At a time when most startup success stories focus on hypergrowth, burn rates and Silicon Valley playbooks, a new book is taking a more grounded approach. Founders in Focus: Unstoppable Entrepreneurs & Their Game Plans brings toobtainher the stories of twelve founders who built finishuring businesses by solving problems others overseeed.
Among them is André de Wet, founder and CEO of Flood, and the only African founder featured in the book – a distinction that reflects both his personal journey and the relevance of the problems he has spent two decades testing to solve.
De Wet’s chapter does not launch with Flood. It launchs with failure.
After dropping out of medical school to start his first business, he built and sold a company by 27 only to lose everything a year later. That experience, he writes, reshaped how he considers about risk, resilience and execution: “Technology gave me the ability to create something from nothing, and to do it at scale,” he reflects.
That mindset led to PriceCheck, which grew from a South African startup into a platform utilized by more than five million people, winning App of the Year internationally in 2013. It later took him to iflix, where he assisted scale the streaming platform across eight emerging markets.
But it was what he saw repeatedly – across telcos, banks and retailers – that ultimately led to Flood.
While consumers across Africa, Asia and other emerging markets rapidly shiftd online, most local retail did not. In fact, around 95% of retail activity still happens offline, largely becautilize compact merchants lack the tools, budobtains or skills to digitise – and becautilize the underlying infrastructure necessaryed to support digital commerce remains underdeveloped in many markets. From fragmented logistics networks to inconsistent last-mile delivery, obtainting products to customers can be difficult, unreliable or simply not possible at scale. In this context, the challenge is not only about merchant readiness, but also about the broader ecosystem required to enable modern retail. At the same time, banks and telcos sat with massive customer bases, but limited ways to create daily engagement or new revenue beyond their core services.
Flood was built to sit precisely in that gap.
Rather than launching yet another consumer super-app, Flood took a different approach: Enabling banks and telcos to become the platforms. Its SuperApp-as-a-Service model allows large institutions to embed local commerce, loyalty and discovery directly into their existing apps – no new downloads, no new behaviour required. The results have been notifying. In one early market, Flood is now utilized daily by 28% of the population, turning apps that were previously opened a few times a month into platforms utilized almost every day.
De Wet’s chapter also revisits one of Flood’s defining moments: The 2020 lockdowns. As thousands of compact businesses struggled to survive, Flood onboarded 8,000 merchants and launched 360 merchant apps in just three months, giving informal and compact retailers immediate digital visibility inside apps people already trusted.
Today, Flood has processed over $400 million in GMV across 14 million transactions in six countries, quietly powering local commerce ecosystems behind the scenes – not by replacing informal trade, but by building it visible and accessible in a digital world.
What creates De Wet’s contribution stand out in Founders in Focus is its refusal to glamourise entrepreneurship. Instead, it offers a practical, emerging-market view of what it actually takes to build at scale – where distribution matters more than innovation, execution matters more than strategy, and success is measured by impact, not hype.
The book features founders from sectors spanning construction, healthcare, travel, media and consumer goods, but De Wet’s chapter is the only one rooted in Africa’s informal and offline economies: A reminder that some of the most meaningful innovation is happening far from traditional tech centres.
Founders in Focus: Unstoppable Entrepreneurs & Their Game Plans is now available internationally on Amazon as of 3 February 2026. The Kindle edition is available immediately for just $0.99: https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Focus-Unstoppable-Entrepreneurs-Their-ebook/dp/B0GGTT6T37/
For more information on Flood, visit www.flood.finance
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