Claude: In this episode, we’re talking making money
Welcome to Limitless, the podcast that asks the questions that matter for Africa.
In each episode, we’re asking three guests one question that matters to Africans. We’re looking for African solutions to African problems.
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Entrepreneurship in Africa is really one of my passions. And I’m constantly impressed by those making their entrepreneurial dreams happen in challenging circumstances. Here three very different young Africans tell me how they made their first million.
You might remember Maya Horgan Famodu from season 1. She’s an American-Nigerian venture capitalist, originally from Minnesota in the US. I first met Maya about a decade ago when she was in her early twenties and had just arrived in Lagos. She now has a VC firm called Ingressive Capital. Her latest fund is worth $50m. She’s invested in some of the biggest startups in Africa… Here’s our conversation
When we first met, you were bringing Silicon Valley leaders to Lagos and maybe other African cities, as well as a way for them to discover, I guess the possibilities for investment in Africa. Can you tell us about those early trips, don’t realise it might have been very difficult to put together those trips and get those Silicon Valley leaders to be, you know, to feel comfortable travelling in Africa, but also investing in Africa. What was that like in the beginning?
Maya: I mean, it looks like an overnight thing. And people were like, ‘Ah, it’s because she’s American. She had such an easy time.’
But people don’t know, I literally spent years convincing the most influential corporations and venture capital funds that I could find across Silicon Valley, literally going door to door like it wasn’t like, I send an email, and they’re like, Yeah, I’d love to go to Africa, you know.
I would sit in the offices, I’d sit in the sort of waiting rooms of these executive firms, until they would sit with me, sometimes it would take a day, sometimes I have to go back multiple times. Sometimes I would just wait until they left and then strike up a conversation with one of the partners that I was able to recognise. Or sometimes I was able to send a LinkedIn message and then they would take a Zoom. And then I’d have to consistently follow up on an odd with, you know, quarterly calls or monthly calls with them for sometimes years at a time.
So it wasn’t just an overnight thing. There were a series of seeds that were planted, and then nurtured for years.
Claude: The way that you did it is that you started with the advisory by literally leveraging relationships in order to educate some of these leaders in Silicon Valley. And not just in Silicon Valley, but all over the tech scene in the United States. And then the long game for you was really to launch in Ingressive…
Maya: You have to remember when I was 23, I tried launching a $50 million Africa fund. That was probably more cumulatively than all of the venture coming into Africa at its time. And so try doing that given I had less than a year of professional experience, and given Africa was really not a thing, I didn’t get terribly far. So that’s why I launched the advisory company.
And the pitch for the advisory company was: hey, investors, hey, technology businesses, I will take you to Africa, I will show you the high quality investment opportunities, I’ll help you make your first five to 10 investments on ground, I will help you establish private sector and public sector relationships. And then over time, you’ll see how profitable Africa is and how incredible the market opportunities are here. And over time, you’ll see I know what I’m talking about and will invest with me.
Claude: But how does one actually get started with a venture capital fund, and raise that first million that allows you to actually invest in tech startups? In Africa?
Maya: Yeah, well, it’s not easy. Let me tell you that. For me, I knew at the beginning of launching the company, at the beginning of launching Ingressive Advisory, that what I was intending to do was launch a venture capital fund. So everything with Ingressive Advisory was just building the proof case for Africa. And the proof case, that Maya knows how to pick great opportunities. So every investment tour that we organised, every partnership or business relationship that we organised, every company, for whom we agreed to run their African operations, it was all under the guise of building trust, so that we could raise from them and leverage that ambassadorship for Africa over time.
When I was 25, I then tried again, launching the fund. And it was slowly but surely… you know, a few of our first clients from Ingressive Advisory transitioned over to the first investors in the fund.
Claude: Moulaye Taboure is the Malian CEO and founder of ANKA. It’s an online sales platform for African fashion and crafts based in Cote d’Ivoire. The company has raised $6.2 million in its series A funding. But sInce we recorded, it was announced Anka was closing its marketplace. We are not sure if it means the end of the eCommerce platform or marks a change in the direction. Whatever happens, Moulaye’s advice remains valuable. He started off by explaining how Anka raised its initial round of finance.
Moulaye: That is the first thing that really saved us is having the right people, the right teammates, my co founder, especially. They were amazing individuals with incredible execution abilities, that helped us grow fast. And that is, the first step that allowed us to do what people always look for is getting financed and getting investment.
But I like to say the key lesson for us there is you get financed when you show growth, not the other way around. You cannot hope to get finance to get the growth and getting financed doesn’t show any chance for you to get to the growth.
And then of course then you grow into different fears when you realise that you have to be on a team, you have to find new markets and we grew in the US and had to try to acquire companies etc, etc. to finally find the right scale.
And ultimately yes every time you grow, you can attract new partners and new investors. So we are very proud of adding venture capital investors from all over Africa but also from China in the person of the co-founder of Alibaba, but also from Europe with the biggest shareholders of Zalando and ASOS. So that’s total accumulated in what people look at. That is the over $10 million we raised, but that is the fruit of doing over $3 million of revenue over the last three years.
Claude: Yeah, so raising $10 million is great and it’s very rare in the African market specifically for a startup in the creative industries. But I want to really come back to what you said about the team and how important it is to have the right team because as somebody who’s launched many young entrepreneurs programmes in Africa, including in my own country, Togo, I noticed that sometimes people say they’re going to do something but they don’t actually do it. And that really affects team dynamics. So how are you able to identify and motivate the right team?
Moulaye: So I will be honest, I made a lot of mistakes first, that’s the key thing. I think one of the things that helped me is you see a lot of documents in the start-up world that say: you can always hire well, but you can fail.
The second thing is however, what I think is the best tool to hire well is on your first hires, the big hires, it’s to do the effort to check the recommendation to check the referrals to look if the person that they work with is not just oh okay, yes, if someone nice to work with… No, if you don’t have a resounding and detailed example of the person’s ability to execute on what they promised, or to deliver better than what was expected, you pass and you keep searching. But the example I can give is even my co founder, our CEO, I met with almost 80 different developers before recruiting him.
Claude: As entrepreneur in the media industry who became an investor, I noticed the importance of reference checks and I’ve spent so much time checking references when you just mentioned but not just from the people that are recommended by your candidate, but also by back channelling with other people that are in the network that might be mutual connections. One thing I want to ask you is really related to advice. What advice would you give a young entrepreneur who’s trying to do what you’re doing?
Moulaye: For me, it’s two things. First, you need to focus on… especially if it’s a startup. If it’s an SME, it’s a different discussion, but as a startup the key thing for me, it’s really working on your growth.
You need to iterate fast enough to get growth. Your only, I must say, valid examination is how much you grow on your key metrics. You cannot just say: Oh, I’m building something nice. So it looks good, shows I’m a good entrepreneur – it doesn’t work.
You cannot just mention your efforts. You need to look at the results and be humble enough to recognise when your growth is not enough and get to the benchmarks. If you can find them online pretty much. That’s the key thing. Generally 20% of growth a month sustained is pretty good. And the other thing is for me is to be humble enough to work with the right. You need to aim for the best and also be humble enough to know that people are better than you at other things. And that includes listening to your clients more than you listen to your own ideas. Listening to your team and once you have the right team around you, the world is your oyster and you can do whatever you want.
Claude: Moutagna Keita is a Guinean-born inventor and successful businessman. He studied at Harvard University and worked in America. He came back to Guinea to launch his portable ultrasound machine. This medical technology was awarded a prize at the international exhibition of inventors in Geneva, Switzerland. Our journalist Mamadou Mouctar Souaré interviewed him. Here’s their conversation.
Mamadou: Do you remember your first little victory?
Moutagna: The first victory is always the first medal you are given. Even so, I was only the second best inventor in Guinea in 2017. But I can tell you I jumped up and down in my car especially when I got the gold medal in Switzerland. Then it wasn’t so much happiness, it was mostly emotion. There, you are a bit overwhelmed, it’s like … wow. I come from a country that people call poor when intelligence doesn’t belong to any race, nor to any country. Intelligence is universal. We are human beings. When you use your brain well, you can achieve amazing things. Then there were the first contracts. Wow – that was totally brilliant… but then the more contracts you sign, the more you become numb to it and then you just expect them. But life is like that. At the beginning everything is wonderful, but after you get used to it and if you win a contract worth a hundred thousand, then the next day you want a contract of 500 thousand, and when you win a contract of 500,000 you think, oh damn it. You want a contract worth a million dollars. And when you get into the million dollar club, which we have already done, well the most complicated bit is to actually win that first million dollars but once it’s done, everything else becomes much easier.
Mamadou: So tell us – your first million dollars, when did you get it? And how did you feel?
Moutagna: I didn’t feel any joy! You only say to yourself thank god, I can pay back all my debts that I’ve racked up since the beginning of all the research and the development. I can pay back my family, I can do this and that. You feel relief, but not joy. It’s paradoxal. One of the worst things that can happen to the human being, is either that none of their dreams come true or all of them come true. I have understood that those two extremes are the worst thing that can happen, because you’ve sat down and thought to yourself: all that I want today I can have it. So it’s no longer a challenge. Life is beautiful when there are challenges, but as soon as you enter into the millionaires club, you should make other people millionaires because you are in that club. You have to educate people so that they have the brains of millionaires. In fact that’s how I treat my children too; they’re learning how to do 3D drawings at the age of 6 and 7. You mustn’t wait till they are 15 or 20 years old. So for me success, real joy, it’s when you can spread and share this success. That’s really the best.
Claude: I love Mountaga’s honesty. He’s right: sometimes when you finally achieve success, it does not feel like you thought it would feel.
Thank you to all our guests and good luck to them. This was my takeaway: stay persistent, focus on growth and share your success when it comes. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Spotify or Apple podcasts and share the episode with friends and colleagues. If you’re launching a start-up we’d like to hear from you, using the hashtag #LimitlessAfrica on social media.
