A rainy week at the office






We started off the week with a couple of to-do items for Linda.
We visited Sigil once again. This time to buy some sample bags to take back with me to the US. The idea is that Linda will then be able to show these to WOW advisors and get their input and feedback. He also showed us a new sample of a shopping bag that was reversible. He is still in the process of finishing it and choosing the right handles for it.



We also had further discussions on possible tags / logs that could be put on WOW clothing / bag merchandise. There are two options – to have them printed or to have them woven. The woven tags tend to look neater and could also include some interesting words. The logo attached here with the words ‘GROWING AFRICAN BUSINESSES’ was one our ideas. Currently, Sigil has his tags printed in Morocco. Perhaps it could make sense for us to have these made in the US.


During our conversation with Linda on Monday, we were able to further refine our thoughts on the immediate hiring needs for WOW. Ideally besides the new CEO, WOW needs a couple of more investment analyst / account managers, accountants and a legal consultant. We discussed these roles further with Malick and were able to write down job descriptions for these positions. Malick and Amara gave us the impression that while the skills required for these positions are extensive, it should not be too difficult to find appropriate candidates in Dakar.

Wow currently has 8 companies in its portfolio, most of which have further funding needs. Further, we have been analyzing another 7 companies. The total funding required for 2008 for these 15 companies is of the order of 200m CFA (circa $500,000). We have summarized the financial needs of these 15 companies and will present these to Linda. If we wish to fund 20 portfolio companies, during 2008-2009, WOW should raise close to $750,000. It is hard to predict what these businesses will need in years beyond 2009. What we do now is that some of these needs are fairly urgent so the investment in these companies needs to be appropriately timed for it to have maximum impact.

Ludo visited us in the office today with his design for the homepage. Christian and I went through every granular detail on the page to make it more attractive, appropriate, aligned with the WOW theme. He was very hands on and made the changes as we discussed. He will work on cleaning up the product further so it can be shown to a larger audience. It is still in its primitive stage, however we convinced him that we must show Linda the design so far (even though it is still very raw). I think working with a website designer based in Senegal is going to be challenging - especially if WOW intends to do this going forward from the US. Our meeting today was very, very hands on, and it is hard to imagine how this could take place across continents. The meeting today was exciting and it was great to be able to see a product transform as we gave more and more input.

Karishma