't have a place to stay, they get raped. We decided we'll add housing to it. And usually after a year, they are able to rent their own place then they move from the hostel.”
Listen to Linda’s mini-profile to learn how employing women in need can have a ripple effect on an entire community.
Please take a few moments and provide us with your feedback on Grit & Growth. We would love to hear what you’re interested in learning about and how we can make the content we create relevant to your growth journey.
Resources:
Pieces of the Portrait: An Autobiography by Linda Ampah
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From Informal Markets to E-commerce: The Jumia Story
Grit & Growth
12/07/21 • 33 min
How do you convince Africans — both buyers and sellers — to move from informal outdoor markets to e-commerce? Juliet Anammah of Jumia Group is up for the challenge. Listen to her interview for the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series to learn how Jumia is breaking down traditional barriers with technology.
Jumia operates in 11 countries. It’s the largest e-commerce platform on the African continent and the first African tech startup to be listed on the NYSE. But e-commerce still represents less than 5% of total retail, which means there is tremendous upside if the company can overcome all the obstacles. Jumia is seeking to do just that by creating a marketplace that connects buyers with sellers, integrating with third-party providers, building trust with buyers, providing training and data analytics to sellers, and engaging with regulators. The ultimate goal: to improve lives on the continent using the power of the internet.
As former CEO and now chairwoman of Jumia Nigeria and chief sustainability officer of Jumia Group, Anammah has her hands in all of it, as she explained at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series event.
Jumia’s strategy is to integrate with existing third-party solutions to handle everything from logistics to delivery to payments, creating a full digital ecosystem. “It's an asset-light model. You have people who have tricycles and vans and so on, but what was lacking was always the technology to integrate that together and to use the data to make quality decisions.” Anammah continues, “The real value you bring to consumers is not limiting them to your own solution — it is actually giving them a platform through which they could use whatever payment method methodology that they have.”
Jumia is breaking down more than just trade barriers, but gender ones as well. “At least in Nigeria and Kenya, which are key markets, about 51% of our sellers are actually women. It’s a gender agnostic environment. You could be a fashion seller, you could be an electronic seller, and you know you don't have a lot of physical markets where someone can make those kinds of gender-related decisions that could be forbidden.”
Anammah believes that the power of the platform extends far beyond commerce, driving development and creating jobs across the continent. “In the end, reducing inequality is so critical and is a big part of how we create value. And how we create sustainable improvement in quality of lives on the continent is by asking ourselves: What more can we do?”
Listen to Anammah’s entrepreneurial journey as a guide for your own. Hear about the challenges of building a marketplace business, competition, expansion plans, sustainability efforts, and more.
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Profiles of Purpose: The Boy from the Streets
Grit & Growth
02/01/22 • 9 min
Meet Afolabi Abiodun, founder and CEO of SB Telecoms and Devices, a company creating HR solutions for small and medium businesses in Nigeria and across sub-Saharan Africa. From street hawker to debtor to entrepreneur, Afolabi is proof positive that a boy from the streets can find success.
No one ever doubted that Afolabi had the drive to succeed. But his lack of business knowledge often got him into hot water...and lots of debt. After incurring millions in debt, he actually ran away from home to avoid embarrassment and move on to a new life.
To make matters worse, Abiodun explains “it was actually my grandma's property that was used as collateral for my business. The banking office went straight to my grandmother and told her ‘your property will be sold’”.
A message from his brother changed his course. “He said: you can run fast as long as you want, but the problem that you've left behind will haunt you for the rest of your life.” Abiodun came back and the rest is history in the making.
The problems Abiodun faced running his own businesses — recruitment, payroll, and other HR tasks — led him to create SB Telecoms, an easy-to-use HR application that handles everything from recruitment to retirement and hire to fire.
“When people talk about problems. I say to people, yes. It's easy to say. We don't have infrastructure in Africa. Power is a problem, but I mean, for me, this is a way of life for me all my life, the road has always been bad. This is the world I know. I try not to complain about it. I try to solve it.”
Listen to his mini profile to hear how street smarts and business smarts can help propel entrepreneurs on their journey forward.
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04/02/24 • 7 min
Meet Mir Shahrukh Islam, cofounder and CEO of Bondstein Technologies Ltd. in Bangladesh. He created his IoT, or internet of things, company at a time when very few in Bangladesh even knew the term. Today, that future-focused, risk-taking spirit still defines and inspires his entrepreneurial journey.
Taking bold risks is part of almost every entrepreneur’s DNA. Shahrukh demonstrated that trait from the get-go when he chose his company name, Bondstein, a mashup of James Bond and Einstein. “Daring and smart” is how he strives to approach business challenges. The company he created generates actionable intelligence by connecting assets to the internet for SMBs and enterprises, including tracking vehicles, solving customers’ operational efficiencies, and reducing costs.
While risk taking conveys confidence to many, Shahrukh admits that doubts always remain. “Whenever I am taking a big decision, doubts always come. Will it work? Will it not work? Will I be able to convince my partners? Will I be able to convince my customers? Will I be able to convince my suppliers? But you never know until you take that decision, until you take that leap of faith. So it's always important to just trust the process, take that leap of faith,” he advises
Getting feedback — positive and negative — is essential for Shahrukh’s growth as a leader. “I constantly challenge myself with people who are more capable than me to deliver. I always meet with individuals who have achieved something that I aspire to achieve someday,” he says.
According to Shahrukh, taking a break to recharge is how he stays motivated through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. He says, “Whenever I am very much cluttered or very much tired, I always take a break, go on a drive, talk with random people on the roadside, and try to understand different philosophies.”
Hear how Shahrukh is navigating the entrepreneurial journey and finding success and happiness along the way.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Grit & Growth have?
Grit & Growth currently has 84 episodes available.
What topics does Grit & Growth cover?
The podcast is about India, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Investing, Business Strategy, Business News, Growth, Investment, Podcasts, Small Business, Economics, Business Education, Business, Africa, Female Entrepreneur, Growth Mindset and Asia.
What is the most popular episode on Grit & Growth?
The episode title 'It's All in Your Head: Masterclass on Thriving in Turbulent Times' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Grit & Growth?
The average episode length on Grit & Growth is 30 minutes.
How often are episodes of Grit & Growth released?
Episodes of Grit & Growth are typically released every 14 days, 3 hours.
When was the first episode of Grit & Growth?
The first episode of Grit & Growth was released on Apr 9, 2021.
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