Founder Collective Africa: The Mission
Making sense of building tech ventures in sub-Saharan Africa--from a founder's PoV
Welcome to Founder Collective Africa by me, Olumide “D.O” Olusanya (aka “D.O”).
I have a passion for Strategy, Startups, Tech Ventures, and building them in Sub-Saharan Africa and, therefore, spend an inordinate amount of time and attention reading, studying, understanding and deeply grokking these subjects as they relate to excelling in them from a founder’s perspective in Africa. My constituency for the Founder Collective Africa initiative—and on Twitter—is the young or first-time tech entrepreneur, who can’t seem to make sense of the noise that our tech ecosystem has become in Africa and is, therefore, challenged in effectively marrying what he reads about these subjects in foreign technology media, like TechCrunch—or the heavy output content engine of Silicon Valley’s Venture Capital industry—with the realities of the African terrain he is embedded in and from which he/she is building out his/her venture.
On the flip side, foreign investors newer to the African tech venture terrain who have strong interest in getting involved, or have recently just done so, or others participating—or with interest in participating—in related adjacencies outside of directly founding or directly investing in such ventures, in one form or another, are faced by this same problem: almost no credible place to go, no authentic source to reference and no original point of view with which to calibrate or make sense of what the African tech venture terrain is like or what it may require for one to succeed in it as a founder, investor or venture.
I have been writing about these subjects via my Medium account and, especially, my Twitter handle. However, these have been sporadic, without any form of cadence. Founder Collective Africa is my attempt at making the way I put out this content, which has now become very distinctive in the African tech venture “echo system” [pun intended], more deliberate and with a more predictable cadence. This also helps me to better give back to my constituency—young or first time African tech founders—in a more organised form. While I have always known I would embark on something like this, the specific inspiration to take the steps at this point came from the following:
1.) The very copious and very positive response to my Jumia Africa IPO analysis on Twitter. (It’s a long 120 tweets thread.) Most comments and feedback clearly indicated that it was the very best of the analysis of the Jumia IPO that was available globally, especially in the light of the events playing out in Jumia 5 months after I penned those tweets. Yet, I only covered the initial 40% of the IPO filing.
2.) This tweet by Erik Torenberg prompted me to carry out this Twitter survey to find out if this is something my constituency was indeed interested in and the feedback too was very positive. Hence, here we are.
Presently, I am Founder/CEO @PayPeckerHQ, The Digital Transformation Infrastructure for African Retailers and #QSRs. I also built the first Central Bank of Nigeria licensed payment switch; the first online realtime ePOS system in Nigeria; the first internationally-integrated realtime payment card solution in West Africa (MasterCard); rolled out Visa card products into 14 markets for United Bank for Africa; moved on from there to build Nigeria’s Biggest Online Supermarket (@Gloo.ng), which was pivoted to @Gloopro, Africa’s Premier eProcurement Platform for large enterprises, now on a mission to IPO on the LSE by 2024/25, where I am Founder/Chairman. If you are interested in my background, many things have been written about me and some of the ventures I’ve built. These are sourced from Forbes, CNN, The Washington Post, Financial Times, TechCrunch, Mashable, Medium, TheNextWeb, The Economist and TechPoint, to mention a few. You can follow me on twitter, where I’m most active!
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