#3 - The 1-person billion-dollar company

Hello Reader,

How are you doing? I hope you're fine.

This week I made some minor tweaks to the structure of the newsletter so that I can go into more detail about certain areas. Let me know what you think

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📊 Chart of the week: The number of Commercial bank branches in the world (2004 to 2021)

I saw this graph earlier in the week and I thought it was interesting. Looking at the graph, 2 things are clear; High-income countries are reducing the number of bank branches rapidly while lower-middle-income countries seem to be increasing the the number of bank branches they have. I'm not going to go into details but it's important to note that both trends are happening due to socio-economic reasons.

Assuming this trend continues, these are some tech business opportunities that I think you can take advantage of:

• Tech courses/boot camps: One of the most popular reasons for a bank to close its branches is because they are switching to a digital-focused model where customers can access most of their services online. Due to the closure of these branches, some people will lose their jobs and have to find another one. This is where the opportunity lies.
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  I believe that there is an opportunity to provide courses and boot camps that focus on transitioning from a traditional banking role to a non-engineering tech role. What I mean is courses that can help bank tellers transition to fintech product managers, data analysts, or product designers. The course content will be created using information that they already know because of their banking experience.
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  Create a course and find a way to target existing and ex-bank staff with ads.
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• Industry-specific job boards: When banks close down their branches, many people need to find new jobs. This creates an opportunity to create a niche job board focused on the banking and finance sector. Recruiters who work in banks, fintech startups and finance houses will pay to place job ads on a job board that has an abundance of talent within this industry. It helps them narrow down their search and recruit talent that already has a background in the industry.
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  People looking for jobs will also benefit from using a job board that specialises in helping people in their industry find jobs

There are a lot of other ideas but these were my initial thoughts.

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🎞️ Video of the week: The 1 person billion-dollar company

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​Alexis Ohanian shared a video of him and Sam Altman talking about how AI can help people build unicorns (businesses worth at least 1 Billion dollars) with a team as small as 10 people or even just 1 person. Sounds shocking right? Especially when you consider that the average unicorn today has hundreds of staff.

I strongly agree with Sam and I believe it's just a matter of time before it happens. I started thinking of industries where this is most likely to happen and this is what I think:

• SaaS (Software as a service): Software businesses have almost always needed relatively smaller teams to run. AI will make those teams even smaller. AI can help simplify and automate tasks in coding, marketing & user acquisition and even general operations.
• Media: One of the most popular use cases for AI at the moment is content generation. This includes the generation of text, photos, videos and even humanoid characters. I don't think it'll be long before we start seeing large movie, music and content companies being built and run with the help of AI.
• Education: AI can help create personalized content and learning experiences on various topics. It can also automate grading, and provide feedback personalised to the learner. This takes out a lot of the work needed to run an online school or education-focused business.

There are a lot of other sectors that a 10-person team unicorn could be created in. I'm excited to see how it goes.

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🔦 Article Spotlight: Thoughts on tech ecosystems in developing countries

I wrote a blog post about my thoughts on the Nigerian tech ecosystem. It was about an alternative approach to building tech businesses. Though I wrote it with a focus on Nigeria, I strongly believe that the same concept is applicable in other developing countries. You can read it here​

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Always building,

Eko

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