This Is My Next

In March 2019, when I was 21 and studying Law at the University of Lagos, I co-founded future.africa with Iyinoluwa Aboyeji (E)  and Olabinjo Adeniran, an opportunity I will forever be grateful for because it completely transformed my life.

Africa has been at an inflection point over the last few years, and we wanted to take action to move things forward. At the time, our goal was to catalyse necessary conversations about Africa’s future by outlining the problems and bringing together a community of the continent’s brightest who were interested in solving these problems. You can read about the mission in our announcement post here.

At the time, my primary role was Editor for the publication, which would help lead these crucial conversations. It was the perfect fit because in the years prior, I worked as a writer and content marketer for various startups and media platforms. I was very excited about the opportunity to apply the skills I’d developed since I started working at 16 in a new way.

Future Africa kicked off with great acclaim. We had a great time speaking to industry veterans, startup founders and people who were simply curious about what was happening in Africa, and documenting what we were learning. However, as we spoke to numerous stakeholders, we realised there was a critical funding and building gap, and we couldn’t stand on the sidelines, only sparking conversations. While conversations were essential, we wanted to do more, roll up our sleeves and get directly involved in building and shaping our continent's future.

After multiple meetings to brainstorm what exactly we could do, in 2020, we announced our evolution from being an online community shaping conversations about Africa’s future to a platform to support innovators actively building that future.

Our new goal was simple: partner with mission-driven innovators to turn the continent’s biggest challenges into global business opportunities by providing them with capital, coaching, and community support. This required a more robust team, and Dami Aderinto, Chuba Ezekwesili, Chine Ezekwesili, Tola Onayemi & Mayowa Olugbile came on board. We launched the inaugural  Future Africa Fund in January 2020 and went into the market to fundraise. In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the world as we knew it completely changed, and so did I. 

The plan was to raise money from Limited Partners and individuals worldwide, but when the pandemic started, conversations started to die down, and many emails went unanswered. Nobody knew what would happen in the world, and it was a crazy time to even think of investing in Africa. 

We had a pipeline of great entrepreneurs to fund, but suddenly, we weren’t sure we’d ever get the money to fund them. My role evolved during our transition because Future Africa had evolved. I became a lot more involved in setting up the operations to power our evolution, setting vision and strategy, joining E in conversations with other potential partners, managing his travel schedule, and then I became Chief of Staff. In this role, I did a little bit of everything, and I started to learn about the venture capital industry and how it worked through my conversations with E, who had raised funding for Andela and Flutterwave. During one of our random conversations, he explained the concept of Syndicate/Special Purpose Vehicles to me. I did more research about it and found the whole process fascinating, so when COVID hit, and everything seemed bleak, I had a wild idea: “Why don’t we build a community of people interested in funding African companies and then syndicate each deal?”. It seemed wild, crazy and impossible, but I thought we should at least try; thankfully, my colleagues came on board, and thus, the Future Africa Collective was born.

I dove headfirst into inhaling all the knowledge I could find about raising and deploying venture capital. The best part? My role offered me the opportunity to practice every single thing I was learning immediately. I learned to craft winning investment memos, find the best entrepreneurs to invest in, create a great investment process for entrepreneurs, coordinate due diligence, negotiate term sheets, run our internal investment committee meeting, set up investment vehicles, run the closing process, manage our community of co-investors and answer all their questions - which ranged from how investing would affect their taxes to how to wire their funds if they lived in Nigeria. Many Future Africa Collective members were first-time angel investors, and setting up the collective remains one of my proudest professional accomplishments. 

Over the next 2-3 years, I transitioned from Chief of Staff to Fund Principal, entirely focused on managing our investments and funds, and I grew in my role and confidence as an investor. I travelled all over the world to represent the company at conferences. I led the deployment of over $10 million into over 50 transformative companies, including Bamboo, Releaf, Shara, Smile Identity, Stitch, Stears, Tambua Health, Termii, Marketforce, and Moove, doing my part to ensure that we contributed towards closing the funding gap by being intentional about funding female founders. The goal was to invest at least $1m in women-led companies, and we smashed it! I also managed our fund operations and back office, and designed new fund structures in different jurisdictions across the globe to solve our peculiar needs. My learning was both broad and deep. I was stretched to do more than I ever believed I could, and I am forever grateful to my colleagues for their unwavering faith and belief in me. 

In December 2022, after completing the Newton Venture Fellowship, I knew it was time to leave Future Africa, take a sabbatical and discover what was next for me. 2023 and 2024 were my break years. I just lived. I moved to the United Kingdom and did some consulting here and there, but I spent most of my time praying and thinking about my new chapter. It is now time for me to return. 

My ultimate goal is to redefine the world of private investing and create products that help people ethically build, sustain, and multiply their capital while solving global challenges.

I’m currently raising a fund and launching a private wealth network (more details on this soon).

While working on these, I want to share everything I’ve learned about venture capital and everything I will learn while raising a fund. I’m writing this for the person I was in 2019, just learning about this world of venture capital and how to raise and deploy capital efficiently. Being a beginner is a superpower if you leverage it properly, and I am excited to begin again.

What can you expect from VClikeABC?

I'll be covering a little bit of everything: explainers, technical content, a no-holds-barred fundraising diary detailing my experience raising a fund and running the syndicate, advice for founders, thoughts about what’s happening in the industry, educational content, and perhaps later, some form of community and, who knows, maybe a bestselling book.

My goal: To make it simple for anybody from any background to understand the world of private capital and be able to raise funding or allocate funding if they wish to do so.

My path in venture capital has been very unusual, and I am a storyteller. I want to leverage these unique experiences to help others who might be considering a career in venture capital, angel investing, or starting a company to answer pressing questions they may have. 

When I participated in the Newton Venture Fellowship, we had to craft a fellow’s vision, and one of the goals I wrote was this: 

“Break barriers for emerging investors. It took blood, sweat and tears to create our fund in 2020, and I want to ensure that other investors don't have to go through the hurdles we faced. The plan is to build products that reduce the cost and knowledge barrier to starting new funds, especially  in emerging markets, and empower people to deploy capital into more companies.”

VClikeABC is my first step towards doing this. This is my next, and I am glad you’re here.

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