Why I am Founders First

When I speak with super early stage founders (in Nigeria), I like to ask them what obstacle is stopping them from making progress on their business idea. They almost always respond, “funding.” I would smile and then follow up with the next question in my sequence: “What have you done so far?”, and most of them would say a variant of “nothing”.

When I speak with Nigerian early stage investors and ecosystem builders, the number one complaint regarding the ecosystem is about a lack of fundable ideas within the country. It’s a pyramid distribution, where there are a few stand-out ideas that get all the attention (and funding action) while the great horde remaining struggle in the trenches.

The founders say they have ideas, but they need funding. The investors say they want to fund, but the ideas are lacking. Seems like we have a catch-22 on our hands.

Poor ideas are the product of poor thinking. Thinking is influenced by education, experience, and exposure. I believe that the poor startup ideas we see, or indeed the poor quality of founders, or even tech talent is the result of poor foundational education within the country. In addition to this, most entrepreneurs in Nigeria do not have proper entrepreneurship education, which results in poor business ideas and ineffective business creation practices. Finally, the most common catalyst for the average Nigerian to start a business is survival; most are just looking for something that can help pay the bills. This surely also affects the ability to think critically about problems, and this all results in a more significant amount of failed startups, a lower number of startups that eventually get funded, and a low number of startups that actually scale up and go global, compared to other areas of the world.

The lowest common denominator is the ability of the founder to come up with business ideas and execute them effectively. Therefore, providing education to early stage founders, especially to first time founders, is the most effective lever that can be pulled to generate better outcomes for Nigerian startups. More effective than investing in a new idea, a new market, a new consumer trend. A bad founder can have all this on their side and still end up with a washed up startup, however, a good founder, one who have the necessary thinking and execution skills can push through irrespective of them.

This is the foundational belief behind my “Founders First” mentality.

Founders First means I will always invest in the founder (or founders that make the team) over the idea or market. I will always invest in the character of the founder, the mindset, the skills, the competence, the life experience, the resilience, the ability to execute, to be flexible, to adapt and evolve, to communicate, to have a vision. Ideas, inventions, big markets, even timing, are valid, but they form the secondary consideration after the founder, the second layer of decision-making, so to speak.

The way I currently invest in Nigerian founders is by adopting, what I call, “Incubation as Education” posture, which is the idea that good entrepreneurship needs to be taught and the only way to effectively teach it is through practice. Creating incubation programs that take founders through the step-by-step process of starting businesses, providing opportunities to build relevant skills along the way, irrespective of whether their initial startups or ideas succeed, could be considered successes if the founder retains the learnings gleaned through the program and leverages it the second (third, or fourth) time around.