Ben Kuhn is the CTO at Wave, a mobile payment company whose mission is to make Africa the first cashless continent by building ways for unbanked people to send and save money.

Our discussion today covers a wide variety of topics — everything from how going cashless can help lift people out of poverty in sub-saharan Africa, to how social enterprises differ from tech companies. to why soccer balls don’t make good lamps. 

We also spend time diving deep on why startups should only spend their “innovation points” on things that directly impact the core business problem they’re trying to solve and use “boring” solutions for other things. Ben’s mental model for this is fascinating — the way he sees it, departures from the status quo are almost always more costly than people realize, and so it’s only worth doing when it’s mission critical.

Hosted by Marshall Kosloff and produced by Jackson Steger