Advice for Founders with Iyinoluwa Aboyeji
Meet Iyinoluwa
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji is the Co-founder of Andela and Flutterwave. He has been part of many successful businesses. Prior to starting Andela, Iyin co-founded Booknet.com, a social learning platform for sharing and organizing resources within learning communities, which was acquired by the Canadian Innovation Center in 2013. In the same 2013, along with some of his friends, he also co-founded Fora, a distance learning platform for African universities. When Fora didn’t really live up to expectation, Aboyeji and others then founded Andela.
The most impactful event in my life was on December 10, 2005. A few of my friends passed away in a plane crash despite crash-landing at an airport because the airport had no emergency fire trucks with water. These, my friends, were some of the most intelligent people I knew — and I would have been one of them but for the fact that I opted for a separate travel arrangement.
The incident made me realize that personal success cannot insulate you from the failures of your society. It also shaped how I handled business to this day. I don’t see entrepreneurship as a way to personally enrich myself but as a tool for social change. It must be done not just for profit or personal interest but most importantly as a service in the public interest.
Find great co-founders and work together on an important problem. These two things are indispensable.
Lots of people waste their time working on problems that don’t move the needle for people, products that don’t save them time or lives or give people much-needed opportunities. Stuff that doesn’t change their life. If you aren’t building something that’s ensuring prosperity and progress is within everyone’s reach, you may be successful but it won’t mean much in the grand scheme of things.
If you want to do important work you must have the courage to be disliked.
In Nigeria, there is no shortage of good people minding their business and trying to be at peace with all men. But these ‘good people’ are also the reason why our country has so many obvious problems.
I used to be one of these people so I know. These days I try really hard to make sure that I’m not just doing things to be liked. I say and do what I believe to be true at the time — regardless of who is offended or how unpopular it may be. I really couldn’t care less.
Firstly, I wish I understood the importance and uniqueness of African business modeling much earlier in my entrepreneurial career. I made a lot of mistakes tinkering around with impossible unit economics in tiny markets. I see a lot of well-funded giants still make some of the mistakes I made earlier in my career. But understanding the intricate relationships between value creation and value capture has been so important for me.
Secondly, I wish I knew that especially as entrepreneurs it is so important to get involved in politics and social change causes. I give more than half my income to political and social justice causes and I intend to do even more. First because whether we like it or not politics trumps everything. Poor politics makes people poorer and that will destroy your business. Second — we can only do business if there is a society. So if we don’t push for a better society, we are like many older businessmen are in this country, rent-seekers. We deserve whatever the poor will eventually have coming to us. The greatest philanthropy you can give is your voice in favor of the poor and weak.
Avoiding opposition politics as a businessman or refusing to criticize the government to protect your business is a short term move that will only hurt your business and society big time in the long run.
Every founder needs to have three books in their library :
Zero to One by Blake Masters and Peter Thiel. If you are in technology and you haven’t read this book at least once it’s hard for me to believe you understand the actual business you are in.
Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyle is another great book that has helped me build incredible business models for startups and portfolio investments alike. It will really shift the way your mind thinks about value creation and capture.
Courage to be disliked by Ichiro Kishimi: I read this book last year and immediately resigned my job. It is the one book that has changed my life. I definitely recommend it to ‘good people’ who want to stop being ‘good’ and start doing the right thing instead.
I have made very many mistakes and the way I overcome them is by simply not having a sunk cost mentality. The moment I discover I am making a mistake I just stop making the mistake, no matter what people will say or how much I have invested in my mistake. I believe I not only have a God-given right to make mistakes but more importantly, I have a duty to correct course as soon as I realize I am wrong — and I very often am.
Bill Gates once said ‘most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.’ I happen to subscribe to that idea
However, given this is Africa I have a strange answer. For me, it is two years. I learned this from Raphael Afaedor actually who told me one evening at the rooftop bar of Four Points that you can accomplish a lot in your entrepreneurial career if you build a new business every two years. I happen to agree and it has been my MO.
I take the first year to pour myself wholly into building something new. Then the next year to review my progress, assess whether the ship can run without me and groom a successor. Once this is done I hand over the reins and I’m off to the next assignment.
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