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The next African story will be written by Africans, and there are people crafting the narrative now. Join Dotun as he hosts a series of conversation with people whose ideas and work is shaping the African future.
[00:00:00] Dotun O: Hey, Elo. Welcome to the Building A Future Podcast again.
[00:00:03] Elo U: Thank you Dr. D for having me. It's always a pleasure. The last time I did this with you, it was loads of fun. Please, no difficult questions.
[00:00:11] Dotun O: That will always be difficult, but nice, interesting questions. And we've got a lot to actually go over today. The idea behind the season of the podcast is for me to retrace some of the conversation I've had before and scaffold it around the evolution of the African technology ecosystem.
[00:00:28] Dotun O: When I started the podcast, then a lot of people were in the middle of their journey or just starting and the questions that was being asked then were mostly how did you start? What are you doing and how do you see the future? I think some of the future that we talked about then has happened now
[00:00:41] Dotun O: and if there's any company or anybody that I think represent that journey of an African technology ecosystem, both from ideating very early on and also building a very scalable business that has gone beyond Nigeria, even outside the continent. Is you. It's someone like you has [00:01:00] that view. . So my first question for you is this:
[00:01:02] Dotun O: One of the features of a strong entrepreneur is their reactiveness or the ability to move fast and react to market dynamics. Your company has evolved over time. You tampered with both the technology, your model and all the things that you've done.
[00:01:17] Dotun O: How did you build those skills? What are the key capabilities that you personally built and your team, evolving your company to react and adapt to those changes.
[00:01:27] Elo U: Yeah Dotun thought you said they're gonna be hard questions. Okay just reflecting a little bit. I think something that is quite important is that people need to ask themselves the question, why am I doing what I'm doing? It comes down to that and why am I spending a significant portion of my time doing what I'm doing There are tons of things that we can do in an order, right? There's family who we can spend a bunch of our time and we may not get bored. But there is also finding something we absolutely love, But it's not really about finding the thing that we love. The thing that drives you to achieve outsized success, blow things up 10 [00:02:00] X is staying in love with something.
[00:02:01] Elo U: And at the core of it you're going to create, or if you're going to contribute to creation best, believe it. You have to love that stuff. You have to absolutely love it. And to stay in love with something requires a humility that goes beyond you. Essentially. You sacrifice yourself for that thing. That's what it comes down to.
[00:02:20] Elo U: But if you're doing it for the wrong reasons,
[00:02:21] Elo U: You end up fueling your ego, you stop listening to your most important stakeholder. Who's that?
[00:02:26] Elo U: Your customer. Because you don't build a company with the sole intention of making money. If that is your objective, you will not listen to the customer. You'll be very short term focused. You will not put yourself on the line for it. You will not have the humility to change the course when you need to. And we don't exist by ourselves in the world. Things would always change and things would always impact what we're doing. I'm very happy about the changes in the market ecosystem over the last year, or no, it's going to two years, right?
[00:02:55] Elo U: The markets crashed. The covid liquidity is going away. This music has [00:03:00] stopped. You can no longer fake if you can stay in love with the venture, if you can stay in love with the business. So critically, how do you change the course?
[00:03:08] Elo U: How do you evolve? To do that, this long story is the best summary I can find, and it starts with the entrepreneur.
[00:03:16] Dotun O: It's interesting, this is very consistent with a lot of conversation I've had with you , that building a company starts from you your stamina as an entrepreneur and going to the core fundamental, why am I doing this?
[00:03:27] Dotun O: And asking that question I really want to double click on it. Building a product is different from building a company. And building for the right reasons, staying the course because that journey is tough. You've gone through a lot of that, you started with advertising, ad network, and then our customer data. You started with yourself, that core thing. You say, this is who I am, this is what I want to build and this is why I'm doing this.
[00:03:50] Dotun O: But how do you then build a company around that?
[00:03:53] Elo U: Let's find a rough definition of what a company is. A company takes division [00:04:00] of a founder, or a team of founders and brings it to life while building other support services around that vision. n a vision and you brought it to life technically right? However, there are several things that you need to build around that product. For the product to sustainably test within the target market vertical that is supposed to serve, make adjustments Quickly,
[00:04:24] Elo U: double down on the winds, learn from the failures.
[00:04:28] Elo U: And this takes significant preparation. This takes interaction between teams,
[00:04:32] Elo U: and this takes multi-layer stakeholder engagement, to get the company to be less of a product or a pure vision and start getting on it way to becoming a real company.
[00:04:44] Elo U: The founder has to embed his own idea of culture, of mission, of purpose. We don't talk enough about our purpose as founders,
[00:04:53] Elo U: We talk about the mission. We see market opportunity. We get excited to start to chase it, but we don't talk enough about what is our purpose
[00:04:59] Elo U: My [00:05:00] purpose 14 years ago when I became an entrepreneur, and my purpose today is very different. In fact, I'm going through the second attrition of my purpose.
[00:05:08] Elo U: In the first six, seven years of my journey as an entrepreneur, I was essentially just running a race of, I need to get far away from poverty. I was the real leader. I went through an evolution, right? When I started understanding the elements that put together a company, we hadn't raised Series A when I decided that we needed to have a board and we set up a proper board. We have a five
[00:05:26] Elo U: five man board.
[00:05:27] Elo U: And of the five board members excluding the investors and one of the board member, I didn't know them before I reached out to them to serve on the board. So it's not a board of a few people that you are very conversant with.
[00:05:38] Elo U: Why is that a problem? That is a problem because when you know somebody. Or somebody's your friend when a person gives you feedback, emotions gets drawn into it. When you don't know somebody, that person's not a friend. When a person gives you feedback, you take it for the substance of the feedback, right?
[00:05:51] Elo U: It's useful to have a friend type character give you the same feedback, but you bounce that against your board members. You find that at the end of the day, the [00:06:00] decision you tend to make. And your board is not gonna make your decisions for you. Nobody, investors aren't gonna make decisions for you. Other shareholders independent board members will not make decisions for you.
[00:06:08] Elo U: You remain. The core decision maker. What it does for you is that it sharpens the decision making because there's a lot of perspectives. Perspectives that are driven by years and years of experience.
[00:06:17] Elo U: When I talk to founders, they talk about, oh, I don't wanna have board members. They take away my business from me. I say it today, right? And I think anybody can take this to the bank. Your business is not yet a company if you don't have governance in place. I think that it's categorical. People say they wanna build a company. How do you build a company you wanna sell and you run the company by yourself for five years? Put yourself in the other person's shoes, or put yourself in investors' shoes.
[00:06:41] Elo U: You wanna raise capital, you wanna sell the company in five to 10 years. You want to have the government look at your company. You want your customers to be confident that you are the sort of company they wanna be associated with in the long term.
[00:06:52] Elo U: When I became a founder, I became a founder because I saw an opportunity and I wanted to pursue that opportunity. We were lucky enough, we became [00:07:00] successful.
[00:07:00] Elo U: When we started to think about some of the lessons of the first few years, we realized that we didn't quite have a company. We had a mobile advertising platform. It was in four markets, but we just went about things. It was great. It was good. But we thought it could be more, and we wanted to solve for going faster.
[00:07:15] Elo U: A company is not yet a company if it doesn't deliver a platform for sustained wealth creation. Think that's critical. And we have many examples of that in Nigeria, right? We all bank at one or some of the s. Each of the FUGA were started in this country. the FUGAs were started around the same time I was leaving secondary school.
[00:07:33] Dotun O: the Fuga are
[00:07:34] Elo U: first bank, UBA, GTB, access bank and Zenith bank. Those guys constitute 60 70% of financial services customers in Nigeria. But those banks, 25 or so, going to 30 years ago didn't exist.
[00:07:45] Dotun O: Some
[00:07:46] Elo U: Some of them, yes. But each of them has gone through some sort of iteration.
[00:07:49] Elo U: Iteration.
[00:07:50] Dotun O: And pivots.
[00:07:51] Elo U: pivots. They didn't exist the way they are today. A majority of them were founded around this time. I'm talking about four out of five or three out of four. One was acquired. Anyway. [00:08:00] What's the story? The story here is that this banking platforms have become significant wealth creators.
[00:08:05] Dotun O: and not just for the founders and the management,
[00:08:07] Elo U: Yes. For every stakeholder. For every stakeholder. For employees. Think about building a business where somebody has a career of 20 years within that business and rises to the top, becoming a managing director and to become a managing director.
[00:08:19] Elo U: Has transitioned from, with all due respect to maybe
[00:08:23] Elo U: Akute
[00:08:24] Elo U: to live in Ikoyi and has done it on that platform of this financial institution. We are the founders are people that we can see in our society. So when technology, investors, technology founders go about screaming on social media about how they made money, yeah.
[00:08:39] Elo U: They've not done nothing.
[00:08:40] Dotun O: Until you build sustainable wealth,
[00:08:42] Elo U: You have Yeah. Until you, we have built sustainable wealth creating platforms. We have done absolutely nothing.
[00:08:47] Dotun O: You are really touching on something that I wanted to go into you and I've discussed this several times, what does exit mean in Africa how do you optimize for the right enterprise value exit that creates that wealth [00:09:00] creation platform for employees, early investors, and the founders.
[00:09:04] Elo U: We built a business organically. Got it up to not of $5 million in revenues and a hundred people, and we did it in six years without a penny of our side capital.
[00:09:12] Dotun O: so for five years you bootstrap the business to $5
[00:09:16] Elo U: More than $5 million.
[00:09:17] Dotun O: one and 5 million revenue.
[00:09:18] Elo U: to seven. So it was ranging between five and $7 million
[00:09:21] Dotun O: recurring revenue.
[00:09:22] Elo U: revenues with
[00:09:23] Dotun O: With zero external capital,
[00:09:25] Elo U: zero external capital. When we got to the heights, we were about close to seven.
[00:09:30] Elo U: And then in fact, the pointer that we had lost the plot was that we started eroding value. Our revenue started to come down. And it came down to five. We saw that growth was slowing.
[00:09:39] Elo U: We saw that we had platooned in some parts of the business and we needed to figure out what next.
[00:09:44] Dotun O: And is that because of the market or You're not executing enough? Or what The opportunities out there
[00:09:48] Elo U: We were executing, but it was more a question of we were chasing a mobile advertising opportunity that had matured and consolidation had happened.
[00:09:56] Elo U: Consolidation happened before I, two to three years prior. When [00:10:00] consolidation happen, we weren't even thinking a consolidation was happening. Today, we are in the cloud data platform space. For Africa? First of all, to play on the application layer in the cloud, you need to have a minimum three years head start, right? If you are gonna play on the applications layer of the cloud, you need to have three years, head start. The cloud opportunity in Africa.
[00:10:17] Elo U: By 20 26, 20 27 is done.
[00:10:19] Dotun O: wrapped up the
[00:10:20] Elo U: wrapped up and closed. Closed, yep. It's done. the technology will start to disappear. When technology starts to disappear, value has been created and people have captured that value.
[00:10:28] Dotun O: You mean the advantage or the leverage that technology has will be disappearing,
[00:10:32] Elo U: start to disappear.
[00:10:33] Elo U: For cloud. For cloud, yes. Because for social has disappeared because social is not the way of life. When technology is now part of how we. Value. Real value has been created. In 2010, we took MTN, Nigeria's social Media Business. Remember, MTN sponsored that World Cup. Were global sponsors of the World Cup, South Africa World Cup.
[00:10:52] Elo U: We created significant value, took MTN from zero social media flows on Twitter on different platforms to 500,000 during the World [00:11:00] Cup. We know how much value we created as part of our mobile advertising proposition. In fact, after that World Cup, we spun off our agency business, which was a managed service business that launched one of the pioneer digital agencies in Africa. This was in 2010. How many people had smartphones at the time? These are just snapshots of my experience and my journey. That has led to some sort of evolution. So personality wise, you need to realize the reasons why you're doing what you're doing, right? We fast forward to 2018, raised capital
[00:11:29] Dotun O: First of all, what led you to raising capital?
[00:11:31] Elo U: We learned from our first experience, our first missionary journey, raising capital is our second missionary journey, right? We didn't realize when consolidation was happening.
[00:11:38] Elo U: Mobile advertising consolidation happened, passed us by, we didn't know why, because we're not a company. To be a company. You would hear from your investors, you'll hear from your board members, you'll hear from your employees. They're different stakeholders. You hear from your customers. We didn't understand, we were not yet a real company. When you lose the opportunity, we looked at what we had created and we figured that the most important [00:12:00] asset that we had was data. Because we existed pre privacy. So if you exist pre privacy, you have a whole bunch of data on people, right? And we went through the privacy journey in the last five years. Every year it gets tighter and tighter. This year, cookies will stop. Cookies goes away.
[00:12:13] Elo U: So being able to weave all this data, we felt that to do that we needed to build a business that is. Cloud facing,
[00:12:20] Dotun O: and that requires you raising capital
[00:12:22] Elo U: because we needed to do it faster.
[00:12:24] Dotun O: Faster. Okay. So that's what I want to get. So you raise money because you are exploring new opportunity where you have some leverage with the data.
[00:12:32] Dotun O: Exactly.
[00:12:32] Dotun O: And you needed to then do it faster and raising external capital beyond your balance sheet.
[00:12:39] Dotun O: We are happy to do that.
[00:12:40] Elo U: I remember when we started off we probably had one to $2 million on our balance sheet when we started this journey of cloud
[00:12:45] Elo U: because
[00:12:46] Elo U: because didn't go out to the market thing or we wanted to, we had already started building out for the cloud with our own cash from our previous business. And we doubled down on it and we've realized that we needed to raise more capital. So we continue moving fast. We went out and raised the [00:13:00] capital.
[00:13:00] Dotun O: What sort of leverage do you have at that point as a founder who is raising money pre $5 million revenue, $2 million in the bank, proven to some extent proven product market fit or good understanding of the next product market fit that you're going for, what sort of leverage do you have when you are negotiating that deal and valuation?
[00:13:20] Elo U: So speaking, I didn't think about it in that way. If I was gonna do it again, would I do it the same way? Yes, I would. I think we raised we're one of the first companies to raise venture. I think we raised around the same time as Andela. So that would be 20 17, 18. So how do we think about it? We thought about it as we have some revenues. These revenues are going to be legacy. We needed to recreate the future of our business. we were confident that we could tie up the application space.
[00:13:46] Elo U: What were we solving for?
[00:13:47] Elo U: We needed a mechanism that gives us an enterprise value that is fair, a cap table that puts us in a very healthy and strong position over the next two to four years. We needed a cap [00:14:00] table that optimizes for the management or employees. So the first thing we did was we took 20% of the company and give to employees.
[00:14:08] Dotun O: You created a new option pool, 20%. To the employees? Yes.
[00:14:11] Elo U: of the company. Before we raised first round of capital, we already had an option pool. That option pool was an option pool that, myself and my co-founders created before any investor coming into business.
[00:14:20] Elo U: But that option pool didn't have integrity, right? When we raised the integrity increased a bit because there's external capital, right? There's some sort of liquidity that gave us a chance to also distribute some money so that people can see that things are real. What we didn't realize was how hard it was gonna be to build out, since speaking, I don't think it was hard because it took us five years
[00:14:40] Elo U: years
[00:14:41] Elo U: to build out a $5 million business. It has taken us about five years to build out a business that is more than five times five in revenue times. So has going faster worked with external capital?
[00:14:51] Elo U: The
[00:14:51] Elo U: The answer, absolutely.
[00:14:52] Dotun O: Because you wouldn't have achieved that five times
[00:14:55] Elo U: wouldn't have achieved that
[00:14:56] Dotun O: with, without the
[00:14:57] Elo U: external.
[00:14:57] Elo U: Without the external capital, which
[00:14:58] Dotun O: is a combination of just a cap, [00:15:00] not just a capital, but combination of capital advice and governance. Absolutely.
[00:15:04] Elo U: Absolutely.
[00:15:05] Dotun O: So there is something there which I just wanna call out, which is external capital from good investor compounds.
[00:15:11] Dotun O: It's not just the capital, but their stake in the business their own time that they want to put in because they now have a stake in the business. And you mentioned something at the beginning of this conversation, that one of the job of a CEO or a founder is to be able to see every information around from your stakeholders.
[00:15:27] Dotun O: Remove every emotion from it and make a decision. But you make good decision. By having the right input
[00:15:33] Dotun O: What is the right enterprise value or in another word, exit that entrepreneurs in Africa should be aiming for?
[00:15:40]
[00:15:40] Elo U: Personally. This is what I work on. If you raise $1 million of venture , in fact not venture, whatever, you raise $1 million of it in equity, kindly be prepared to return 10 times one in enterprise value. The formula for it is. Every CEO founder, whatever name you want to have, if you raise. $20 million [00:16:00] worth of capital at the minimum, kindly be working towards returning 20 times 10.
[00:16:05] Elo U: So if you raise 20 million, your enterprise value needs to be 200 million.
[00:16:09] Elo U: If you raise 1 million, your enterprise value needs to be 10 million. If you raise 5 million, your enterprise value needs to be 50 million.
[00:16:15] Dotun O: Interesting.
[00:16:16] Elo U: That is, the model. We at tarragon are working towards the same.
[00:16:20] Dotun O: Hopefully
[00:16:21] Elo U: we will get there
[00:16:22] Dotun O: and
[00:16:23] Elo U: we'll do everything possible to get there. Because what does that do? What does it do for the guys who are younger? If you build a company the right way the first time and you hit 10 x. Venture raise or 10 x capital raised in exit, and you have 10% of it.
[00:16:36] Dotun O: if
[00:16:36] Elo U: If it's a hundred million, you have $10 million.
[00:16:38] Elo U: If it's 10 million, you have $1 million. And you do this and you're done at 35. I was in a similar position. I have been in that position. What I gonna use the money for, promise you, you're not gonna use for nothing.
[00:16:48] Dotun O: What do you mean by that?
[00:16:51] Elo U: You're not gonna use for anything.
[00:16:52] Dotun O: If you have $10 million at 35,
[00:16:54] Elo U: if you have 10 million at 35, what are you gonna use it for? You're gonna keep staying in love with something else. You're gonna [00:17:00] start throwing money at that thing. You're gonna start solving another problem.
[00:17:03] Elo U: you wanna start a company, go and find one co-founder, two co-founders, and try to build something that is very big, huge. When you hit $25 million in EV
[00:17:12] Dotun O: million,
[00:17:13] Elo U: million in ev, anything above $25 million money doesn't matter anymore.
[00:17:17] Dotun O: That's dependent on how much you own in the business, right? Or even if you own 10%,
[00:17:21] Elo U: When you're starting a company, the shareholders are three people for the shareholders for simplicity of the maths.
[00:17:25] Elo U: Two people. You come into the business, you split 60 40
[00:17:29] Elo U: as far as the opportunity is huge. When you hit $25 million in EV and you're going towards $50 million in ev you remember, you talk about compounding, it doesn't matter anymore,
[00:17:37] Dotun O: but the EV is validated by external investors.
[00:17:39] Elo U: validated by external investors, yes. But even an external investor come in 60 40, they take 10, 10 out. So that's 50, 30, 20 goes to investors, right? Ev hits has $25 million. Another person has 30% have $10 million, right? First round of capital or second round, you go to the next round is $250 [00:18:00] million. What do you have? The person who has 25 goes to $125
[00:18:04] Dotun O: Oh. Diluted for other stuff.
[00:18:06] Elo U: But it goes up to $105 million, right?
[00:18:08] Elo U: you rewind back to think about when you started and you wanted to own the entire hundred and investors came, you wanted to optimize for enterprise value without having created value, right?
[00:18:17] Dotun O: Investors
[00:18:18] Elo U: also have a shitload of responsibility in this, in fact, I think founders have less of the responsibility here.
[00:18:25] Elo U: Investors have a lot of the responsibility in setting price
[00:18:28] Dotun O: And certain price, but also because what point I was trying to get is certain inspection on ev because in the last three years, everybody has gone through. Unicorn mania, where it's unicorn or nothing.
[00:18:38] Dotun O: It is very obvious that we cannot have as much billion dollar exit within a short time span compared to the other market like America, where there are loads of. Opportunities either strategic buyers or a sophisticated public market that can take those businesses.
[00:18:53] Dotun O: What sort of enterprise value should a startup entrepreneur be aiming for in Africa within [00:19:00] less than 10 years of starting a business?
[00:19:02] Elo U: I was fortunate to be appointed an executive and resident at Legals Business School. one of my responsibilities, of course, is research. And one of the things I want to interrogate further is how do we solve for liquidity of capital on the continent?
[00:19:14] Elo U: The question you ask around enterprise value cannot be answered in isolation of liquidity on the continent, Liquidity, first of all in the local market ecosystem. And every market goes through this progression. At a time when we went into India India had liquidity challenges.
[00:19:27] Elo U: Today it's not so much, right? There are more Indian startups that have exited in India rather than out of India. It's just easier to manage, right? If you have your potential acquirers as people who are very close to your ecosystem, Or are within your ecosystem. So the question of ev, we cannot respond to it entirely, If we do not think about the broad question of the liquidity or capital, then the second part to it is if you have raised a million dollars doing revenues of a million dollars, you have a phenomenal business, that business, you can essentially exit it at 10 x, 10 times venture raise, and 10 times revenue,
[00:19:59] Dotun O: [00:20:00] which is
[00:20:00] Elo U: fantastic.
[00:20:01] Dotun O: So
[00:20:02] Elo U: this obsession with building out a unicorn I'm not sure. When you look at unicorn type businesses that have listed on the nasdaq,
[00:20:08] Elo U: it's been a mixed bag.
[00:20:10] Elo U: The past 20 years of the global ecosystem
[00:20:13] Dotun O: it's
[00:20:13] Elo U: is gonna be very different from the next 20.
[00:20:16] Elo U: And I think that by now our ecosystem should be aware that, winter is coming, in fact we're in winter. Winter has come and I think it is gonna be an extended winter, How we did things in the last few years is not how we're gonna do things in the future,
[00:20:29] Elo U: so it needs to be a balancing act, the balancing act of building a very responsible business. Thinking about your purpose as a founder, as an entrepreneur as a CEO, we've given an example of 10 million of venture raised, and you need to return 10 x of that venture raised and 1 million revenues. And we're also giving the example of 1 million of venture raised and 1 million of revenues.
[00:20:48] Elo U: Who would you rather be with, You can make that choice by yourself
[00:20:51] Dotun O: and it was to how you capitalize the business from the beginning.
[00:20:54] Elo U: It's critical
[00:20:55] Dotun O: and the expectation you set for yourself at the
[00:20:57] Elo U: these are things that people need to think about [00:21:00] before they even start to make decisions on capitalization.
[00:21:02] Dotun O: I want to pivot a little bit , there's a uniqueness in Africa that we have to be conscious of whether we like it or not. This startup in, in Africa solving the same problem, the same product, is not intrinsically the same as the one solving that problem in America.
[00:21:16] Dotun O: What are the learnings that you have from selling into large enterprises on the continent. ' cause for someone who selling to large enterprise in America, they have a different perspective how they be their business development team, how they map out the opportunities compared to you
[00:21:31] Dotun O: what are the lessons and what are the differences that you observed?
[00:21:34] Elo U: like to tell real stories, right? there's nothing theoretical about my responses. So when race series B, we spoke to more than 60 investors. why was it difficult? Because investors should know that, oh, if there's no application layer in Africa for the cloud, there'll be no AI in Africa on the enterprise side. That's basic primary one stuff, right? But nobody got it. Why didn't they get it? They didn't get it because we didn't architect our business for the us. We architected our [00:22:00] business because we looked at our value chain. The African value chain and the American value chain, is totally different. It's like night and day. I have. Two of my ex-colleagues that have founded companies in the US and they said, if you take out the network element, which is a critical element, the network that has relationships that is super easy to build in America because they have built with me Terragon will not be Terragon today if those people are not Terragon. If you take out the relationship element, the network element, this is super easy to build. Why? Because the value chains are mature in every value chain. There are at least five to seven companies that are on the NASDAQ solving for that value chain.
[00:22:34] Dotun O: And the customer segment is well defined and the pricing is well understood.
[00:22:38] Elo U: everything is very clear. You just take a small niche and you create significant value. I have not spoken about GDP per capita, which is another kettle of fish, right?
[00:22:47] Elo U: And
[00:22:47] Elo U: G Capital is something that we don't even think about when we're raising capital. You have a GD per capita, for instance, on mobile that is maybe a dollar or $2. Then in the US $17 and we want to raise at the same EV as the US player.
[00:22:58] Dotun O: And so how do you [00:23:00] approach that market? How do you do the business development or capture that segment of the market
[00:23:04] Elo U: Investors when investing in Africa need to think about our capital as patient capital on the enterprise side. They need to consider seriously being patient. They depend too much on the quality of the product that they have funded to be built. But it's not true. The product that's currently solving that problem for the customer has also its own accumulated goodwill .
[00:23:21] Elo U: Switching that out takes time, right? So first of all, patience is critical on both the investor side and on the CEO side. It takes a village to build an enterprise business. But I think that there's a lot of opportunity to improve value chains for enterprise businesses.
[00:23:33] Elo U: There's a lot of opportunities to sell businesses into enterprises, large enterprises. There's a lot of opportunity for scale up to buy startups.
[00:23:41] Elo U: I tell the guys in Terragon from us today that Terragon is not, startup stage. We're a skill up . We can look at startups and acquire them. For all sorts of businesses, startups, to think that they can go from $1 million in revenues and get to a hundred million dollars in revenues. It takes forever. It takes a while, but if you go together, can you go further [00:24:00] out?
[00:24:00] Elo U: So these are some of the elements I think. I think there are other nuances in selling into enterprises but one thing that is very important is to have a multi-pronged strategy being very patient and of course solving a very big problem.
[00:24:11] Dotun O: You've done businesses across Africa. You actually used to live in Kenya. You've also launched a company in India. So you have very good perspective of the global south a lot of time we compare Nigeria with either India or Latin America as the closest market we can use as proxy.
[00:24:28] Dotun O: What are the differences in your opinion, between. Africa, and I'm using Africa as the monolith to some extent, versus India versus some of the key countries in Latin America in terms of market development
[00:24:39] Elo U: That's a very good question. When I look at India, India is the Nigeria. That works. It works. what does that mean? It means that we've gone through some challenges with sound here. There's driven by power outages. You will not get that in India. But when you go out on the street it looks exactly like this, like Lagos. And there's [00:25:00] maybe 10 x more people or five x more people, it just looks exactly like that.
[00:25:04] Dotun O: like what
[00:25:05] Elo U: power work you turn on the tap water is there, every home doesn't have to put up its own bore hole. are basic infrastructure stuff, right? But let's take that and put it in the venture, ecosystem.
[00:25:14] Elo U: How do you optimize for ev That was the question, right? If everything works in that sort of society, the chances of that society coming together from government to large enterprises, to scale ups to startups, to investors coming together to solve for multi-stakeholder value creation, I think the chances also improved. Here, and I think, and I tell my team this, it is difficult where every day you solve problems for yourself that you shouldn't be solving. It's also difficult for you to put your head together to solve a bigger problem. It takes double the effort to get people to, galvanize around a topic. So I don't have the answer. However, I don't think it's impossible to solve.
[00:25:54] Dotun O: I like to end my interview with two fire round questions, and one of them is, what view [00:26:00] did you hold before now that you no longer hold?
[00:26:03] Elo U: ? That one is a very simple one. It's about people.
[00:26:06] Dotun O: Tell me more.
[00:26:07] Elo U: That is what it comes down to. is leadership.
[00:26:10] Dotun O: getting a
[00:26:11] Elo U: CEO role, you have a business or you have a vision, you have a product. It starts to solve a problem. You start to build a company. Leadership comes down to your service of others and how they experience you. That is at the heart of it.
[00:26:23] Dotun O: And what has changed in the last few years for you in leadership?
[00:26:26] Elo U: that? That is what I work on every few years. My first missionary journey, my second missionary journey, and now I'm about to embark on a third by the grace of God. And that changes every time. One step in the third missionary journey was becoming an executive in residence at the LBS. So I think that this ecosystem will not get to where it is if we do not solve for two things. Number one is you need to have productive people at scale. We put together factors to production and create value from a business standpoint. We need to be able to solve for that. And to do that, one of the solutions [00:27:00] there is liquidity of capital where when people solve problems, they need to be able to scale up and scaling up doesn't mean your IPO.
[00:27:06] Elo U: Scaling up doesn't mean unicorn Scaling up means I can sell my business for $10 million into a business that's valued at $50 million and I sell it. We become bigger, we pursue larger opportunity, and we can potentially win together. That's an exit. You've created more value. So you need to have those productive people.
[00:27:22] Elo U: Productive will at scale. What you're doing is productive. We are sharing experiences and these experiences will be available on mobile devices that is in everybody's hands and they'll be able to listen and learn. So we want to be able to do this in a formal structure where we have resources for research, we have resources in classrooms.
[00:27:38] Elo U: and then second part is people need to make money, wealth creation. For them to make money, we need to build out the capacity for liquidity.
[00:27:48] Dotun O: It's interesting you put it that way, that people need to make money. I smile when you say that because sometimes My Calvinistic viewpoint. We said money. Why are you talking about money? But I think about it actually
[00:27:58] Dotun O: that's our nations are [00:28:00] built.
[00:28:00] Elo U: Of course,
[00:28:00] Dotun O: generational wealth accumulated over many years many generation help countries to establish great GDP and production. The last question is, which book are you reading now or have you read lately?
[00:28:12]
[00:28:13] Elo U: Which book am I reading now? I'm always reading. sometimes I'm reading two books at a time. In December I read when Bread Becomes Air Poor Kalin,
[00:28:23] Elo U: Yeah.
[00:28:24] Elo U: a very different book but profound a book that we should all read. And my response to the last question, people need to make money. That book also helps you understand that it's not all about money.
[00:28:34] Elo U: Right now I'm reading simpler, better Strategy, Felix. Health, it's a Swiss technical name. He, but he runs the strategy department at HBS. he's the guy who came up with the whole thing around value stick, willingness to pay, willingness to sell price and cost construct, and how fluid you are moving that up, keeping them far apart from each other.
[00:28:55] Elo U: it's just a simpler model to thinking about strategy. So I'm reading [00:29:00] that. I'm reading also Duckworth
[00:29:03] Elo U: Professor of Psychology at the U Penn. She's the lady who has done extensive work on grit. The power of passion and perseverance. One of our concepts there is, there's excellence in the mundane.
[00:29:13] Elo U: There's several other things that she has in there. She came up with this whole thing, this whole idea of. It's not about being in love, it's about staying in love. Yeah, So I'm reading those two books. The great one is more, I read it more from a reference standpoint on several things, just from a communication, how I lead.
[00:29:28] Elo U: but the strategy one maybe I'm reading it a little bit more. I
[00:29:31] Dotun O: Thanks. Thanks a lot. It's always a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
[00:29:35] Dotun O: And I think what we've captured here is a minute detail of some of the things that you and I talk about over drinks. I hope the listeners have found this fascinating as well as I have.
[00:29:44] Dotun O: Think
[00:29:45] Elo U: we're doing what we have to do there's nothing about it being a favor if it's about people, if it's about making money, then we need to scale ideas. We need to scale experiences, and. You're contributing your bit, to that.
[00:29:55] Elo U: And I am just supporting you . Thank you for having me.
[00:29:58] Dotun O: Thanks, bro.