The Magic number 3, III, Trois, Drei, Adek, Saatu
There seems to be vast evidence of the significance of the number three and its derivatives, inter alia, Three is a crowd, the Holy Trinity, Third time’s a charm, and in some progressive circles, Threesome (Ménage-a-trois). I shan’t pretend to be particularly interested in the origins of the apparent significance of the number three and or the validity of that assertion. Well, at least not beyond the point that it serves me for purposes of this article. For the short term needs of internalizing this second installment in tracking the missteps to mayhem in as far as entrepreneurship venturing is concerned, I have not-so-arbitrarily awarded the number 3 a sacred place in the list of numbers.
H.Sc
The financial demands/needs of an A level student are not insignificant. More so in a coeducational institution that has ruthless awards system deliberately elevating the haves over the have-nots. The desire for relevance, particularly of the financial kind, is a lifetime human aspiration and one would argue correctly, that in a closed boarding school environment, that desire is even more pronounced. That notwithstanding however, a major consideration for us, the matriculating senior six students then, was the impending uncertain 9 month vacation within which one is expected to maintain availability in recreational set-ups despite uncoordinated and sometimes out rightly absent parental financial support. The months and days approaching this 9 month reprieve were bittersweet. Joy at the prospect of unmitigated “chilling” intermingled with anguish at the notion of self-financing said chilling. This incongruity, however, laid fertile ground for the proactive learners to embark on rigorous theorizing on how best to build a financial buffer so as to ensure a “soft landing” for vacation programmes.
Ideas Lab
Several ideas were fronted, effectively covering the entire spectrum from the comical (literally, a comedy show, as we considered ourselves to be unfailingly hilarious) to the bizarre (up country brothels-courtesy of Mateo Wacha-now an Engineer). Animated debates would ensue, through which many ideas failed the test and were summarily thwarted. Short interludes to cater for the fairly important business of education would follow, and then the more pressing concerns would reemerge, and back to the animated debates.
Triple/Tripartite
The paradox of smart people working together in close quarters reinforcing one another and still managing the net output of devastatingly irrational ideas is an area in which further scholarship might provide useful lessons.As you can probably already tell, our democratic theorizing, distillation and debating of ideas led us to what would inevitably be an epic cash burning incident, albeit unreported by any authorities and or witnesses to date for reasons ranging from shame to the earnest desire to forget, until this here blog post.
The idea was simple enough, you were recruited as one third of a party of three, by a “sponsor”, whose account, by way of joining, you would then be required to replenish with a one-time only, hardly prohibitive, sum of money. The task would then be to co-opt three (there is the illustrious number again) other equally ambitious account holders who would proceed to ‘join’ the procession ‘under you’ and the network would sprout from under your feet, enriching you in the process with all but any real effort.
As is always the case, with the memorialization of such events, the benefit of hindsight and retrospective inspection & analysis, make these ideas appear to be so obviously irrational and unjustifiably risky, BUT, as these terrible decisions are being executed, the doctored withholding of complete information and the tilted portrayal of the benefits versus the risk/costs is difficult to overcome. Essentially, the reader is requested to discount our intense stupidity in adopting this idea by the factor I just mentioned. Further to that, given that I wouldn’t feel offended if someone didn’t refer to me as a young man, I feel it important to build on that analogy as a demonstration that we attended High School a significantly long time ago. At such time, internet was still a luxury good, and therefore we lacked the benefit of easily accessible information of well documented Ponzi/pyramid schemes dating all the way back to 1926. Once again, the reader is firmly advised to discount our intense stupidity in adopting this idea by the factor I just mentioned.
One incident that stood out in this process was a firm caution by a close friend (Akampa Aaron-now a successful entrepreneur), on the underlying dangers of these get-rich-quick schemes as there were no notable millionaires whose success stories could be traced to any such scheme. I famously retorted, and we muse about this reply to date that “Akampa, there is nothing about business you can possibly teach me”. Spectacularly wrong.
Memory can’t locate who contracted outside help to funnel the money for depositing and “joining” but these details are not as important as the controversy that was generated over being asked to join under a friend. It was inevitable that someone had to join under someone, but there weren’t enough to go around in the limited school context. Well-heeled participants ‘bought’ others to join under them by subsidizing their set up fees. Others tried to cash in their friendship capital to persuade people to join under them. Very vivid is the memory of one such request that was made to me by one of my longest serving friends and brother (Bahizi Silas-now an established Financial Mathematician). Burdened by the friendship provisos and a convincing argument that we were going to make so much money it would not matter who would join under whom, I considered this request almost to the point of ascent. This was however undone my intense desire to not be seen to be working for a peer/right hand man. I politely declined and instead opted to participate under a faceless owner, for peace of mind.
Friends, there were no survivors. The hot air vendors were bundled by the regulators at the Central Bank before our material concerns had even reached infancy. We later learned that as students with few links to outside world, we were late adapters and no surprise a mere 24 hours after ‘joining’, the pyramid schemes breathed their last. 100k a pop, down the drain, along with any conversations on the subject. An important lesson from this debacle was that the phrase “wealth creation” is not accidental. The creation of true wealth is preceded by the existence of a value proposition. Anything less than that is pure speculation and as our case so neatly proved, is a risk not worth bearing.My expectation is that I shall dredge up other failed entrepreneurial excursions for entertainment, education and as far as am concerned, catharsis.
*the author is experimenting with the imprudent use of commas like Andrew Mwenda
