interview - Afrikan Heroes

How Homeless Cameron Chell Built More Than Eight Startups Which Have All Been Successful

August 8, 2019

Looking for an entrepreneur with the Midas Touch for startups? Cameron Chell, the CEO of his newest startup ICOx Innovations, which is one of only a small handful of companies that have the ability to address the demand for both branded currency and blockchain platform integrations, can fit into that description.

Son of a former rancher dad, who was also the local butcher, and a mom who was the local florist in a very, very small Canadian town of Fort Macleod, southern Alberta, Canada, Cameron Chell told Alejandro Cramades that he had not known anything apart from entrepreneurship all his life.

‘‘I’ve just never known anything else,’’ he said. ‘‘Both my parents were entrepreneurs, and back in those days, they didn’t call them entrepreneurs. They were small business owners. They worked seven days a week. We went to church on Sundays, but they still worked. All three of those industries or those businesses, you had to work every day. I just don’t know anything else. So, I feel very blessed and lucky to have been brought up that way.’’

So Many Startups In His Portfolio

Cameron Chell said he had built and exited eight to nine startups.

‘‘You know,’’ he said. ‘‘I haven’t actually kept track, but it would be probably in the range of somewhere between eight and nine. And it depends on what you call an exit too. If you call them partial exits or exits whereby they’ve gone public and were part of the team, and have been bought two or three times before it’s gone public, I would say a dozen at least. But in terms of just pure, pure like, “We built it once and sold it to one buyer then it would be six, I believe if I’m not mistaken.’’

Cameron built his first tech company, FutureLink. In terms of what FutureLink did, its first version would be called a cloud computing application.

FutureLink went on to work with a number of companies from Oracle and Sun, to Microsoft, IBM, and Compaq. It achieved around a $3.2 billion dollar market cap, back when a billion dollars was worth its bargain.

‘‘FutureLink, I would love to say, was purely my idea,’’ he said. ‘‘It was actually my brother-in-law who came up with the notion of being able to run apps in server farms and have the app be accessed via the internet. This brand new thing called the internet. This is back in ’94, ’95 when we were starting to talk about it. In ’96 when we launched it.’’

Cameron Chell said they were basically trying to enhance both the upgrade experience for users on FutureLink so that people wouldn’t have to go into the computer land or the computer store at that time and buy 3 1/2″ decks and load them into a computer.

‘‘Well, why do you even have to do all that?’’ He said. ‘‘Why aren’t you just accessing the software that sits on the server somewhere as well, as mobile computing was really starting to make its mark? Like, why do I need to carry a laptop? Why don’t we login via what we were calling it at that time a thin client? We were working with a number of companies, everywhere from Oracle and Sun, and Microsoft, and IBM, and Compact because there was this computer utility thin client kind of revolution that was coming. We actually dubbed the industry application service provider industry.’’

At the same time, Chell was also running similar companies, such as ASP Industry Consortium, and was heavily committed to engineering. This could be so dizzying considering that he was trying to run successful companies and not just companies for companies’ sake. Chell said he was usually highly effective if he had a couple of things going on at the same time

‘‘We launched the ASP Industry Consortium, and that was really a self-serving mechanism to try to get adoption in the industry, but also to try to bring some standards to the space,’’ he said. ‘‘We had positioned FutureLink as one of the founding companies, and I was lucky enough to take on the vice chairman role there and really became the promoter of that. Again, We also started a company called Engyro which went through a name change. Eventually, that company was sold off to Microsoft separately. I think in true serial founder fashion, I tend to work better if I’ve got a couple of things going on at the same time.’’

However, his multitasking turned out to be successful because according to him, he was very lucky to work with very accomplished teams.

‘‘They let me lead some of the strategic direction, and then they handle a bunch of the coding, the product design. I like to be involved on the architect side of things. But once we get a layer deeper, I’m either out of time or out of skill,’’ he said.

Chell said for each of these initiatives or startups he had co-founders, but he was careful about the roles they occupied in his startups.

‘‘In every single case, I’ve had co-founders,’’ he said. ‘‘I would say in the early days, much to my own character defect, I would stand out in the front, and I would say, “I was the founder, and the reality is I wasn’t.” I wasn’t the only founder. I think I was a really an important part at times to make a number of these organizations work, but not everything has worked by any stretch of the imagination. There has always been, not just two co-founders, but really a co-founding team when we really get honest about that. The co-founders I choose tend to be either technical or operational. Previous to this, they were much more finance co-founders. My role tends to have skewed over the years to a much more finance role and a strategic direction role.

So, the co-founders that I mix with tend to be more technical, more marketing and a bit more operational.

The Outcome of Chell’s First Set of Startups

Although Chell also built Engyro in the early days, it ended up pivoting to a billing payment system in particular for the Dotnet World.

‘‘It went through a couple of iterations to get to that point, but that’s where it ended up,’’ he said. ‘‘It was two management teams after us. We were still involved strategically, but it was two management teams after our initial initiative that eventually got that sold off to Microsoft. I don’t recall the amount. It wasn’t a huge exit. I think it was probably an 18-million-dollar total sale. We weren’t large shareholders at that time.

‘‘FutureLink was very successful and quite fortunate for us,’’he said. ‘‘It ended up having about a 3.2-billion-dollar market cap. This is back when a billion dollars was not what a billion dollars is today. It seems like there are a lot of companies with a billion-dollar market evaluations. Not to take anything away from any of them, but it was a really big deal for us. So, we were a company that had Fortune 500 customers. Our customers were people like Microsoft, Great Plains, and Citrix.’’

Chell said all of these were happening at great revenue base.

‘‘Then there was this other thing happening that we were relatively kind of almost ignorant to which was called the Dotcom,’’ he said. ‘‘We caught a hold of it, and we just ended up being a startup that had some fundamentals behind it and with beneficiaries of a great market. We were building something that we were really passionate about.’’

What Happened to FutureLink, Cameron Chell’s First Company

To get the picture clearer, Chell said he hired a new chairman for FutureLink at the insistence of the financiers of the company.

‘‘He came out of the Telco industry,’’ Chell said. ‘‘He came in, and unbeknownst to me, when he took on the chairman role, he actually started acting like a proper chairman. I was quite insulted by that. He obviously didn’t understand who I was or how important I was as a 20-some-year-old founder and CEO of this company.’’

At that point, events took a new twist.

‘‘What ensued was me getting fired for being an arrogant little ****. It was absolutely one of the best things that could have happened to me, but I was still too stubborn to recognize what a great lesson and opportunity it was. I took my arrogance and channeled it completely inappropriately; sued the company, and started a competing company, and did all the absolute junior mistakes that one would expect from a complete *** ****, which is what I was at the time. The other thing that was not of benefit, though I thought it was great at the time, was because I was fired, a bunch of my stock nested; a bunch of my stock didn’t nest; some of it did, and I was liquid. I was liquid before the crash.’’

Chell said events were not entirely bad after that ordeal.

‘‘So, I was able to garner a little cash, not as much as one would think, but I was able to get a decent little nest egg out of it which gave me some firepower to start a bunch more companies and create more problems for myself ultimately,’’ he said. ‘‘But if it wasn’t for that, I’m sure I would have never sold the share and rode the thing right into the ground. So, ultimately, the company did fail in the Dotcom boom, though I can’t take credit for that. I’m not saying it would have succeeded if I had stayed at the helm, but it was a high-flying Dotcom. All that being said, I do want to point out that this was a company that had approximately, if I’m not mistaken, about 80 million dollars in revenue.’’

Here Is Why Chell Could Manage All of These Startups At A Time

Cameron Chell said he was probably all successful because of the lean startup approach he had adopted at his startups.

‘‘We were, without knowing it, very lean-centric,’’ he said. ‘‘And of course, it wasn’t called lean then. It was basically called survival back then, and it wasn’t really an accepted practice in terms of how you built startups. The accepted practice of the day was raise a bunch of money, build a whole bunch of infrastructure, and hope customers show up. We were never huge, huge capital raisers. We were builders first, which I think is often quite characteristic of founders.’’

Chell said his startups would usually end up getting a customer first, and then build the product around their requirement.

‘‘That’s just how we’ve built things always,’’ he said. ‘‘As Eric Ries and that whole lean startup moment really came in, it was really exciting and familiar to see. We didn’t even recognize that that’s what we were doing. So, we’d become pretty strong proponents of what that is and how that works. It was interesting to see somebody from outside our organization teaching us what we were already doing.’’

‘‘I realized that I wasn’t in control of things’’

For Cameron Chell, the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, changed the way he previously viewed life entirely.

‘‘I went on and kept building a bunch more companies. Some were moderately successful. Some were complete disasters,’’ he said. ‘‘But in 2001, I was at the base of the World Trade Center on 9/11, and, my life, whether I knew it or not at the time, was headed for a major catastrophe because I was just running completely out of control, and just totally self-centered. By the end of the day on 9/11, I was in complete disarray wondering why I was alive, and other people weren’t. It was probably the first chunk of my self-centeredness being at least somewhat corrected. I realized that I wasn’t in control of things.’’

Chell’s life took a new downward turn afterward. He found himself suddenly homeless.

‘‘So, all this great value and brilliance that I thought I was creating, I really started to question it,’’ he said. ‘‘Within a very short time, I was drinking heavily, and within a very short time, I was abusing drugs. Within about two years, I was completely bankrupt and desolate. Within three years, I was living on the street, and I spent the next seven years after that working to get clean and spent a lot of time in the street, and rehabs, and such to get my life back on track, which by the grace of God and a lot of great people, I’ve now been clean for over 10 years.’’

Chell was literally watching his life slip out of his hands. At a time, he would make up his mind to get back on track, but that would not hold.

‘‘I wish that I could tell you that moment,’’ he said. ‘‘That moment happened two dozen times for me, where I said, “This is it. I’m done. I’m going to get better. I’m going to fix it.” Even two dozen times is a joke. I’d wake up every morning or be awake for three days straight, and every 10 minutes I’d be like, “Okay. That’s it. I’m done. I’m done.” An hour later I’m off running again, just doing whatever I could to get my fix. So, I would love to say it was willpower and I decided I was going to do it, and there was this great burning bush or something, and it wasn’t. What happened was a lucky situation. It didn’t seem lucky at the time where I was in a lot of danger. I was being pursued by a gang. I lived on the street, and I was getting beat up by them.’’

Chell said he was in the streets for a consistent four years that was on and off.

‘‘Like in and out,’’ he said. ‘‘Actually, my total round was about a decade, just a little bit over a decade, about 12 years from when I really slipped deeply until I finally got myself cleaned. I didn’t get myself cleaned up, but I was finally able to get cleaned up, which is quite a short timeframe for somebody that goes really deep and lives on the street because most people don’t come back from the street. But there were four years in there where I was just completely gone, un-findable.’’

Long story short, Chell had to get through a few days without DOC, the drug of his choice.

‘‘I ended up getting through 10 days without it while getting away from this gang,’’ he said. ‘‘ I just didn’t really have a choice. I hit rock bottom. That’s the bottom line. I didn’t have a choice to use it again at that time because I decided I did want to live. I didn’t know that I wanted to live, but I did want to live. At the end of 10 days clean, something just started to click. I had had 10 days clean before, but not having gone through what I had gone through in the previous 10 days. I knew that if I ever touched anything again, that I wouldn’t come back and I’d be done. I could just see so many people that were really sincerely and authentically trying to help me, and I was just disrespecting them at every moment.’’

However, Chell said since recovery, there were many tempting times over the weeks and the months and years ensuing where if it just weren’t for some pure luck he would have relapsed to his former position.

‘‘Founders can be incredibly impulsive, compulsive, and generally always determined people,’’ he said. ‘‘So, when there’s something that has worked before to solve a problem, like using a drug or something, it’s tough to get away from that. I see a lot of founders. I get to coach and mentor some of them, and I see the intensity that they approach things with. You generally have to be on some level incredibly intense to be able to do something like this or to take the risks or be willing to subject yourself to the things that you go through. It puts you in a lot of risky situations, but also, you’re generally kind of predetermined to be a certain type of individual that could be subject to falling into these traps. I guess my point is, there was no burning bush, and it was a lot of luck and a lot of great people that helped me get through that.’’

Cameron Chell said at that point when he was in the street, he had given up on himself.

‘‘I had not only given up on myself, I had actually believed that everybody, the entire world, my family, everybody was better off with me,’’ he said. ‘‘Like you justify it this way, that it was better off with me being on the street because I was so worthless. Homelessness itself is its own form of drug, and it is its own form of mental illness that draws you into it where you don’t want to leave. You don’t want to leave. In fact, I would say today when I’m hungry or lonely or tired or angry, just haven’t been looking after myself, the odd crazy thought of being homeless would slip into my head and be more attractive than the odd crazy thought of using drugs. It’s a very odd mindset that slips into that, but worthlessness is at the forefront in it.’’

A Ton of Lessons From That Experience

Chell said he learned many lessons from that experience.

‘‘There are so many great lessons that I’ve been given, but the one that I hang onto the most every day now is that I stay very, very present,’’ he said. ‘‘So, I only do the next thing in front of me. It’s almost counter-intuitive because we’re taught to be visionaries, we’re taught to be what’s the next big thing. We have to see around corners and anticipate the next move. If you’re not a great Chess player, you’re not a great CEO, and if you’re not all those things. But, you know, the reality is if you just don’t get done the next most important thing, none of it matters.’’

Chell said ninety percent, in his opinion, of founders today who don’t succeed generally do it not because they haven’t got a great idea.

‘‘There are amazing, great ideas out there,’’ he said. ‘‘I sit in Angel Forums and I listen to pitches, and the ideas and the thinking is incredible. But 99% of the time, the reason that you, whether it’s recognized or not, the reason that people don’t invest in those founders is because they don’t believe they can execute the next step. It’s really all just about what is the next most important thing to do.’’

Chell goes on further to say that when he gets up in the morning, his mind is already racing.

‘‘If the first thing I don’t do is meditate…I worry about the next 15 minutes getting to my workout, getting back on time, getting my kids’ breakfast ready. If I don’t take that level of pragmatic approach as a founder, I’m also not going to run my business well. So, those are the things that I’ve seen investors really focus on whether they recognize it or not. I’ve also found that the most successful founders have a high level of anxiety. One of the greatest ways for them to elevate that anxiety is to know that everything will be okay if you just get the next thing done.’’

Now 42 years old, and things are starting to turnaround, Chell is now a father and in a loving relationship. But he has also been diagnosed with lymphoma cancer.

‘‘It’s just another one of those great lessons where you realize you’re not in control. So, I didn’t recognize it, but now I had some clean time, I had somebody to love me, I had a family that was growing, and I thought, “Hey, I’ve done everything right. I deserve to be in this spot that I was in because I’ve done all the hard work,” he said. ‘‘Again, entitlement, a character defect of mine, just slapped me right in the face and said, “You’re not in control.” I was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer. Part of my first reaction was like, “What! I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. I’ve done everything right. Why would this happen?” So, it really, again, it was a blessing because it really took the need for me to let go of ego and start to understand, where is my self-centeredness in this, and understanding this isn’t all about me. I’m not a victim here.’’

‘‘And what are the most important things that I need to take care of in terms of my family, and the people that I was working with, and the investors that had put money into projects that I was building? And here I was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer.

‘‘When I got focused on those things rather than, oh, my gosh. What about me? Why am I not getting what “I deserve?” Things turned around. I was very, very lucky that physically and health-wise, I was able to get on the other side of it and I’ve been clean of that now for eight years, or lymphoma cancer-free for eight years. I promise you: I totally believe that if I would have stayed in a state of victimhood or entitlement, I don’t know if I would have beaten it.’’

It was a grace that I’m here, but it sure changed that whole experience. But even if I hadn’t (because I was able to get to a spot of not having that entitlement) even if I hadn’t been able to beat it, I believe that both my family and my co-workers and our investors would have been fine because of the steps we would have taken to help ensure that everything was fine. Again, it was just about the next thing. We won’t worry about 20 years down the road. We’re just worrying about what’s the next most important thing to get done.

Back To Work

Cameron Chell had since moved on. He has spent much of his time building series of other startups.

‘‘Again, I didn’t really know much else, so I had already launched a couple of companies,’’ he said. ‘‘The first one was a company called UrtheCast. Our idea was to build a competitor to Google Earth by putting live video cameras in space. In fact, we were going to put them on the International Space Station.So, we were successful in doing this. We raised a very small amount of capital to start. We started proving up the idea. We got a couple of customers onboard that liked the idea, and they funded some of the product development, and then eventually, we were able to raise bigger and bigger capital and bring on a more and more senior management team. Today, those cameras are on the International Space Station, and they provide live video feeds of earth. The primary customers are B2B, not B2C as we had originally contemplated.

To date, at least to my knowledge, they are still the only live video from space. All other video in space is all based on still pictures being taken. I mean, they’re fast still pictures, but none-the-less, it’s not video. Since then, I think we’ve got 22 companies in our portfolio to date.

UrtheCast Has Since Gone Public And Done Its IPO

Chell said UrtheCast has since gone public and has secured a series of funding for the business.

‘‘The total capital was 280 million dollars at the point that we were no longer part of the active management of the business,’’ he said. ‘‘They’ve raised capital since. Even 280 million dollars for a space company is a ridiculously small amount of money. We were building the cameras for literally 5 million dollars a piece. They were literally Canon SLR chips that were the sensors being used. Now, the housings were very expensive to pack that equipment, but it was all part of this new initiative called Small Space at the time which was all about being able to use commercially-available products in the space industry. We were also beneficiaries of space being pretty hot at the time with the XPRIZE going forward and such. Yeah, we just grabbed onto what we could and built what we did.’’

UrtheCast Is The First Portfolio Company of Business Instincts Group Formed By Chell

Business Instincts Group is a venture creation lab.

‘‘We come up with ideas internally,’’ Chell said. ‘‘We bring ideas in-house and incubate them. They are generally very early stage either ideas or businesses that we feel have a significant opportunity to scale. What we have is a proprietary process called The Rip Kit which is responsibilities in perspective, which is a system by which companies can build startups from idea right through commercialization.’’

Chell said the primary idea behind it is that rather than setting KPIs or Key Performance Indicators, what it is designed to do is to set responsibilities and perspective which basically involve the entire team setting the most important objectives on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. The team then check in on those objectives on a weekly basis.

‘‘There’s a software system that helps drive the whole process,’’ Chell noted. ‘‘It’s one level above project management. But what it does do is it really ensures that everybody is on the same strategic page, and as such, it allows them or empowers them to make decisions because everybody knows they’re on the same page.

The other great advantage of the system and the software is that it provides full transparency and a dashboard to the investors. So, as we go out and we raise capital for our projects or we have our senior management teams raising capital for our projects. One of the things that they can show to investors is everything that is happening on a weekly basis. They can see exactly what the strategic initiatives are, who is in charge of them. Are they behind, on track, ahead, and by what percentage?

Chell said Business Instincts Group has crucially been driven by Big Thinking Process.

‘‘Big Thinking is, it’s anchored in the first question we call: What if?’’ He said. ‘‘So, imagine if Google Earth was live. Like, just what if it was? We know all the reasons that it can’t be, and it’s impossible. But, if it could, what would it look like if you could? Then we go through that question, and we end up coming up with the really cool product. This is how we started UrtheCast.

We come up with a really cool product of what it would be like to have a Google Earth live rather than three-year-old satellite data. Then we talk, well, we know it’s impossible to build this, but what if we could build it? What would that look like? After you go through like 7 to 15 what-ifs on a project, you end up getting it boiled down to natural potential or possibility to build a project that was thought impossible, literally five or six hours previous to that.

That’s our Big Thinking Process. So, we love big ideas, and we love all that kind of stuff, but we really like to anchor it in a pragmatic approach to like.’’

Cameron Chell’s success has also been with Slyce, a visual search engine startup.

‘‘So, obviously, search is a massive industry and a cornerstone on so many commercial aspects of what happens on the internet and e-commerce in general,’’ he said. ‘‘There was a lot of focus being put on audio search, so we see things like Siri, and Alexa, and so forth. Let’s just be a bit counterintuitive here and go down the path of visual search. We had done quite a bit of stuff in visual search before, not specifically for what Slyce was going to try to accomplish, but in particular we had done some machine-vision work way back in the 90s, and then at UrtheCast we had recognized the power of some visual recognition when identifying objects on earth using cameras from the space station.

So, the general idea was why don’t you — and this isn’t a novel idea. Lots of people have had it. Why can’t you just take a picture of something? Let’s say it’s an office chair, and you are in the Office Depot or Staples app, and you take a picture of that, and boom, it finds it in their inventory. You can buy it instantly. So, like no click at buying. Rather than one-click purchasing which Amazon built an empire on, what if you could do it on no-click buying. So, we envision that up in the little search bar there would be a keyboard. There would be a microphone, and there would be a camera. That’s what we wanted to create.’’

Cameron Chell has also gone ahead to launch other successful businesses such as ICOxinnovations.com, a publicly-traded company that creates blockchain economies and corporate currencies in partnership with established brands

Advice for Business Owners Starting Out

‘‘ I’ll tell you what I tell my son,’’ he said. ‘‘I get up every morning and meditate, and I just focus on one think big, but act small. Act small in terms of what you need to do next, and act small in terms of where your ego needs to be. That’s really four things I just told you there. You do those and everything, I believe, will work out right. Don’t get too far in front of yourself. Think big, but just learn how to act small, and I guess that’s the advice. Think big, act small. Some of those small acts are just doing what’s next and having a little meditation sometime throughout the day.’’

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world.

Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/Afrikanheroes/

Great startups are being created everywhere — Interview with Techstars founder David Cohen

August 7, 2019

David Cohen is the founder and co-CEO of Techstars. He has founded several companies and has invested in hundreds of startups such as Uber, Twilio, SendGrid, FullContact, and Sphero. In total, these investments have gone on to create more than $80 billion in value.

Prior to Techstars, David was a co-founder of Pinpoint Technologies which was acquired by the publicly listed ZOLL Medical Corporation in 1999. Later, David was the founder and CEO of earFeeder, a music service that was sold to SonicSwap. He’s also the co-author (with Brad Feld) of Do More Faster; Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup.

Techstars today has 49 accelerator programs in 35 cities across 16 countries, including in Paris, Berlin, London, and Lisbon. It invests €72 million into nearly 500 startups annually. Last week, Techstars announced they just raised €38 million to accelerate even more startups in Europe and across the globe. Good timing for an interview with Techstars founder and co-CEO David Cohen.

David, please take us back to the very beginning of Techstars. How did it all start and how did the Techstars model change over time?

Brad Feld, David Brown, Jared Polis and I started Techstars in order to create a better way to do early-stage tech investments as well as to improve our local startup community in Boulder, Colorado. I pitched Brad Feld on the concept early on and he committed to invest in our first 10-minute meeting.

We then recruited experienced mentors and in our first year had 302 applicants. Of that first group of 10 companies, 5 had successful exits (and one of the other five is still thriving today).

We then began scaling the platform to what you see today, given the impact on the communities and the success of the approach. In 2012 we increased the amount of capital we invest per company to today’s figures and started doing corporate partnerships (our first one was with Microsoft to power their Kinect and Azure accelerators).

Today we work with around 100 corporate partners. In the last year or so, we’ve launched several new products alongside our accelerators like Techstars Studio, Techstars Talent, and Techstars Ecosystem Development.

Can you share some numbers about the current state of Techstars? Like a number of startups, raised capital, number of exits, etc?

See techstars.com/companies — it’s always up to date — we’re very transparent here. Skip past the top 50 companies to see stats. At the moment, about 7.9 billion in capital raised. 186 exits by M&A/IPO. 1,759 companies that finished Techstars (another few hundred in programs now globally). Their enterprise value is about 22 billion. Check the page mentioned for more stats/data.

What differentiates Techstars from most other accelerators out there. Why and which startups should apply at Techstars?

Our network is global. We have activity in 120 countries annually, with accelerators in 16 countries. 10,000 mentors. An enormous talent network. I think our track record also differentiates us significantly. And, instead of us trying to fund 100+ startups in one room, we fund just 10 in a consistent model in each community that we participate in.

What would you say are the main differences between the US startup ecosystem and the startup ecosystems in Western Europe? What are some of the major changes you are spotting?

In some cases, there are still significant regulatory differences. We run into challenges in some countries with very high legal costs, challenges with employment structures, etc. These seem to be heading in the right direction, but unfortunately today you still can’t think of the EU as “one market” — there are significant operational complexities to invest throughout Europe that still create challenges. However, it’s amazing to see the growth in early-stage funding that is available — this is quite healthy now.

How important is location for the success of a startup? Would you recommend startups to move to one of Europe’s leading startup hubs like London or Berlin, or maybe even to Silicon Valley?

No. We believe that more and more, great startups are being created everywhere. As long as you have a vibrant startup community, you don’t need to move away. Live where you want to live. This is part of the freedom of entrepreneurship.

You just raised €38 million for Techstars to accelerate even more startups in Europe and across the globe. What are your plans and goals for the next 3 years?

We’ve been consistently profitable since inception which has allowed us to get to the scale that we have today. This cash injection won’t be used to invest in startups (we have $500M AUM to do that), but rather to scale our footprint and product offerings. We’ll certainly want to grow to more European locations over the next few years, perhaps doubling our existing footprint in that timeframe. But we’ll also be offering more resources to our founders and partners, such as Techstars Studio, Techstars Ecosystem Development, and Techstars Talent, in the region.

What is your take on equity crowdfunding as an alternative or additional funding source for startups? Do you think it will become more relevant over the coming years?

I’ve always believed it’s a nice addition and we’re supportive of it. I think it’s reached a more or less steady-state, where some startups are able to add on a bit more capital if they want more of the “crowd” involved.

Could you recommend our readers one or two books that helped you during your entrepreneurial endeavors?

Well, we just released the 2nd edition of “Do More Faster” that I wrote with Brad Feld, and of course new to the Techstars series of books is also “Sell More Faster” by Amos Schwartzfarb. Outside of self-promotion, I’m a huge fan of “The Soul of Money” and “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” for entrepreneurs.

These excerpts originally appeared on EU-Startups.com

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/Afrikanheroes/

Market Integration holds the prospect of transforming African economies— Ekra

July 15, 2019

In this interview, Jean-Louis Ekra, former president of Afreximbank, spoke on the emerging Russia-Africa relations and the benefits of the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreements which was just signed by African leaders in Niamey, Niger, among other issues. Excerpts:

What are the prospects of African Continental Free Trade Area agreement hold for Africa’s development?

You know that Africa is a continent that trades the least with itself. There are benefits trading with your neighbours, like reduced costs and so on. The first thing that African countries will benefit from this agreement is the opportunity to trade with their neighbours by just opening borders. The second is that it will push countries to transform their usual commodities into manufactured goods. You need to have complementary products to trade effectively with your neighbours. So, it will be a good incentive for African economies to enter a process like AfCFTA that will help to transform their economies.

What is your view on the future of Africa-Russia relationship?

Africa needs to diversify its relationships for its own benefit. A diversified relationship protects one if one of many partners falls on bad times. So, it is important for Africa, from that perspective, to diversify its relationship. So the Russia-Africa relationship is welcomed in that context.

How best can Africa leverage on its relationship with Russia to bridge its infrastructural gap?

Russia, as you know, has advanced technology. In infrastructure, Russia is well known for power. It has capabilities in solar and hydropower energy that can be implemented in our continent. So, I think that it will be good for African and Russian private sectors to jointly develop those activities. Some are canvassing that Africa countries should bring home some of their foreign reserves held abroad for investment in Africa.

What is your view? There is an initiative that we launched in Afreximbank when I was there, which is ongoing. Yes, it is correct for Africa to try and use, as much as possible, its own resources, including external reserves. There is no reason the continent should be borrowing money when it has money in deposits in other places. Won’t it have an adverse impact on foreign exchange markets on the continent? No. It won’t. These reserves are backed by strong ratings of an institution like Afreximbank. You have currency in America or in Europe. If you have it in Africa it is still your own, So it should not affect your exchange rate.

On the event that this becomes a reality, which institution will warehouse the foreign reserves?

Foreign exchange reserves have to be held in a strongly rated institution because they are important assets of a country. So, AfDB can hold those reserves likewise the Afreximbank. In my view, these are the two institutions that can hold such a reserve.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.

Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/Afrikanheroes/

Africa has a lot to benefit from Russia—Steve Davies Ugbah

July 4, 2019

—Steve Davies Ugbah

Professor Steve Ugbah is Nigeria’s Ambassador to Russia and also holds a concurrent accreditation to the Republic of Belarus. In this interview, he speaks on the importance of Russia’s renewed engagement with Africa; Nigeria’s place in East-West geopolitical rivalry and benefit of AfCFTA in deepening trade ties within Africa among other issues. Excerpts:

How would you describe Nigerian-Russian relationship?

Nigeria-Russia relationship has improved in recent times. We are strengthening the relationship because for a long time it grew cold as we had no substantive ambassador to Russia for four years prior to my appointment. We are now trying to rebuild confidence and trust in each other and take the relationship seriously. So, the relationship is cordial and we are strengthening our bilateral ties.

How is Russia responding to this renewed engagement?

The response has been positive and we have held high-level meetings which are intended to signal to Russia the extent to which we value this relationship. It is a gradual process of rebuilding confidence and I am sure that soon, we would have attained 80 percent of our goal of confidence-building and reaping strategic benefits in the process. Russia is a very important country not just for Nigeria but also for Africa. The extent to which Russia and Nigeria and to a larger extent, Africa can strengthen its relationship, it will be mutually beneficial.

So, I am optimistic this rapprochement will mature and be of benefit to Africa in all facet of our relationship whether economic, cultural, or educational. Russia has been generous to Nigerians especially in the areas of cultural exchanges and scholarships for students. So, my hope is that these activities that are mutually beneficial will continue.

Which other opportunities are there for Africans to tap from Russia?

Russia is a superpower and Africa can benefit most certainly from its firepower and its experience in security. Russia has an abundance of minerals just like most African countries and it has been able to exploit its natural resources more efficiently and I believe we can learn from them. It also has the largest landmass on earth and they have been able to manage their diversity very well and this is what Africa can also benefit from. Of course, Russia’s comparative advantage is in hydrocarbons and this is what we can benefit from. So, there is a lot we can benefit from Russia even in the areas of agriculture, space technology, ICT and many others. So, Russia is well endowed and I believe Nigeria and Africa have a lot to benefit from the country.

In this era of intense geopolitical rivalry and great power competition, how do you think Nigeria can juggle its relationships with these powers?

Nigeria is a non-aligned country and I don’t think that will change its political posture as far as international politics is concerned. So we are not aligned to any geopolitical bloc. We are strictly guided by our interests and we go where we see opportunities. Nigeria has done business with the West, it is doing business with China and we are hoping to increase our level of contact with Russia and the former Soviet states, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). So it is not necessarily about aligning with any bloc but it is about pursuing your interests aggressively as you can and going wherever your interest can be protected. So my hope is that both the East and the West will woo Nigeria and that will place us at an advantageous position. So it is about going to where your interests are protected and taking advantage of opportunities.

Given Russia’s renewed engagement with Africa and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) that came into force recently, how can Africa maximize the opportunities to boost trade ties with Russia?

It is a good thing that Russia is now waking up to Africa and is interested in exploring opportunities in the continent. That is why the Afreximbank annual meeting here in Russia and the heads of government meeting between Russia and Africa in Sochi, Russia come October are auspicious moments to deepen trade ties. Given that Russia is a continent-sized country, deepening trade ties will improve two-way trade between Russia and Africa.

In fact, I just returned from Nigeria with a Russian trade delegation of 13 companies that are looking for opportunities. We have partnered with Chambers of commerce in Lagos and Abuja while also taking advantage of the Russia-Nigeria Business Council here in Moscow. So I see a bright future for Russia-Africa relationship especially now that Africa is better placed to reap benefits from trade relationships within and outside the continent given the AfCFTA that will take of soon. This, will no doubt, fast track integration within the continent while boosting intra-African trade. Although protectionism is rising the AfCFTA I believe if well leveraged is a framework that will help solve some perennial problems faced by Africa such as unemployment and poverty.

Kelechi Deca

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Getting Your Startup Started: Startup Founders Share Their Experiences

June 19, 2019

Getting your startup up and running can be one of the most demanding tasks every startup founders can face. The experience could be overwhelming, but seeking advice from the right mentors could make the work less cumbersome.

Below, we share the experience of most startup owners on how they got started.

Mostapha Kandil — SWVL, (Egyptian Startup)

‘‘Obviously, I am very happy about the fact that my team and I have reached this far in such a small amount of time. When we first came into this space, everyone thought we are crazy. They thought we are taking on Careem & Uber and we wouldn’t be able to survive. No investor was willing to take us seriously. This investment by Careem proves that we can actually make it.

But happiness is not the only feeling. I am scared as well. All this hype and attention we’ve been getting esp. after Careem’s investment comes with a lot of responsibility towards all our stakeholders; captains, customers, everyone. We are trying to build something that even some governments struggle to do; a public transportation system.

It’s one of the most difficult things for countries to build a public transportation system in emerging markets and we are some 24-year-olds trying to take on this challenge so yeah it’s scary. Normally public transportation is a loss making machine in these countries as it requires huge infrastructure. What we are trying to achieve is a sweet spot between quality and pricing.

‘‘I think the biggest risk was to shift from being Petroleum Engineer to doing something else. It was not easy to study something and then end up doing a completely different thing. Also, your parents could never really understand what you’re doing. When I called my mom to tell her how I made it to Forbes after Careem’s investment. She was like ‘good for you’

For every startup, he advises:

Don’t over-engineer everything, just get it done. You’ll figure it out on the way.
2) Take risks because what you’re already doing is a risk in its own. You probably left a job to start a business so you’re already taking it. Make sure you keep doing it onwards a well.
3) Learn more by learning faster. If you do 9 experiments a week vs your competition doing 10 experiments then your competition ends up learning 52 times more over a year.

Gregory Rockson — mPharma, (Ghanaian Startup)

Gregory Rockson is the Co-founder and CEO of mPharma, a drug benefits startup in Africa. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Westminster College.

mPharma works with drug manufacturers, service providers, and third-party payers to develop products and services that improve the access and affordability of high-quality drugs for patients across the continent. He shares his experience as a startup:

‘‘It was an early morning in downtown San Francisco a few months ago and I was sitting in a Starbucks, thinking about what next to do with my life. After two successful interviews with Google, I had a good feeling that I would receive a job offer, but something just did not sit right with me. Around 9am, I received an email from a friend which had a link to an investigative article titled “Dirty Medicine” on CNNMoney. It tackled the issue of criminal fraud in Ranbaxy Laboratories, an Indian multinational pharmaceutical company. This article marked my return to Africa and my quest to use big data to help African governments develop better drug surveillance and monitoring systems.’’

At that moment, all I could think about were the 84 children who died in Nigeria in 2008 after consuming adulterated baby teething mixture and the many other families who have lost a loved one due to substandard/fake drugs. I was frustrated by the silence on the part of drug regulators in Africa.

I moved from asking myself why to thinking how. How do we develop technology solutions to address the challenges with pharmacovigilance in Africa?

Grant Brooke — co-founder, Twiga Foods (Kenyan Startup)

Three years ago, on the stage of an international pitch competition, I stood in front of judges and a thousand entrants with a single PowerPoint slide of a banana, which simply stated: “This is a Banana”. Its simplicity got a big laugh.

When in the African e-commerce space players were aiming for tens of thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs), our banana revenue alone made us one of the largest tech commerce players in Kenya. While we are doing more than bananas now, it is worth keeping in mind that the average Kenyan household buys about 50 different consumer products a month.

To build a unicorn startup in Africa — a relatively small consumer economy — you had better be in a segment with a lot of spending.

Say no: We are good at saying no as an organisation. Lots of people want to partner with us, use us to distribute their products, to build things on our platform, to photo op with us, and so on. We are not easily distracted from our core objective of ‘selling bananas’. I was once given the academic advice: “Early in your career, say something specific about something specific, and once you do that, you can say it all.” The same holds for business: do something specific about something specific, and a few years down the line you can do it all.

Founded in 2014, Twiga Foods is a business to the business food distribution startup that builds fair and reliable markets for agricultural producers and retailers through transparency, efficiency, and technology. The startup is one of the best-funded on the continent,

Deji Oduntan, former CEO Gokada, (Nigerian Startup)

Build a Base then Tell Your Story

There’s a phrase that goes, ‘Build it and they will come’. I’m here to tell you it’s a lie! Build customer confidence and loyalty in your product(s)/service and once you do, tell your story with pride. Gokada had a strong organic social media following of tens of thousands before we began any serious PR work. The story is sweeter when the customer base is already in existence and it’s this customer-centricity that has sprouted significant investor interest in the industry and Gokada specifically, as news of this recent funding round indicates.

Be Laser Focused

Prior to Gokada, I led Customer Experience efforts at Jumia, where I imbibed a very important lesson: Know your target market and be laser focused. No service can work for the entire market, or indeed Nigerians, as we are a diverse people. Thus, identify a target customer segment and accelerate to product-market fit in the shortest possible time. To do this requires a lot of qualitative research and hypothesis testing. Don’t be afraid to spend time and resources into gathering insights quickly and effectively. It could be make or break.

Bank on Trust

Behavioral change was critical to the branding efforts I drove at Gokada. How do you take a nascent and almost non existent industry and turn it into an industry with promise of a sustainable future in Nigeria? I led with trust, by using operational excellence and social media to position Gokada as a brand worth trusting. We dispelled a lot of mistrust in the market about motorcycle taxis by promoting safety, cleanliness (we introduced disposable hair nets to the sector after recognizing the concerns and superstitions people had about sharing helmets) and verified drivers. This trust system was central to Gokada’s success over the past 14 months.

Nigerian Lagos-based on-demand motorcycle taxi app Gokada has proven to be up to the game. The startup has raised US$5.3 million in Series A funding with a plan to expand the number of its motorbikes and available drivers, increase its daily ride numbers as well as grow the startup ‘s team.

Onyeka Akumah — Founder, Farmcrowdy, Nigeria

In 2015, I was looking at investing in Agriculture. I wanted to work with a farmer and trying to decide which farmer to work with, which one I would be able to invest in and he would get the work done so I can get the return on investment after the harvest. I got in touch with one of my co-founders (Ifeanyi Anazodo) and asked if he could help me identify someone to work with. We met a lot of farmers. While they were talking, I noticed that they had certain challenges they were facing — access to funding, technical know-how to improve their yields, and market access to sell whatever it is they produce. That became for me an opportunity to see how I could connect these farmers with so many other people interested in investing in agriculture beyond me, that were constantly told by this (Nigerian) administration to invest in agriculture.

He advises every startup to shun these common mistakes:

One mistake was that we raised money and felt like we could change the model immediately. It’s a mistake that many people make when they raise money or have a bit of breakthrough. It’s advisable to create your niche and stay on it. And even if you raise money, just amplify the efforts of what it is you’re doing.

One of the things that happened with Farmcrowdy is, even when we raised money, the 5 farms we started with remain the 5 farms we run till today. Although we are in a better position to scale our operations into other things and add new farms. Don’t change your model, especially if what you’re doing is working. You can add one or two things, but it’s important that you maintain what you’re doing that is working.

The second thing is, as much as I had brilliant people working with me, I was the only founder. I didn’t have people to bounce ideas off, rather I had people I only dished out instructions to execute what I had spent my time working on. Do not travel alone, that’s something I would tell everyone. You need people with complementary skill sets.

Three is when you raise money, you have to raise more. Even if you don’t have an active window for investors to come in, you need to be providing updates to potential investors that want to come in. So, it’s not when you want to raise money that you start having conversations. Let people already know your business before you have those conversations.

The other thing is, I promised myself that whatever I do again, it must be something that is making money from the onset. I’m not going to wait 3 years before I look at how to make money with any business. It must be something that I can see the margins already. It doesn’t have to make us profitable from day one, but at least I know that if we are able to get to a certain level in our operations, we will break even.

Zodidi Gaseb, Founder African Naturals, (Namibian Startup)

Save up as much as you can and network like your life depends on it. Tap into your network and finally, go to as many workshops as you can to brush up on your business knowledge. Always remember why you started when things get tough.

Jacqueline Shaw, Founder African Fashion Guide, Ghana

You are defined by the actions you take not the dreams you make. Because your actions are the antidote to fear, just feel the fear and do it anyway, be extraordinary in your thinking and your actions to stay relevant and to stand out in the crowd. As entrepreneurs we define the game we want to win, we are only limited by our imagination, so think bigger, and then think bigger than that.

Finally, as Nelson Mandela said, there is no passion to be found playing small, in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. Because when you are uber passionate about your WHY then your goals become non-negotiable.

Jason Njoku, Founder Iroko Tv, Nigeria

In mid 2015 I had a problem. We were months away from running out of money and needed to do something. There was no commercial solution. We needed to invent our way out of this. We had an Android app that sucked and needed to reallocate capital to product and engineering in NY in order to try and invent the future. We had just launched the channels with StarTimes and they were totally pissed at us for under performing and being a dysfunctional organisation. The deal was at real risk. Our foray into linear TV was turning into a total nightmare. Terrible start. I was living in NY, trying to lead the efforts to build our Android app.

For someone untuned to the sometime chaos of creation, IROKO was a mess. To make matters worse, I wasn’t even in Lagos. I was causing all this havoc from NY. I would drop in unannounced for a few days and retrench entire divisions. Rumours of a coup d’etat were reaching me from Lagos.

This was right in the middle of the due diligence for the $19m content and capital fund raise that closed a few months later. If I was a seasoned executive with experience, I probably would have found a way to not give people the impending sense of gloom and implosion over at IROKO, whilst negotiating the biggest deal of my life. Alas, I am not sophisticated like that. I am a simple man. I needed to reallocate capital.

But hey. It could also fail. Woefully. Nonetheless. It’s all about that deep experimentation nature and being comfortable with the 90% failure rates. But what I know now is if that were to happen, we at IROKO would fully embrace it. Accept our role in it. Do a full autopsy and then institutionalise it.