Included VC 2021 Reflection: Hope Ditlhakanyane
Hope Ditlhakanyane joined Founders Factory Africa as a Venture Sourcing Lead in January 2021, and has since been promoted to Head of Venture Sourcing.
Although Hope started her role at the start of the formal curriculum, Hope gained an invaluable experience at Included VC; from the 101 Deep Dives, the Fellow chaired simulation investment committees to collaborating with other Fellows. Hear from Hope and how this experience helped her hit the ground running in her venture role.
Highlights include:
- 🤯 The three knowledge bombs from Included VC Partners that really got Hope thinking
- 🚀 Hope’s new hack from Included VC in building confidence
- 💛 How Hope would like to see the VC ecosystem transform
INVC: What were you doing when you were in the process of applying to Included VC?
HD: I was working as a venture partner for a nonprofit incubator, based in Ghana called MEST Africa. MEST Africa is a fantastic player in the African Tech ecosystem that brings exceptional young professionals from all over Africa for a free residential-based entrepreneurial training programme in Ghana. Post the programme, they pitch their business ideas in teams and should these represent high growth tech solutions, they receive pre-seed funding for $100k.
I would then work with the teams to move from idea to a business with paying customers, then support them with subsequent VC fundraising. For me, this was a great learning curve about the tech space and helped me meet key players and build founder communities. In hindsight, this allowed for a natural progression into VC.
INVC: What are three mic drop/ knowledge bomb moments from Included VC’s Partners that have really resonated with you?
HD: A huge knowledge bomb was from Matthew Goldstein, Managing Director at M12, during the first Included VC retreat when he mentioned the key thing to focus on in terms of building an incredible career in VC is to focus on building a track record of good deals. This has helped me plan how to track my own personal progress and know that the founder comes first. Providing value-add and building the right founder communities allows you to get into exciting deals, enabling you to extend funding to incredible innovators and world-changes. That is what VC is all about.
Another knowledge bomb from Matt was about how VC is structured differently to other industries. Learning cycles are longer than fund cycles, thus making a VC career uniquely challenging. Therefore, the playbook for building an effective career is different. You have to get comfortable with making decisions with way less information. You have to maintain intellectual honesty, clearly knowing when personal biases or opinions are influencing your perception of a deal and so much more.
Ore Adeyemi, Head of Strategic Innovation Investments at HSBC, also gave me some great advice in my 1–2–1 mentoring session. He mentioned the different skill sets you need at each stage of a VC career. As you start to move up, it’s about, ‘how do you then create space for others to be able to replicate that same success?’ For me, that’s thinking about how do you create more success stories, instead of just keeping all that knowledge to yourself? The philosophy of Included VC, which I share, is democratising that knowledge.
INVC: How have the Included VC Fellows helped contribute to your development?
HD: There are three Fellow moments I would choose to highlight from an emotional standpoint and also moments with Fellows that have really impacted my career through networking, knowledge and opportunity.
- A Fellow who made an impact during my time at Included VC is Lali. When I entered VC, it was an emotional transition, and primarily because you feel prepared for this industry, you come in, then you’re hit with imposter syndrome- things are always moving extremely fast! It can be really overwhelming, so having Lali to be a sounding board and talk through some of the challenges and get her advice on how she has approached some of the things has been fantastic.
- Kenneth, a fellow with fantastic knowledge of the East African VC ecosystem, helped me review a deal that I am actually in the process of closing. Having someone which this local market knowledge is helpful when analysing different opportunities.
- There was also Matt, super smart super connector, who is based in Asia but connected me to a local angel investor in Africa. The power of the Included VC ecosystem is how global it is!
INVC: How has Nikita/ Included VC shaped and contributed to the role you’re now in?
HD: I got into VC before the Included VC formal curriculum started, but for me, a lot of the sessions helped me hit the ground running. I’m not sure how effective I would’ve been without this knowledge because I didn’t know the do’s and don’ts of certain aspects of venture capital. For example, I learnt about more effective ways to source deals, how investment committees are run as well as fast-tracked perspective into analysing different business models.
I managed to facilitate the sourcing process into over 10 deals within my first 6 months, which landed me a promotion. I think the learnings from Included VC helped me do all this effectively as quickly as possible.
Another big part in which Included VC has contributed to my development, is my growth in confidence. Most times, representation helps people feel like they belong. There aren’t a number of women, let alone black women in VC. We are heavily underrepresented. A lack of representation can cause feelings of imposter syndrome. The Included VC community, especially Nikita, helped me really think about how to become better at leveraging my community, so that I don’t always feel the weight of any situation. There’s power and understanding that many other people may be able to help solve things that you’re struggling with. This has become a new hack in building up confidence.
The final aspect was being a part of a globalized community. Most of my connections were from Africa, but now I can proudly say I have incredible people I can connect to from Europe, Americas and Asia. That’s a powerful thing to be a part of. This alone has contributed to so much growth, and is something I am excited to see that Included VC will be continuing.
INVC: How would you like to see VC transform over the next 5/10 years?
HD: For me, I would like to see more gender diversification, because I think there isn’t enough of that, particularly in an African context where we are still trailing behind- less than 13% of the investments are still to women. To solve this, ecosystem players need to implement a robust gender-lens strategy.
Firstly, this starts with ensuring venture capital teams are as diverse as possible, because there’s power in diversity of thought, experiences and perspectives. Especially when trying to analyse investment opportunities, diversity allows you to see the unseen and truly choose innovative solutions that will disrupt industries. Many of the Included VC speakers spoke about how great deals often have non-consensus. You get this outcome when people see things differently but are able to use their differences in creating an informed opinion about the future. Having diverse teams is the starting point.
Secondly, diverse teams can bring in a breadth of diverse deals because they can source from different founder communities. This allows for distribution of opportunity that matches a distribution of talent, so regardless of your social class or association, you will be able to access funding.
Lastly, it is thinking about how opportunities really drive a massive positive impact on consumers, especially those from marginalised groups. There is a massive untapped $5Trillion opportunity in serving the “BoP” market. Women are driving more of the purchasing decisions. The black middle class is growing. All these shifts in consumer patterns, mixed with the development of technology, allows us to rethink the VC model of what “good” opportunities look like. The VC investments in the 5–10 years will be about finding the opportunities that solve problems at a massive scale.
INVC: How has Included VC exceeded your expectations?
HD: I’m one of those people who does a lot of research and reading but I didn’t expect to learn so much in such a short space of time and learn it all in multiple different ways! All of those nuggets from speakers who’ve been in industry for 15 years have definitely exceeded my expectations in terms of that.
The second layer is the diversity that exists within our cohort, and having people who come from very interesting backgrounds spread all over the world, and all being driven by this common purpose to want to do good. It’s definitely a cohort which is so collaborative!
Nikita’s personal commitment and sacrifice that she has made. It’s very hard to come by people who are so invested in other people’s growth and in the vision that they have to transform an industry. Included VC has really exceeded anything that I think any of us were expecting, so I will always be super grateful to her.
INVC: Three words to describe Included VC
HD: Diverse, impactful and transformative.
