In the competitive world of African business, Wilson Ganga stands out not just for what he’s built, but for how he built it. The Angolan entrepreneur behind Tupuca (the country’s first food delivery app), T’Leva (an electric taxi service), and PayPay Africa (a mobile payment platform with over one million users) doesn’t fit the mold of the meticulous business school graduate with perfect five-year plans. Instead, he’s emerged as one of Angola’s most successful tech figures through what might seem like a counterintuitive approach: diving in headfirst and figuring things out along the way.
“Sometimes you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, so just do it,” Ganga explains with the candid authenticity that has become his trademark. This philosophy, while seemingly cavalier, has powered multiple successful ventures and created thousands of jobs in a country still developing its startup ecosystem. For aspiring entrepreneurs, especially those in emerging markets, Ganga’s unconventional wisdom offers a refreshing alternative to business orthodoxy.
Embrace Uncertainty as Your Competitive Advantage
In markets like Angola where formal business infrastructure is still developing, waiting for perfect conditions means waiting forever. Ganga recognized this early and turned uncertainty into opportunity.
“That’s the fun part about being an entrepreneur,” he says. “Sometimes you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, so just do it. And then every single day you got to figure it out… You made a mistake, but you figure out how to use a plan B. There’s always a plan B.”
This approach played out dramatically when launching T’Leva, Angola’s first electric taxi service. In a country with limited charging infrastructure, conventional wisdom would suggest the venture was doomed. But rather than seeing obstacles as roadblocks, Ganga saw them as problems to solve through improvisation.
“We would go to a gas station and put the electric chargers. We would ask people, Angolans love money, right? They have a lot of land. We would ask someone, ‘Hey, can we use your land and put this generator here and put this machine and we’ll split profits?'”
This creative problem-solving exemplifies how Ganga transforms uncertainty into innovative solutions. Instead of waiting for perfect charging infrastructure to emerge organically, he created a network of charging points through profit-sharing partnerships, simultaneously solving his technical problems and creating additional income streams for property owners.
For entrepreneurs facing similar challenges, Ganga’s message is clear: start with what you have, where you are. The solutions will emerge through the journey itself, not from waiting for perfect conditions.
“I believe a lot on the mind and what the mind really wants you get. And when you get it, you just don’t know. People don’t know or you don’t know how you got it, but it’s just also not giving up. It’s a law. If you don’t give up and you try, you will get over.”
Build Resilience Through Daily Failures
What separates successful entrepreneurs from failed ones often isn’t their rate of failure but their response to it. Ganga normalizes failure as an everyday occurrence rather than an exceptional event.
“I think we fail every day. Literally. Every single day you’re like, you have a drink, you’re like, how the hell are you going to solve this? It’s fun, it’s life,” he explains with a laugh. “The thing is you just know, hey, what’s kind of worst? Okay, you’re going to die. Okay, you die, everything’s over, right? So it’s like go on, just try.”
This fatalistic yet freeing perspective reduces the psychological burden of setbacks. By accepting failure as inevitable rather than exceptional, Ganga removes the paralysis that prevents many entrepreneurs from taking necessary risks.
His mantra, “You either win or learn,” reframes failure as education rather than defeat. This mentality proved crucial when launching Tupuca in a market where food delivery apps didn’t exist. Initial skepticism was high, with customers reluctant to trust an unfamiliar service.
Rather than retreating, Ganga doubled down with creative solutions: “We use Facebook, like an attractive ad, people will click, they’ll give us their number and their email, then we’ll send them an SMS… One day I sent an SMS to these 2000 people like, ‘Hey, today you guys all get free ice cream on Tupuca. Just order and you’ll get free ice cream.’ And people started ordering.”
The resilience to withstand early failures translated into strategic pivoting, eventually building trust and creating a thriving platform. Ganga attributes this resilience to principles learned early in his American education: “The couple of things that I learned was more just hard work. Hard work, teamwork, and also discipline.”
These fundamentals, forged through years of sports training, proved transferable across industries. “In America you start sports at an early age and I was starting to play football and basketball at six, seven years old. This is waking up early, going to practice, working with your teammates… So those are one of the three principles that I learned at a very, very young age that now that I’m 32, we still live by it.”
Leadership Through Care and Market Listening
For Ganga, entrepreneurial leadership isn’t about command and control but about nurturing potential. He offers a surprisingly tender metaphor for his leadership philosophy:
“Leadership is kind of being a father. As soon as you have a small baby, you care so much about that person, that little seed that you have to nurture them, lead them, and give them what they need to succeed. That’s how leadership is. It’s like once you really care about the company, you’re doing, your team and the people that are working with you every single day, naturally you’ll move them.”
This nurturing approach extends beyond his immediate team to entire business ecosystems. When describing his electric taxi service, Ganga highlights how he structured the business to benefit multiple stakeholders:
“The market does talk a lot. So you need to talk to the market and figure it out and do profit share splits. It’s like a gig economy that you make sure everyone makes money through this thing that you’re building. Because with this electric taxi company, the car owner makes money, the driver makes money, the platform makes money, the guy who is renting out or profit-sharing his land for the electric meter makes money, the country makes money because of the electric part… Just with one customer getting in that taxi, about six different entities make money.”
This win-win approach creates natural allies and supporters for his ventures, solving infrastructure problems through aligned incentives rather than confrontation.
Simultaneously, Ganga maintains unwavering self-belief despite external doubts. When asked about people who doubted his ventures, he responds simply: “I don’t know. I don’t really listen to people doubting me.”
This selective listening, tuned to market realities but deaf to pessimism, creates the psychological space needed for entrepreneurial experimentation. Ganga’s articles frequently emphasize this balance between confidence and market responsiveness.
The Courage to Begin: Ganga’s Blueprint for Success
Wilson Ganga’s entrepreneurial philosophy defies conventional business wisdom but has proven remarkably effective in Angola’s developing market. His “just do it” mentality doesn’t suggest abandoning strategic thinking but rather recognizes that perfect knowledge is impossible, especially in rapidly evolving economies.
For aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly in emerging markets, his approach offers a liberating alternative to analysis paralysis. Start with imperfect information, expect daily failures, nurture your team and partners, listen to markets but ignore doubters, and remember that resilience trumps perfect planning.
As Angola continues its economic transformation, Ganga’s unconventional wisdom provides a blueprint for a new generation of entrepreneurs. His success across multiple industries demonstrates that the principles of action, resilience, and collaborative leadership transcend specific business models.
In the end, his message is refreshingly simple: sometimes you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and that’s exactly when you should begin.
