Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is on a month-long trip to Africa and said he plans to return in 2020.
Dorsey is visiting Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, and South Africa during November in what he has referred to as a “learning and listening tour”, according to Pulse.
Dorsey, who also founded fintech firm Square, has been visiting tech incubators, universities and tech companies, and meeting African entrepreneurs and fellow bitcoin and cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
Dorsey has long been a cryptocurrency advocate. In October 2019, he invested in CoinList — a company that helps digital asset companies manage their token sales.
Dorsey also invested in scaling solution Lightning Labs and has been hiring engineers and designers to work on open-source contributions to the bitcoin ecosystem, Decrypt reports.
In 2018, Dorsey started allowing Bitcoin to be traded on Square’s Cash app.
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While visiting Lagos, Nigeria, Dorsey had an open question-and-answer session at media publication Techpoint’s offices.
Dorsey surprised the audience by saying that he intends to return to Africa in 2020, but for a longer period to get a good perspective of what it is like to be an entrepreneur in Africa.
“I want to understand the challenges of starting a company here and figure out a way I can support,” Dorsey said according to Techpoint. “I want to live here for three to six months next year, full time, no traveling.”
Dorsey did not clarify exactly when he would return or where in Africa he would live — decisions which he will likely make after visiting all four of the African countries on his itinerary for his November 2019 trip.
Dorsey also said that he intends to hire Nigerians to work remotely for Twitter and that there are “not enough” Twitter users in Nigeria at present.
Twitter’s chief technical officer, Parag Agrawal, expects that to change and predicts more Nigerians will join the micro-blogging platform.
“Speaking specifically about Nigeria, in the future, many of our customers will be from here (more) than there are today. There is (a) massive opportunity here for Twitter because Nigeria has many technical talents and impactful public conversations happen here too,” Parag said.
In response to a question from a Twitter follower, Dorsey said that he will be looking to invest in Nigerian startups through Twitter — though he did not reveal any further details.
