Mobile Capital and (Im)Mobile Entrepreneurs: Start-up Success, Institutional Context and the "Laws of Start-up Money" in Silicon Savannah

Abstract

Abstract

Kenya has become one of the leading venture capital (VC) destinations in Africa. This has been buttressed by ambitious ideological projects such as Silicon Savannah, which has tried to re-brand Nairobi and its greater environs as an innovation hub. Many starts-ups have emerged from this landscape and attracted venture capital, often from funds based in North America and Europe. A closer look at the Kenyan start-up eco-system, however, complicates narratives about ‘Africa success stories’ and self-determined development. Studies and practitioners have repeatedly highlighted that the existing ecosystem is highly stratified by race, ethnicity and gender and that mostly start-ups with ‘White male faces” have received funding and are credited with success. Indeed, the VC scene, heavily influenced by North American standards of ‘doing things’ is socially very homogeneous, usually offering less social mobility to non-White persons. In this project, we account for the fact that capital accumulation in venture capital domains is a process often mediated via raced, gendered and ethnic social relations with strong historical underpinnings. However, we also seek to move beyond a purely pessimist view to uncover the full range of factors that shape social (im)mobility in Silicon Savannah. This will be explored via a combination of assembling a data bank on the socio-economic profiles of founders in the Kenyan entrepreneurial ecosystem and detailed entrepreneurial biographies. The project will also focus on the institutional level to uncover how actors representing the institutional context assess and seek to address the funding challenge and to undo the colonial legacies engrained in the ‘law of start-up money’. The project contributes to the Research Section on mobilities, where currently both the issue of capital mobility and social mobility among entrepreneurs in the formal economy are absent as themes. Links to the RS affiliations and moralities may be developed.