Amadou Daffe: An Exclusive Interview with Loline Mag [Part 2]
This is the second part of the interview with Amadou Daffe, CEO and Co-founder of Gebeya. In the previous part, we talked about his background and the start of Coders4Africa. In this article, we will talk about how Gebeya started its journey and Amadou's advice for young Ethiopian entrepreneurs.
Before it was called Gebeya, it was called DAAS, developer as a service. Amadou went back to the US and wanted to raise money for his startup DAAS. He was hesitating about whether to choose Ethiopia or Kenya to launch the startup. In one of his trips to San Francisco to raise money for his startup, he met up with his friend Hiruy Amanuel, the soon-to-be co-founder. Amadou didn't know Hiruy Amanuel was Ethiopian at first when he told him he was thinking of opening a company there. Amadou explained to Hiruy, "We need to use Ethiopia as our ground to build a pan-African company." After listening to his plan, Hiruy told Amadou that he wanted to go in with him and wanted to invest. Then they agreed to come up with a different name for their company. They decided to pick a very easy to say, meaningful but yet prolific name for our startup. They used Google to translate the term marketplace in Amharic. That is how Gebeya.com was born. They bought the domain and trademarked it, then moved to Ethiopia to start the company.