“Chasing Black Unicorns: How Building the Amazon of Africa Put me on Interpol’s most wanted list” by Marek Zmyslowski is entertaining, educational, and more vain than you would expect.
It’s equal parts tell-all, vanity press, and fish-out-of-water. This is, after all, the story of a Polish entrepreneur in Nigeria.
But the subtitle is misleading at best. Zmyslowski didn’t build the Amazon of Africa. He helped build Jovago, an online travel site for Jumia the Amazon of Africa. Never let the truth get in the way of a good subtitle I guess.
I don’t know how I came to have this book, but if you are interested in Silicon Valley, startup culture, and entrepreneurship, this is probably worth your time. I would, however, take everything in it with a grain of salt.
Zmyslowski is a Polish-born entrepreneur who gives his origin story for how he got into the startup scene. It’s his fish-out-of-water experience in building Jovago in Nigeria that really makes this book worth the time. I’ve read plenty about the startups that became Apple or Microsoft or PayPal – all of the big and some small Silicon Valley success stories. They all revolve around emerging technology in the United States: a place where these startups are either bringing new technology to solve old problems, or entering into a new venue of technology.
This book is not that. Nigeria is a different culture and a different market. Africa as a whole is not like the “Western” civilizations that your everyday Silicon Valley startup hopes will be ready for whatever it is pedaling. That difference is everything.
It’s also why I can excuse Zmyslowski’s ego as he tells about all the things he did and experienced in this new place, with new people, and in a culture he was learning about on the fly.
It is additionally important to note that this book is a translation from Polish (Marek’s mother tongue) to English by Paul McNamara. There are some spelling and grammatical errors in the translation that make this feel like vanity press, those hastily assembled books for CEOs or other wealthy types to be able to say they have a book.
Still, this modern startup culture in a foreign land is based on all those Silicon Valley success stories: high ambition, low overhead, high workload, low work-life balance. But this story is still original in print, though it does feel like other entrepreneurs from abroad would probably have similar stories to varying degrees of success in Nigeria.
So is this a tell-all? Yes. Is this vanity press? Also yes. But it is uniquely different than any other entrepreneur tell-all vanity autobiography you’ve ever picked up. For that reason, I recommend you find a copy.
If nothing else, Zmyslowski pulls no punches when, early on, he explains that “guys in expensive suits had always made an impression on me, until I discovered that they really work for other guys in T-shirts.”