Advice for Founders with Kola Aina
Meet Kola
Kola Aina is the Founder of Ventures Platform; a seed-stage fund and accelerator which through its 16-week program, provides advisory, mentorship, back-office support, seed-funding and need-based residency to selected startups. When he is not working, you can find him reading about art, economics, and geopolitics.
The most significant and recent change I have made in my life is learning how to say no and being more selective with opportunities. If you are someone that likes to be available and helpful to people you tend to say yes to everything and overcommit. Over time, the quality of your output can reduce and then burnout becomes inevitable.
Learning to delegate and refer people to other folks that can be more helpful to them has made a big impact on my life. Efficiency starts to suffer when we do too many things at the same time.
Ensure that you are crystal clear as to what your “why” is. A very clear conviction as to why you are starting a company is very powerful and can be positively self-fulfilling. As a founder, you’re literally pitching to different types of stakeholders every day. From your first employees — on why they should leave good-paying jobs and join you or why they should join a risky venture or why investors should invest in you versus the other company or why customers should trust you with their credit card details or buy your product.
The clearer you are about your “why” the easier it is to sell your vision to people. The best businesses have founders with a conviction that is clearly articulated.
I tend to be harder on myself than most people are and I’m very self-critical which can be good and bad. What I lean on daily is to cut myself some slack and be kind to myself. This has really helped to attain balance. Founders need to be kinder to themselves and realize that most of the time it’s a marathon, not a race and attaining our metrics are critical but self-kindness is even more critical.
What I know now that I wish I knew much sooner is perhaps the fact that nothing trumps family and loved ones. Work, attainment, success, or raising the next round is important but when it is all said and done nothing trumps your loved ones, family and friends.
When I was younger it was all about work so I probably spent the first 10 years of my career just chasing the next big thing but these days I’m more focused on ensuring that there is balance across the board.
The first book I’ll recommend is The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? by Rick Warren. It’s my absolute favorite book because it helped me understand the purpose of my life and my “why” and I think for every young person the quicker you come to terms with the purpose of your life, the faster you can run. It is written by a Christian pastor but it’s actually not a Christian only book.
The second book I recommend is called The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty by Clayton M. Christensen, Efosa Ojomo, and Karen Dillon. I think this book is important especially if you are building a business in Africa.
The third book I’ll recommend is called The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz because I think business self-help books can be cliche; but I really love how Uncle Ben wrote this book, with practical advice about so many things that entrepreneurs will contend with either now or later.
I have made many mistakes but the one I’ll never forget was when I was running multiple businesses at the same time in the early part of my career. Naturally, none of those businesses became outstanding. I read a magazine and came across a phrase that reads: “the disciplined pursuit of less” and became very obsessed with that phrase. Then I started reading books on the power focus and is dedicated to a cause and that inspired me to shut down some of the other ventures I was pursuing to settle on building Emerging Platforms that came before Ventures and to be honest that was the beginning of progress. My mistake at the time was doing multiple things thinking that was the key to success.
I think of my life in seconds because my most valuable resource is time. My entire day is based on my calendar and I’m mindful of whether I am spending too much time at a task because I try to be as present as possible to increase the quality of my engagement and the quality of my output and I find that the best way to measure that is in seconds.
If you can master being present by the second I strongly believe that you will achieve better results.
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