Chat with Danny, breaking the media scenes in Democratic Republic of Congo

Yasi: Danny started his career as Digital Marketing Manager in Bralima, the biggest brewery in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a subsidiary of the HEINEKEN company. Even though having a great job with a bright career future, he decided to start his own media company Deux.Point.Zéro (2.0), and become a full-time filmmaker. He represents the well educated, inspiring, and entrepreneurial millennials of Congo. And we are very glad to have him as our guest today talking about his career, and his entrepreneurial journey.

Welcome to our podcast.

Danny: It’s a pleasure for me to talk to you. It’s been such a long time and I’m glad to finally be on your report. 

Yasi: Indeed. It was such a long time and we were working together in Congo, in Kinshasa. And you had a dream job for many people. How did you actually started? 

Danny: Well, professionally?

It’s a very simple story. It’s the story of somebody who I remember when I was a kid, when I was around 13 to 14 years old, we used to go on these field trips for the. And one time I had to, I went to visit Braley ma, which is like the biggest brewery in Congo that is owned by Heineken international. We went to visit it and it was such an amazing experience for me in terms of, in terms of just seeing our big factory, a big company works with so many people working together to make these things work and to add value, to bring value to the markets, because at the time.

Uh, and it hasn’t changed since then, but Bradley Maya is like the biggest historical company in Congo, like the oldest of the companies that exist now. And it’s like in terms of its contribution to the economy of the world of the country, it’s the biggest. So it was it’s became a dream. I remember saying a lot of times that my first and last job will be at brown Lima because I want, I wanted to, I wanted to contribute.

To the biggest company in the economy. So there was not even, it was not even a question. So first time I had a chance to apply for a job locally because I first lived there for a couple of years in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. So when I came back ready to take over the market and to bring, to, to contribute to work, however I could, the first type was barely ma I needed to get there.

I needed to get into. This is what happened to me. So I went in as a, as a trainee and slowly and surely, I started to, to, to go, let’s say, higher in the ranks. And I showed, solves so much potential that’s it’s kind of, my career was like a clear path. I knew where I would end up if I just keep working hard, if I can just keep having the right attitude.

But then someday I decided that that wasn’t good enough for me anymore, that I needed something. 

Yasi: Yeah. And what triggers you actually take the steps and start something else? 

Danny: I think at first it came from, I would say my education, but my personal education, because very young, I was introduced to the world of personal development and personal growth, all, all those big movements coming from the U S and so I’ve always been facing.

We’ve all these ideas, that one man should change the world or try at least. And that everybody has a purpose that he has to find in life and that I needed to know what my purpose is. And what’s my contribution. To the world. And also, hi, grew up with so many models. That was all self-made people.

Self-made man, people like John Rockfeller or Andrew Carnegie. So I grew up with these people and Steve jobs who was like the main, main inspiration. And so it was like, I didn’t even have a choice, but I knew that, okay, I’m here to learn. I’m here to progress. I’m here for. To, to know how to work because working is, is an art and the science I needed to out to be come a professional before I could like jump into the unknown and try to start something of myself and contribute to the, to the country and to the economy.

Yasi: And do you find it’s risky to quit your dream job and then start something on your own? 

Danny: It is very risky. Especially in a, in an economy like Congo, because Congo is like a third world country. So many things you you’ve been here. So you’ve, you’ve had a glimpse of what’s the status of the other people leave out.

The economy works. What’s the purchase power of the Congolese and it’s very low. So it’s a country where there’s not enough jobs. So yeah, it was at first, I’d say it was to P to live it out before. So many people would kill literally to be in the same position, especially at, at, at such a young age, because I was, I was in the company from like 20 years old or 21 years old since I was 21 years old.

So it’s very young, especially in Congo because in Congo, even when you’re 40 years old and you’re in the company, you consider it to be very young, still learning. You see? So the perception here was that I was so ahead of my time. And to be able to raise kids for, for the unknown, because in the ends, entrepreneurship is going into the unknown, not knowing and not knowing what’s going to happen.

Not having any experience because you, you cannot just wait till you have all of the experience in the world in jump, because sometimes you just need to learn on the field to learn as you progress to learn as you fail. So it was a big. 

Yasi: And how did you plan your career change? Did you have a master plan or just jumping into it?

Danny: Well, the first thing I did actually was when I decided to leave my job at first, it was like a impulsive decision. Meaning maybe at some point I was unsatisfied with the status quo and I just decided that, okay, it’s time. And I just quit my job and then something great happened. Now I see why it’s was, it was great.

Something great happened. We, at the same time, we have a big change of management in the company and the new GM that came and met me and discovered that, uh, I quit my job and I was going to leave like in a monitored. Uh, we had a great contact together, so he told me, okay, I just met you. And I would like to know what it’s like to work with you because I feel like you can bring something to my project and my vision, and please don’t leave.

So don’t leave now. So what we, we agreed on is that I was going to last one year longer before I could decide if I wanted to, to leave. Uh, so that made it easier for me because now I had a full year to prepare for what I was going to do. So it was a great, great opportunities because, uh, I just realized that if I jumped just right out of the blue, I was going, it was going to, it was going to become very, very much difficult because I will just be in, uh, drowning to just discovering everything at, at a time.

Now I just had a full year to have the time to prepare the business plan, to analyze the market better, to talk with people who are entrepreneurs. And I took a ma a mentor as well. Somebody who was a great, great friend of mine. And, but he was like 10 years or 20 years ahead in terms of business, in terms of skills, in terms of knowledge of the market and in terms of failures as well.

So he really helped me move. Through this transition and that really made, made it easier for me, I think. 

Yasi: Right. And after you quit your job, you started your own company. So what are you doing now? 

Danny: What I’m doing now is that I have a production video production company or an audio visual production company.

So the, basically what it means is that, is that we produce. Films, documentaries, TV commercials for either companies, but also for like the greater audience that is going to consume it itself. So this is what we do now, but it’s shifted as well from when I quit my job, like, uh, it’s four years now, it shifted because at first it was a, a bad, uh, a classical.

Communication agency and ad agency. It was classical. So we were working from marketing strategies for clients to making TV ads, to, to creating, to create digital campaigns. But for the last two years, I’d say that I’ve been focusing on. Because you cannot just do everything. It’s also a big mistake to think that because you love so many things that should be in that you’re maybe good at all of those things that should do.

You should embrace all of them. That was a mistake at first. And it was a huge, huge, huge difficulty for us that we met, like the first two or three years. And then we decided to specialize now to do what, to do one thing at a time and to just be the best. At it. And we found that audio visual production is such an empty markets here in Congo because content, we don’t have local content.

What, uh, it’s almost 80% of what you see on TV or online in Congo is still some coming from abroad. So there’s such a huge market locally to, to, to bring local content of quality. So we specialize on.

Yasi: And your company is called the Ponce hall. So 2.0, what is the story behind this name? 

Danny: So the point is the hope means 2.0.

And actually the company shifted when I created the company like four years ago, the name was, was so creative, so creative. So that was our mindset. ’cause we, we were thinking of ourselves, there’s this new force on the market of aid agency. We didn’t fear anything. We’re so fresh in our ideas because it was all my Illinios.

It was very young team, very open-minded kind of people. So the name was so creative, but then at some point we shifted toward the 2.0, because it was 2.0, tons of kinds of means. So creative 2.0, so it’s like an evolution. Because the, the vision also has evolved. We cannot, we couldn’t just stay the same one.

Our vision was so precise and clear now. 

Yasi: And I also know that you create a series of video having conversations with local entrepreneurs or people who have, who are very inspiring to the, in the community. And where did you get this inspiration from? To have to construct this kind of company? 

Danny: So at some point when we’re in the shift of the transition from so creative to the 0.0, the idea was okay, how can we stop?

Just delivering value to clients where capital is companies, some companies, you know, sometime we were working with, with clients we didn’t believe in, or we didn’t believe they offer something of value to the local community because today. Business and marketing, shouldn’t just be about selling things.

It should be a brag about bringing value and it was becoming so important for us to work with company where the beautiful philosophy of work, as well as the beautiful wood to responsibly there re social Audi said societal responsible, uh, responsibility. Sure what I meant. So it was very important. So at some point we felt, we fell out of love with working just for clients, because it comes with, came with so many, so many country constraints that we’re not feeling anymore.

We weren’t creative anymore. And we weren’t taken for were kind of taken for granted. So we did that shift. So the idea was how do we now create, create. Really relevant content. And I’ve always wanted to try myself and making videos and being like a, a host of a T a web show or podcasts, something like that.

Thank you. Thank you. I’m really starting to like it. And it’s, it’s kind of, uh, working in terms of, um, getting awareness to word it and people are loving it. Yeah. And it’s, it’s kind of feeling, feeling good. And I just want to see and do it for long the longest of time and see where it can, it can put me, but yeah.

So yeah, the inspiration was coming from the main podcast and TV shows that I’m seeing from these. As I mentioned us culture and media landscape is like a huge, huge, huge inspiration for me in everything I do. So it was just natural and I tried it and it’s working well, and it’s a beautiful opportunity to show to local Congolese, young Congolese, aspiring entrepreneurs to show them people are.

Either ahead of them or Heider in another direction, going in another direction, just to inspire them to know what’s are the steps that it can take to become who they supposed to be. 

Yasi: And how did you choose topics? 

Danny: Uh, at first it’s the top picks that I’m passionate about. So it’s a it’s societal topics. I love talking about.

Where our world is going capitalism, uh, new technology and how it’s impacting the world, uh, women and their role in our societies, especially in African societies because women have a specific different role. I mean then in Western minded countries. And so it really is about everyday life topics, but. Uh, tackling them in such a way that we can always get something popular, something inspiring out of it, because it’s not just about talking about like the news.

I don’t like to talk about the news. I like to talk about universal messages, some things that are relevant in time, because I think that’s, that’s what we need here locally. So, and also sometime when I received somebody who’s such an expert on a specific. And a specific field. I’d like to talk about what he knows about 10 and just to go with the flow and to, to see where it brings.

It brings, it brings us though. 

Yasi: And what are the topics that interests you personally in your videos? 

Danny: So mainly it’s about entrepreneurship. Meaning that whatever topic we find, we tend to want to solve the entrepreneurship question in that topic. For instance, if we talk about. Uh, I was talking about the influential teachers marketing or our people have become brand by themselves.

And I will now people leave out of their popularity online and on, you know, so even that’s was, uh, an opportunity to see how now youngsters and millennials can simply just don’t have. Look for a job, a job that I would hate for, to work for a boss that it wouldn’t respect now because the internet has given us so much opportunities to brand ourselves.

It’s an opportunity for entrepreneurship and it’s an opportunity to get people to know who you are, what you do, what you believe in, what your area of expertise is. You can work your way. You can become an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur just coming from that. So all the subjects like, uh, for instance, when I was telling you about women and feminism in general, it was a beautiful subject to know, okay, how can we focus on becoming a better community for women to try as entrepreneurs?

I’ll do women get to redefine themselves in a, in country or in an Africa where women are so minimized are so undervalued and even at the world stage, because you still have so many countries where women don’t have the same wages as men, women don’t have the same advantages as men. And here in Africa is these deeper because we are such a traditional society as think, right?

So all the topics tend to want to, to answer the question, how do we make entrepreneurship better locally?

Yasi: I feel already seeing a growing trend that people start their own business in Congo. 

Danny: Yes, definitely. But it’s kind of a necessity because you simply just don’t have enough jobs for everybody. We’ll look for a job.

This is the reality here. So being an entrepreneur here is not just about. Wanted to become your own boss or wanted to become a millionaire. It’s like a survive survival things. Of course, for millennials, for some portion of the population who are kind of comfortable, comfortable in their skin or in their life or in their families will live in a modest family.

They tend to want entrepreneurship for all the pretty reasons. But most of Congolese people are entrepreneurs by nature. Everyone sells something. Everyone is doing business somehow and everyone is a commercial commercial, or a trader. And it’s such a, so it’s part of, it’s part of the, the mindsets, the local mindsets, but it’s also.

Part of a mindset that I think has a lot of flows in the sense that we are more about trying to get by than trying to create companies that are going to bring values. So these types of these types of entrepreneurs, we don’t have enough of it. I will say also, I think because we tend, especially young people from today, we tend to want to become entrepreneurs for so many wrongs.

Me. I’m the first two, we went into that direction. I think a bad reason to become an entrepreneur is for instance, to want to become your own boss, you know, because these are, so I think you should want to become an entrepreneur because you identify a needs that you feel like you can provide, you can solve, or that you have, uh, felt like there is not enough jobs in a specific area.

That you want to provide for something, but if you want to become an entrepreneur, because it’s going to make you rich, this is such a wrong way to, uh, to, to, to, to tackle it because entrepreneurship is so hard. You have to be passionate about it. You have to really love what you do and you have to, to, to, to, to really love the hardship and the process more than just the, the, the destination of what, where you want to go.

So. This is the shift of mind that we need. We millennials from Congo, especially are from Africa and even the world and, and especially, and that’s why I try to do as well in my shows and in the kind of content that I put online. Now it’s about trying to re inspire people to a new mindset that is like a real mindset because we just, a lot of us don’t simply live in the real reality.

If I can talk it, speak it, like it say it. 

Yasi: What do you mean by not living the real reality? 

Danny: Uh, it means that we want to become entrepreneurs, but we don’t want to, to give up comfort for some time, for instance. Okay. If I want to, I, I love being, we love living in beautiful apartments, beautiful places.

Having the human. 620 inches TVs. We love that. But being an entrepreneurship, an entrepreneur is about making sacrifices, especially at first, you don’t, you don’t want to become in a position where your company needs to. You need to get to get money from your company for yourself at first, because every.

Opportunity to save money, every opportunity to reinvest the money that the company is making should go into that. It shouldn’t go into paying for your, for your luxuries paying for what you want. So a lot of us want to become entrepreneurs, but are not already ready to give up on the, like the short term comforts that is going to bring us the longterm value when long-terms.

If you see what I mean? So that’s what I say. I mean, by we don’t live in the real reality in that way, because the reality is that we need to give you give up on so many things for so long. Sometime you could take up to five years sometime he could take up to 10 years. Sometimes it could take up to forever, but if you’re still more interested in the process in the value that you will.

In that sense that there will not be failure. Even if you don’t, you don’t become a millionaire in the process, you still can make a real change. If you change, you shift your perspective. Yeah. 

Yasi: Right. It’s and it’s so important that you find something you really, really enjoy doing, because despite all the difficulties that will keep you going, if you just go for entrepreneurship for the wrong reason, any difficulty as well, beat you down.

Danny: Yeah. Yeah. And also I think I, myself, at some point that I find myself in a position where I felt out of love for what I was doing, but. I just understood that it was not about what I was doing. It’s not, it was not about the core, the core business that I was into, but it was about how I was approaching it.

For instance, I was working for so terrible clients that they made me hate. My job, they made, made me hate the process of creating content of making videos, making ads, because I was just simply doing it for the wrong people in the wrong. So at some point, what we had to do was to decide that we need to give up the comfort that we’re having now, because we are going very fast.

The first two years of the company, we held homeless, uh, uh, like a $500,000 of income and revenues. Like the first two years is a lot of money in Congo for a young company that is. 

Yasi: Oh, 500,000 us dollar in revenue. 

Danny: Yeah. Less revenue. Not like in profits, not profits in revenue, just in turnovers, the money that was coming and was going the money that was moving inside the company.

Yeah. 

Yasi: That’s his like half a million of us dollar, which is not many startup. 

Yasi: Yes you did this, this gigantic amount of revenue for startup in the first year. 

Danny: Exactly. Like he was the first two years, but it’s a huge amount of money to manage, especially when you don’t have enough, uh, enough experience I would say.

And it was also the, the, one of the reason that the company failed. So, so big after that, because. I think there’s a principle in life or in business or in the universe that wants that everything has to grow piece by bits, by bits. We had so many opportunities at once that it was becoming very hard to seize them in the right way.

We felt very comfortable, comfort, comfortable. We went from a company of like three to five employees and in like six months we had like 20 people. And managing them was just a mess because you need to manage egos. You need to manage to teach people your way, your philosophy, your way of working. And it was becoming, the company had just become too big for us to.

And we will getting crazy. We thought that, okay, now we’re about to become millionaire so we can start to leave like that. And we just made so many wrong decisions. So many times that we starting crash pretty fast, pretty fast. And you just realize that, okay, you don’t need that many, that much. To build something of value, just, you just need the right process and the right philosophy and to learn the right lessons and you can have less money than that and achieve much bigger.

Yeah. 

Yasi: When you say that the company is crashing very fast, do you mean by losing clients or losing employees? 

Danny: We started by losing clients first because we was, we weren’t just able, we thought that having a lot of hiring new people, just hiring a lot of people will help us manage 2, 3, 4, 5 clients a day.

But you just realize that it’s doesn’t work like that because all these people need to work as a unit. They need to work with the same philosophy of being of service to the client. So some clients just naturally become out of priority, meaning that we give, we give them the minimum service in terms of quality in total.

Respect of deadlines. And some people took it. Some clients took it personal, some, uh, jeopardize the way we were working. So the payments were become we’re coming more slow, slower, or some people just decided that we needed to stop our partnership there. So we, this is how things started to fall. And we, we find ourselves in an, into adapt a big debt that was hard to manage because we didn’t have.

The cashflow to, to, to just manage it to daily. And it was very, very difficult at some point, 

Yasi: well, from half a million revenue to 

Danny: being in like two and a half years. So it’s a crazy story. It’s a crazy story, but yeah. Yeah. But in terms of lessons learned, because it was still a small debt because you don’t want to have half a million dollars, that kind of depth.

It was a very. Some, it was a small enough debts to make us realize that we were just going in the wrong direction, but too, it was a small enough, well, it was a big enough debt that it made us realize that we were going in there in the wrong direction, but it was so small enough that we knew we eat, allowed us to make the right adjusted.

To, to not do things in a different way. Yeah. 

Yasi: Is that the reason why you Brent rebranded your company? The ponzu? 

Danny: Yeah. Yeah. One of the reasons, because one of our main, uh, investors also decided that he didn’t want to work to partner with us. So, yeah, so out of three associates with just two of us go the founders, the founding member members, just, we went in another direction and the investor just decided that, okay, we didn’t do the things the right way and we needed to go separate ways, but he didn’t give us a thing, the right support to be able to even help us draw because he was the guy who already had companies already at a.

Uh, background. So we felt like it didn’t give us the support when we needed to, but maybe, maybe we were, we, weren’t also listening, you know, when you’re young and you’re starting and you have all these big dreams and you feel like he know how we’re going to manage it, you tend to not listen too much to too.

People were trying to tell you this, the direction you’re taking is over. 

Yasi: So after your rebranding, after you find a new direction for the company, what does your company focus on right now? 

Danny: Okay, so right now, like for the past two years, but like, like on a regular basis for the past 12 to 15 months now it’s about the main domain thing we do is we produce documentaries, documentaries.

So, and it’s a great way of doing things because we want to focus on content with added value, not just commercial content. We want content that, okay. It can be of service to a particular brains or company, but it’s also an educative and entertaining in a way that it brings value to, to the end consumer.

So mostly documentaries, web shows as well, web series, like we produce we’re producing or writing. A web series that is called, we are entrepreneurs new, some entrepreneur that is focusing on telling the stories of entrepreneurs. So we today in the life of a different entrepreneur in each episode, that is where we go through.

His routines, his philosophy, we grow, we go as well, physically with him throughout his day to know what kind, what type of entrepreneur is he? Is he a guy who wakes up at 5:00 AM, start to work? Is he a guy who would prefer to work to, to, to sleep late and to send email before going to sleep? Is he a guy who would like to start off the day by a meeting or, you know, just showing Congolese people?

What an entrepreneur is an amazing. Uh, local entrepreneurs, and this is the type of shows that we are producing right now. I’ll maybe send you some links to some stuff that we produce and you’ll, you’ll see. And you, you give me your feedback as well. 

Yasi: Definitely. I’ll be glad to do that. And what do you think are the differences between your generation and the previous generations in your country?

Danny: I think. We are the generation, we’ve the most unstable economy. This is our reality. My father was at a university and got picked up by a company when it was at a university, like in the first or second year. So he had a full year knowing that his future was already taken care of, but we are the generation that is so uncertain of.

Of what is going to be what future is going to be made of that. We live in some kind of insect. We have a lot of insecurities in that sense. So the approach also is different, meaning that we are no longer driven by security because we know that there is no security. We are driven by purpose and are when I see the previous generation was.

At generation that could be content with just being well-paid that with money. And my generation is looking for a purpose, looking for happiness in a job, looking for a job that make us grow, looking for a job that is really that can care or being in is really interested in my personal development. He’s not just that you become a better professional, but they want a job.

Also interests that is also interested in knowing how my family is growing. So I think that makes us so volatile in such a way that we can lose. That’s how we can lose a great opportunity, a great job, because we just want something more and we can do it with so much ease, much more ease than the previous generation.

Because we know that, okay, this life is short and so many things can go wrong. I can, I can stay in my job for 10 years and just one day make a small mistake. And one day the company needs to reevaluate everyone or just to need to shrink down to the personnel. And just in once again, your whole life can change if you didn’t prepare.

So we’re very volatile. We’re not faithful anymore to the marketplace or to opportunities we’d like to shift. And I think it’s also a great things that that’s also a great advantage of our generation in a way that we are only, we don’t, we only want to bring the most value it’s non-negotiable. Yeah.

Yasi: And then you are creators, you want to create something that fulfills you rather than settling down?

Danny: Yeah. Any, yeah. It’s like, we are generation of artists, of people who have learned to, to speak their hearts. So everybody. Wants to do something that is profound for him and everybody who wants to be a creator in some way, whether you’re in a Greek culture, weathering during the filmmaking, everybody wants to make a brand out of it’s his way of doing.

And it’s beautiful to watch.

Yasi: What if the audience wants to watch some, the videos you have produced or follow you on social media?

Danny: Where can they find you? Uh, they can find me, um, all the social media platform like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. Um, not so much on Twitter, I should be more, uh, and YouTube as well.

And it’s just my name, Danny, but really everywhere. It’s the same. And they will see great content it’s too bad. Uh, everybody recommends me to start subtype, putting English subtitle to my content for them to have a broader audience as well. So I might be thinking of doing that and, uh, but yeah, mostly on all social media plans.

Since I’ve been making videos, it’s B it’s brought me so many work opportunities in terms of contracts, in terms of, uh, production opportunities that maybe, yeah, maybe, I mean too comfortable too, and focusing just on my French speaking audience, but definitely there’s so many contents that are, I think universal, universal, irrelevant.

Our recently did a video. Uh, talking to women in general. And I was just surprised by the burdens. The outfits went viral. I got called from people from the us, from people from Canada, from people from South Africa. We just resonated with what I was talking and I want to add as well. That’s what is good with us?

Millennials is that. So different, but the same at the time, whether that you live, whether you live in Switzerland or in China or in Canada, we kind of resonate with the same things a little bit different culturally, but since also it’s about globalization. You know what, when I see, for instance, the movement that had happened in us post COVID about George Floyd and just racial injustices and the protest.

And I, we just took ’em to come. The world is a beautiful testimony that we are now becoming more and more of the. We want the same thing. That is a better word, a better planet, because I cannot just say, okay, I can focus on Congo and what, what is happening here? Because my impact on the planet in Congo is impacting a young girl in Malaysia.

And then, so we need more than ever to become one in terms of how we do things and entrepreneurs, I think, and we can play such a great role. Regulating mindsets regulating the way we do business, the way our business can become clean, uh, for the planet and for social, for the society around us. So I think it’s just a beautiful time to be on.

Yasi: Yeah. And also, I totally agree with doing that after talking with other guests. I also think that people share similar mindset or very purpose driven, regardless. You’re in Congo, you’re in London or you’re in other countries. It’s just a very interesting observation that this generation people around this age.

They are different from the previous ones, but they are also similar in certain ways themselves. Yeah. 

Danny: Do you think he has to do something with internet? The way that this generation is so different from the. 

Yasi: I think so. I think the information is much more accessible. Cross-border also cross different language and then people read similar stuff.

For example, or the personal development books that you read. I have also read them somehow. We are influenced by this concept by what the books is written and also YouTube videos. International programs, the TV shows talk shows. Yeah. 

Danny: I agree. Completely agree with that. 

Yasi: All right. Thank you very much for your time.

It was really nice pleasure talking to you.