Out-Innovate

Introduction

Beyond Silicon Valley

Xavier Helgesen was troubled. He had just returned to his home base of Arusha, Tanzania, after weeks spent pitching Zola, his startup, to Silicon Valley investors. It was 2014, two years into the journey, and Zola already had thousands of paying customers and a large potential market. But Xavier had secured only a fraction of the capital that a pedestrian San Francisco startup might expect to raise in months.

Xavier had co-founded Zola with Erica Mackey and Joshua Pierce to tackle a seemingly intractable problem: eight hundred million people in Africa live “offgrid” and are vulnerable to systematic disadvantages resulting from a lack of electricity.¹ These hardships include respiratory health problems from kerosene ...