Interview with John Viannie Wasswa of Cyanase.

1. What are your names? 

John Viannie Wasswa.

2. Where did you go to school?

Went to St Thomas Aquinas kawempe for my o-level. While there I feel in love with technology. I remember my friends and I came up with a formula that helped all my classmates solve chemistry equations faster.

Went to Mengo Senior School for high school where I majored in Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics.

Attended Makerere University and did a medical course in biomedical laboratory technology. While there I made a research and came up with a chemical formula of a drug that can help human extend the life of spermatozoa.

3. What did you study?

I did a medical course in biomedical laboratory technology. After that course I self taught myself computer programming and I majored in PHP, React, HTML SQL, CSS, python and Django.

In simple terms you could call me a molecular biologist that can write computer code.

4. Tell us about what you do? I hear you have a company called Cynase?

Well yes, I am CEO and founder Cyanase.

When I was doing my final year at University. A friend approached me with Fintech idea, he wanted to build a platform that supports network marketing. By then Cyanase was a media company (we could help companies attach videos and audios to their products such that their customers get more information about their products). I didn't like his idea so I told him, let me think through and find ways of making this idea better. In the middle of the night I thought about my life after school. Deep inside me I knew I had spent over 22 years in school but had no clue. (Was still struggling with raising funds for Cyanase.) So I thought, what if students started saving money on day one in school such that by the time they finish school they have a starting point. My friend didn't like the idea, I took it on and that was the birth of Cyanase the investment company.

5. What are some of the major influences in your past that are determining what you are doing now?

I love the idea of impacting the world.

When I was on my form 2, my then physics teacher introduced me to Isaac Newton, I loved his concepts and laws, three years later at mengo ss, I learnt that he is the creator of calculus. This guy lived over 400 years ago but look. His legacy still stands. After doing my medical degree I felt like I can't be the kind of person that will have a routine kind of life. Life where I wake up every day , go to hospital and do the same non impactful things for the rest of my life. I wanted to create something that can change lives and let the legacy leave forever.

I am interested in the idea that you are self taught?

Yes, I am. The one thing I do is to make sure everything at cyanase is moving on smoothly. If they are not, and I can't hire someone to do it for me, I do it myself.

When I was building Cyanase, I had some start up capital (personal savings) of about $500. I spent all this paying developers who didn't even develop the product to get to market fit/ MVP. I didn't have money, I didn't have a laptop. But I had a small phone and I could buy data.

6. Tell us about your work in the Savings and Investment Technology Space?

Well yes , we are building a platform that helps people invest their money in the simplest way possible.

We have a technology, we call it an API, it Enables other digital platforms to integrate investing features into their products without facing regulatory compliance and operation expenses. We believe with this kind of technology we can power other apps to offer investment classes and savings. It's the same technology that will make it possible for people to buy treasure bills and bonds through a USSD.

We also have a mobile app , we use it for the B2C, it also supports goal based investments where users set goals and they invest towards achieving them. This is also accessible via web.

Because we don't do the investment ourselves, we partner licensed investment companies to offer investment classes to our customers.

7. Tell us about some of the statistics that make this space attractive?

The investment space is growing rapidly with so many picking Intrest. Chippercash alone has over +500,000 Ugandans trading American stocks, I believe these can also invest in different asset classes if given the opportunity. In Uganda alone , we have Treasury bills and bonds worth over $500M traded on secondary markets per quarter. This includes government and company bills. The last time I talked to our investment partners (sanlam) they had gathered over UGX 2T under their investment fund.

8. What do you think the gaps are in the Technology and Innovation Ecosystem in Uganda? What would you say are our challenges?

There's is alot of potential in Uganda. We just need more serious entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs that have the grit to push regardless of how hard things can get.

We also need the government to bring up policies that support start-ups and their mode of operation.

9. What other countries have you worked in? Any plans to expand? What are your favorite design tools and programming languages? Your take on AI?

Have been to Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana. I think Africa is nice place to start a business, everything is generally at it's initial stages and that is good business. We plan to expand in the next financial year but only after we met certain milestones as a company.

I don't do any designs but when it comes to programming I love REACT for Front End and PHP for Back End and I like Python because it's the language that makes machines intelligent.

Talking about AI, personally I built a bot on Twitter that could listen and detect whoever needed financial advise. It could do replies on tweets and recommend our products. I did it because I didn't have money to market on Twitter. But Elon Musk of X shut it down. AI is here to simplify work, take away jobs of those that can't adapt to the change and also make the rich richer.