UNAJUA Throwback S1: Can African mobile gaming startups compete with Facebook and Tencent? feat. Lucy Hoffman

Mobile content development startup co-founder Lucy Hoffman unpacks the fundamentals of the 'super-platform' potential of Africa's mobile gaming industry.

UNAJUA Throwback S1: Can African mobile gaming startups compete with Facebook and Tencent? feat. Lucy Hoffman
Photo by Kojo Kwarteng / Unsplash

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This two-part UNAJUA Throwback series takes us back to when Lucy Hoffman, co-founder and head of operations at the Cape Town-based, American mobile content development startup Carry1st, joined Andile Masuku and Osarumen Osamuyi for an extended insight-rich chat—published on March 10th 2020. (Since then, Carry1st has gone on to close a $6 million Series A led by Colorado-based VC firm, Konvoy Ventures.)

Listen in to learn why, as glitzy ecosystem trends like fintech and mobility continue to dominate headlines, Lucy and the rest of her team at Carry1st are quietly bullish on the mobile gaming industry’s low-key commercial case and 'super-app/super-platform' potential.

Lucy is an experienced American business operations specialist who, prior to joining Carry1st, spearheaded operations at impact investment facilitation startup Nexii and the African Leadership Academy. Before that, she interned for the global diversity and inclusion team at Credit Suisse and spent three and a half years embedded at Morgan & Stanley, where she worked on M&A and capital markets transactions for global power and utility companies.

You can listen to the full original episode here.

Click here (or on the microphone icon on the right of your screen) to leave us a 60-sec voice note with your reactions to any of the topics raised in the UNAJUA Series. (We will include some of your audio takes in future follow-up episodes.)

Useful Resources:

ARTICLE: How Africa Is Getting Its Mobile Game On! by Karen Mwendera (Forbes Africa)

ARTICLE: Nigeria leads mobile app market growth in Africa as use of gaming apps surge 44% from Q1 2020 by Tage Kene-Okafor (TechCrunch)

BLOG: Mobile Gaming in Africa by Chris Cleverly

ARTICLE: Carry1st’s payments solution for gaming spurs $6 million Series A by Alexander Onukwue (Tech Cabal)

PROMO: In case you’re new to the UNAJUA concept, this is where we offer minimal actionable responses to important questions in 15 minutes or less. Do yourself a favour and check out some of our previous episodes— like this one featuring Derin Adebayo, a Nigerian researcher & analyst who shared his take on the question ‘What is driving the capital boom in Africa’s tech ecosystem?’