Bassim Haidar, founder, chairman and CEO of Channel IT Group, said a key part of launching his business was actually going out and exploring new places -- something he thinks others could do more of in order to better understand places like Africa.
"Get out of the living room where you have a view of the world from a TV box, and go out there," Haidar told HuffPost Live at Davos. "It's very easy for us to judge countries and cultures and people without actually being there, because of what we hear all the time."
"Living in Nigeria has a very, very different culture to Ethiopia, or the other side," Haidar said. "The approach [when I started] was, let's go there... speak to the people, speak to the bankers, and try to understand what this market needs."
Haidar also spoke about how Boko Haram is "affecting certain parts" of his business, noting "there's a whole region that we can never go to anymore."
"What's happening is an outflow of people coming down, more south, causing more and more concentration with more infrastructure, that's also putting a lot of pressure on living standards... so yes it has an effect," he said.
"The region where Boko Haram is operating are extremely brutal areas," he said.
Watch more from Haidar above, and see more from the 2015 Davos Annual Meeting below: