I recently listened to a TedX talk about this guy who changes dozen of jobs and countries in the holy Graal search of the job NOT to quit. Constantly starting from scratch, and of course developing this resilience of the life bootstrappers we all read about in those Facebook posts.

I also looked at my calendar and saw a month of april with barely no work travel, and for once only taking (few) planes to spend time with mi kids or family or discover a new place. And then, another thought: managing freedom is also a double edge sword challenge. Because when you are en entrepreneur you can’t really press “pause”.

Coming back from Ethiopia, a fascinating 120M people country where there are more coffee farmers that portuguese in Portugal (yes, 15 Millions, you read correctly) coaching a cohort of entrepreneurs in a mission for NTF V, an organisation helping African entrepreneurs to build new businesses and create jobs.

I could totally see my third time (to use the rugby expression) to do more of this, and possibly in a much more structured way: and my feeling if that in order to do this I have to QUIT my current professional life.

But should I?

How to keep everything together, and make each piece of work complementing the others? I am having amazing conversations recently with old and new friends about bottom up double dip impact in frontiers market.

It sounds very “consultant talk” and i just made it up as a sentence per se, but what I mean is the following: can we tale ecosystems that are not even in Africa’s usual suspect rich and fast developing markets, like Nigeria, Kenya or Egypt and start helping entrepreneurs to build high-impact driven businesses?

Think of Swaziland for example: barely more than a million people, with a rather weak startup ecosystem. I met this amazing entrepreneur building a micro-lending company to avoid people getting into shark loans vicious spiral. Monthly salary doesn’t work in Africa, people are out of money way earlier than pay day.

This business alone can be very sustainable and at the same time change lives of Eswatinni people for the better. This is what I want to build a team to pursue.

In order to do this, I have to fit it into the other set of activities making my days. I can’t SWITCH for this. I can’t just QUIT and do something else. This is also the beauty of building, you can reuse the tools you have.

And so will I. Stay tuned

Rebelliously yours

Matteo