Empowered to the People

Young black South Africans, Zweli Mfundisi and Thebe Tsatsimpe, grew up in the popular townships Soweto and Umtata and through hard work and diligence received scholarships to study at top US (Harvard University, Stanford University, Amherst College) and SA (University of Cape Town) institutions. Beyond educational attainment, they worked at leading multinational businesses including McKinsey & Company, Coca Cola, World Bank, Citibank and Vodafone’s SA business (Vodacom). The duo is passionate about resolving South Africa’s socio-economic challenges, power being the most pertinent of those challenges and most within their grasp. As a result, they launched Empowered Homes, a consumer tech company in energy.

Last year, Zweli and Thebe started an exploration of energy in South Africa, and realized that the space was ripe for disruption. Electricity was expensive and they both discovered, through seeking out personal experiences of friends and colleagues, that people were frustrated by blackouts in SA. Zweli often opens his startup pitch with a heartstring-tugging story of his older sister, driving home from work after 18 hours of performing surgery, seeing the lights are out on the streets, and worrying about how to provide warm meal for her family. South Africa suffers from chronic power shortages and outages, making it their #1 Google search in 2019, and in their Top 10 in 2020 due to failure of a utility, which provides ~45% of the power of Sub-Saharan Africa (bigger than any US utility). South Africa is a prime candidate for distributed power generation solutions such as rooftop solar and microgrids but lack of trust, data, and locally tailored solutions make these solutions difficult to implement. Zweli and Thebe created Empowered Homes to use technology and data to help South Africans gain access to alternative energy sources and provide a great customer service experience through their one-stop-shop solution. Think data and tech native Sunrun.

Zweli and Thebe incubated their idea through Stanford’s design thinking classes and trips to South Africa. With the help of key funding such as a $46,000 grant from the Stanford University Tom Kat Center for Sustainable Energy (a center funded by Tom Stayer to catalyze innovation in sustainable energy), they built a fully remote business during the lockdown. Using the best of Silicon Valley, Zweli collaborated with Thebe, who was working from the East Coast, and they started building a remote team in South Africa by engaging customers on Zoom.

We sat down with one of Empowered Homes’ co-founders, Zweli Mfundisi, to learn more about his journey with Empowered Homes thus far.

AI: You recently finished business school at Stanford Graduate School of Business. You’ve moved back home and are pursuing your dream of building your own startup on the ground. But you’re still in the early trenches of starting this. What are you most excited about?

Zweli: The chance to be able to build something that marries my passions. I love the challenge of building a team and something that is world class in Africa. In regards to the service, making the installer process a really good tech product experience excites me. I know the pain of having blackouts and it’s frustrating that it’s becoming more prevalent in South Africa. But hearing stories of customers sharing their love and learnings from the product — that reaction is exciting. They are nerding out about the product and I love to see that.

AI: Africa is often misunderstood, even underestimated. Let’s clear up some misconceptions. What do you wish more people knew about running an African startup?

Zweli: In the U.S., when you’re raising, for every 100 VCs, there’s only 3 interested in you. Your opportunity set is just so much smaller. To get someone interested in SA energy is so much harder. Your hit rate just needs to be higher. A misconception: more people shy away from being advisers because they think certain issues my company faces are Africa-specific challenges, when in fact, they are actually universal. Unfortunately, more people self-select out because of the geography. They think they can’t add value to African startups solving African problems if they don’t have Africa experience. Not quite. Localization is important but it’s not all-encompassing. I wish some potential stakeholders I approached would look at my company through a general framework, and address my challenges according to the underlying business factors. This fear is not surprising however, considering we are so early stage. Nevertheless, we’ve had a small but mighty set of early believers, which is critical for any startup, but especially African ones, which face many doubts.

AI: As an SA native, you started Empowered Homes with an insider perspective on the market and how it works. What are the idiosyncrasies of operating a startup in South Africa?

Zweli: There is, on average, more infrastructure in some SA verticals, so you don’t have to focus on building the railroad like you may have to in other African countries. SA is just very developed relative to Africa. However, it’s tricky because we can sometimes fall into this ‘middle of the pyramid’, where we don’t get enough opportunity because most institutions for grants, financing and resources believe the country is more developed than it is in some aspects and therefore prioritize other African economies with bigger challenges.

AI: What are your biggest challenges right now?

Zweli: We need to figure out the lightest touch way of doing something that is very intimate in someone’s house: installing a power system. And we need to do it well. We are at the intersection of the real and tech economy. There is a physical/ hardware product involved with our company. So we have to prove that we can scale the company well while prioritizing the installation experience — all while managing costs.

AI: Challenges notwithstanding, the opportunities are endless. What are your dreams and visions for this space? Beyond Empowered Homes, what would you like to see SA energy become and energy in emerging markets at large?

Zweli: To figure out how we can harness the peculiarities of SA, to have a big impact, reducing carbon, and make customers’ lives easier. Thebe, my co-founder comes from a development background so is equally passionate about growing SA’s energy economy. The financial and CO2 reduction opportunities are huge, with a market size over $1.6 Bn in South Africa’s upper middle class segment alone. Further opportunities exist with residential households and in energy insecure emerging markets with sizable middle class customer bases, like Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia, etc. But for now, we focus on very simple but important things like ‘Are customers happy?’ You can go far with these little questions like this as your anchor. It exemplifies entrepreneurship.

Related posts:

The world of online marketing has erupted with tools to simplify campaign management and automate time-consuming elements. With such an abundance of great tools to choose from, identifying the best…

When we think about our life and all the moments that occur within it, we are exercising our mindset. In short, mindset is the way we look at or think of things. The lens we view the world through if…

In the age of WhatsApp, Signal, and other messaging apps, questions over data security or sharing have arisen. True, apps like WhatApp and Signal boast end to end encryption, chances are your data is…