Alan Knott Craig

Founder & Chairman, Fibertime · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveinvestorauthor@alanknottcraig ↗LinkedIn ↗alanknottcraig.com ↗

Alan Knott-Craig Jr. is a South African telecommunications entrepreneur and investor who has founded or backed over 20 ventures, including Cellfind, HeroTel, and Mxit. He is widely known for championing low-cost township connectivity, founding the non-profit Project Isizwe to deploy free public Wi-Fi, and has authored several books.

10statements → 5claims → 2claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2.5/5average debate potential → 3said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 3 assertions · 1 opinion · 3 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Alan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
Knott Craig: WhatsApp has permanently won the messaging market in Africa
“As soon as the smartphone kind of wave started breaking, you know, WhatsApp just won the race. It has won the race. It will win the race.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 31:23 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Knott Craig: Watching a 7-second 3G video in South Africa costs $20
“If you spend it, if you watch a seven second YouTube video on three G at South African data rates, it'll cost you about 20 dollars, 20 US dollars.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:52 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
0% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

288 words/min while actually speaking · 19.8 um and uh per 1k words · 19.1 false starts per 1k · 32.5% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Alan Knott Craig: only 2 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,523 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Alan Knott Craig said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Knott Craig: English-speaking sub-Saharan Africa is largely a homogeneous market
“From our perspective, we kind of very much kind of think, you know, at least from an English speaking perspective, sub-Saharan Africa is as close to a homogenous market as you can get.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:58 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa
Assertion Contradicted
Knott Craig: Watching a 7-second 3G video in South Africa costs $20
“If you spend it, if you watch a seven second YouTube video on three G at South African data rates, it'll cost you about 20 dollars, 20 US dollars.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:52 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa
Insight
Knott Craig: Google's blank search page is useless to new internet users
“You can't give people a clean Google page. It's absolutely meaningless for most of the communities we deal with.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:53 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa
Insight
Knott Craig: Tech startups should never compete against American tech giants
“One of the lessons is never, ever go up against American companies.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 31:11 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa
Insight
Knott Craig: Outside Silicon Valley, cash flow is the only startup metric
“A lot of people in South Africa and Africa and the rest of the world read those blogs and think that's the holy grail, but there's only one metric and that's cashflow. And advertising is not a business model. One day we'll sell to Google is not a business mode…”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 41:00 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa
Prediction Held up
Knott Craig: WhatsApp has permanently won the messaging market in Africa
“As soon as the smartphone kind of wave started breaking, you know, WhatsApp just won the race. It has won the race. It will win the race.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 31:23 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Knott Craig: African internet startups struggle due to low connectivity
“For the most part, any internet startup in Africa is really struggling to kind of get any traction in this local market because there's just not enough people on the internet.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:10 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Knott Craig: African music service Spinlet will succeed due to music videos
“Music videos are just a killer category. Spinlet's gonna make lots of money.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 18:07 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa
Disclosure
Knott Craig: I presided over Mixit, Africa's biggest tech failure
“Well, so, you know, I have the questionable honor of residing over probably the biggest tech failure in Africa.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 30:41 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Knott Craig: WhatsApp is the primary tool for community anti-crime organizing in South Africa
“In South Africa, we have a massive crime problem. So security is a big concern for a lot of people in South Africa. And WhatsApp has become the de facto means of communities organizing against crime.”
Alan Knott Craig Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 32:49 a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa

The other half of the tape: Alan Knott Craig's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 1 episode on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 3

Every mention by year

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Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa Jan 2, 2019 10m
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