Ifechukwu Ogbuagu @ifechukwuogb

🙏🏿 Psalm 40.

We are rebuilding @NkaliFund slowly now. One coop deal at a time. I am learning so much from this process than all my other years as an entrepreneur or investor. We should stop copying stupid models from elsewhere and operate based on reality instead of wishful thinking.

I reviewed a deck for a friend yesterday and told him the same thing. I won’t invest in fintech again by myself unless I have the muscle of a teachers or firemen’s retirement fund. African payments is an infrastructure play but we labeled it wrongly as a startup opportunity.

It didn’t make sense for me not to play in the agent space and do the hardest part with the lowest rewards. This is why I never did any fintech play directly myself. The risks were high and the investments required were much.

I turned it around and explained to him why those companies would not survive and how things were skewed towards telcos in mobile payments. I wanted to solve for merchants while using agents to solve for distribution. MTN agents at the time got > 80% of their revenue.

The next thing he did surprised me. He wanted me to put $100k that I had into the companies that he had invested heavily into in Africa and then run them. At the time, two of those companies had the largest mobile money footprints in Africa with bigger numbers together than Mpesa

He asked me where I thought he got money to invest in companies from? I told him that I didn’t know and he told me that it was from teachers and firemen. His LPs were teachers and firemen retirement funds. He told me to go build something like that first or raise from them.

When I was trying to raise money to build an agent network 10 years ago, I met a US based veteran investor who listened carefully to my pitch and then told me that he won’t give me money because he wouldn’t be helping me to grow if he did. He told me to get the money from agents.

I'll be forever grateful to my PPA for sending me for this HIV Training in Abuja. All expense paid trip. Flight ✅️ Hotel✅️ Feeding✅️ God bless my RMO

Sustainable growth is not from handouts but from making money while doing things that also help others grow. Zero sum approaches don’t create true wealth because it is not sustainable.

The community got together to physically build them a house. It was an amazing thing. I have only seen that in movies of the Amish and older communities in the West. That was the foundation of their societies and why they still have social security funds. We killed off ours.

We had much more sustainable communities without poverty. Everyone worked hard and those who were unable to work because of health reasons or age were taken care of by those who could. I can’t forget a holiday in my mother’s village decades go. A young couple just got married.

There is a background to this tweet. My colleague Ayo, and I were discussing Zoho. He asked an important question. Why don’t our billionaires invest in tech or innovation? I told him that it is because they aren’t as wealthy as we think. One shift in policy and they are gone.

Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota

2 days ago

The wealthy African is a myth. You can’t have true wealth in the midst of so much dysfunction and poverty. True wealth grows exponentially and lifts all up.

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Genetics is wild. This boy is looking like my father daily. Even talks like him. I miss my dad and sometimes want to believe that reincarnation is real but I was the best in my class in genetics so I know it too well. We confused genetics for reincarnation.

You can’t grow that wealth exponentially without exploitation of the dysfunction. It becomes unsustainable as nobody likes suffering. People are becoming rich from fuel scarcity but people become wealthy from building railways and other infrastructure that grows everyone.

Tonte @tontebriggs

a day ago

You can make individual wealth…and be very wealthy in a dysfunctional system you played no part in creating

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I like unreasonable people. George Bernard Shaw - “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” I wrote an article on this many years ago.

In most of Africa, the market is already unreasonable. You can't make progress when you stick to reason. One of the things that shocked me was how financial services companies in Africa thrived in areas of conflict. Our first POS agent in an IDP camp did 100m Naira in 4 days.

Theories are excellent when you read them, but when the rubber meets the road, you will discard what Gbenga from Okokomaiko opined on Twitter and face life. Keep learning and keep building.

In all the talk here about building companies in Africa, my advice is to pray that they meet people with sense and make them team members. The wrong person can set you back personally for years, and you will blame the market or lack of investors. Don't be unequally yoked.

One of the most interesting startups I have met operating in Africa was a crop insurance company operating in the Sahel. Fascinating because the farmers they were insuring typically all supply one type of crop to a major beer brewing company. The brewer initiated the process.