Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Strive Masiyiwa was born in Zimbabwe in 1961, left as a seven-year-old when his family fled Ian Smith's regime, and grew up in Zambia and then Scotland where he attended private school in Edinburgh. He studied electrical and electronic engineering at Cardiff University and returned to Zimbabwe after independence in 1984. He worked briefly as a telecoms engineer for the state telecom company, saved $75 from his salary, and started Retrofit, an electrical contracting business.

When mobile cellular technology emerged, he saw the opportunity and applied for a license to operate a mobile network. The government of Robert Mugabe refused to grant it. Masiyiwa appealed to the Zimbabwe Supreme Court on the basis that the refusal violated freedom of expression protections. After a five-year legal battle that took him to the edge of bankruptcy, the court ruled in his favor. The ruling forced the dismantling of the state telecom monopoly.

Econet and Cassava Technologies

Strive Masiyiwa investments through Econet span four decades across more than 40 countries. Econet Wireless Zimbabwe listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange in 1998. From that base, he built a pan-African group including Mascom Wireless Botswana, Econet Wireless Nigeria (now Airtel Nigeria), Econet Wireless New Zealand (now 2degrees Mobile), and Lesotho Telecom.

The infrastructure layer has been transformational. Liquid Intelligent Technologies, a Cassava Technologies subsidiary, operates over 110,000 kilometers of fiber optic cable across Africa from Cape Town to Cairo, connecting east and west. Africa Data Centres is another Cassava business. Sasai Fintech operates digital payment platforms across multiple markets. Liquid C2 provides cloud and cybersecurity services.

Eric Bahn of Hustle Fund has noted that infrastructure investing in emerging markets requires a different kind of patience than software investing. You are building the rails, not the trains. Masiyiwa built the rails for African internet connectivity over three decades and is now beginning to build AI compute capacity on top of them. Angel Squad members who invest in emerging markets appreciate that time horizon.

The AI Factory

In September 2025, Masiyiwa announced plans to establish AI factories in five African countries through Cassava Technologies. The partnership with NVIDIA began delivering GPUs to South Africa and represents what he has described as a critical strategic priority: Africa cannot afford to be on the receiving end of AI without building its own compute infrastructure.

The first NVIDIA-backed AI factory shipped 3,000 GPUs to South Africa. Masiyiwa has said repeatedly that the regulatory and infrastructure barriers he spent decades removing in telecoms are the same ones he is now working to remove in AI access.

He joined the board of Unilever, serves on Stanford University's advisory board, the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In October 2024, he became the first Black billionaire on the Sunday Times Rich List with a net worth of $3.1 billion. Forbes estimated $2.2 billion as of 2026.

The Digital Mentorship Platform

Since 2013, Masiyiwa has devoted significant time to mentoring African entrepreneurs through his Facebook and LinkedIn pages. His Facebook page has 5.2 million followers, predominantly young African entrepreneurs. Facebook has identified his platform as having one of the most engaged followings of any business leader in the world.

His posts cover practical topics: how to negotiate with governments, how to handle setbacks, how to build teams in high-friction environments, and what it means to build a company with long-term national purpose. He writes with specificity about mistakes he has made and lessons he has drawn from them.

That public engagement is also a talent pipeline. The entrepreneurs who read him most carefully become the founders most likely to build in sectors where Cassava Technologies or Econet have infrastructure advantages.

The Scholarship Mission

Through Higherlife Foundation and Delta Philanthropies, led by his wife Tsitsi and daughter Elizabeth Tanya, Masiyiwa has supported more than 350,000 scholarships for African youth. His Facebook page has 5.2 million followers primarily from young African entrepreneurs he mentors. He is a member of the Giving Pledge. In 2025 he and Tsitsi received the David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award.

Shiyan Koh of Hustle Fund has noted that the most impactful entrepreneurs in emerging markets are those who treat infrastructure access as a prerequisite for entrepreneurship rather than a downstream benefit. Masiyiwa has built his entire career on that premise. His work on both the physical layer of connectivity and the scholarship pipeline to create founders who can use it reflects that integrated vision. Angel Squad members investing across Africa and other emerging markets connect with those frameworks at hustlefund.vc/squad.