Advice for Founders with Razaq Ahmed
Meet Razaq
Razaq Ahmed is the co-founder and CEO of CowryWise; a secure automated service that helps you save money, allowing you to enjoy high returns from risk-free investments in Nigeria with zero fees, charges and no penalties. When he is not working, you can find him watching movies.
If there’s anything that had a big impact on my life, it will be relocating from my place of birth to a different location. This was induced by the riot in Northern Nigeria.
It wasn’t a small change per se as it redefined my entire life and it had a big impact on me from attending university to getting my first job. That singular action changed my life trajectory.
There are three important things that must be in place when you are starting a company. The first which is very critical is having a team that is completely aligned in terms of the vision of the company. Building a company is not about building a personal brand, it’s about building an entity that can outlast you over time and that can’t be done by one person. Having a team is important to the extent that the team members have complementary skill sets that can enable the vision to come to life.
The second is the idea itself and it needs to be one that you feel can materially change the way things are done now and in the future, because those are the kind of ideas that are worth your while down the line. Building a company is a long term commitment and the worst thing you can do to yourself as a founder is to waste those years on things that might not be worth your time down the line. So from day one, you should have an idea of how big the idea can possibly get even though it hard to know.
The third part is the support system. This is particularly broad because it depends on the circumstances of each person. A support system can range from your family to friends to the ecosystem and even to early investors who might provide funding or in-kind support to help you stay sane while you’re going through the whole rigour of getting the company moving ahead.
These three things are very critical when you want to start a company.
Trusting people. When companies are built, or even in life generally, you can’t do everything yourself no matter how good you are, so you must be able to trust people to do their job.
You don’t necessarily need to spoon feed them on what to do but make sure that you actually bring in people with the right skill set, the right motivation and shared vision. With these elements in place, you can trust them to get the job done. Every day I have come to learn that when trust is handed over to people especially the right set of people with the right dose of motivation and responsibilities, they actually get things done in a very spectacular way.
Being patient with the process is a virtue I have come to learn and love. Patience is a virtue as we all know, but having the capacity to live it is a different thing. You have to be patient with your team members, the market, and the product. This is different from being laid back or not being aggressive or growth-hungry.
Also, ignoring the noise and focusing on what matters. Sometimes we learn these lessons but find it hard to live them.
There is no single book that contains the entire thing about how companies or startups work generally. However, I will strongly recommend The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, and while it won’t solve the whole problem of startups, it is a very good book that elaborates on ideas, teams, leadership, scaling, funding and basic operations. It is a good book for any founder that wants to take his/her company from zero to one.
Not trusting people early enough and not doing enough around the factors that generate results from trusting people. To overcome that mistake, all I did was to ensure the right people are entrusted with responsibilities to get the job done. And by the right people, I mean people who are motivated with the right incentives, have the right skill sets and willingness to learn and develop and more importantly have a shared vision about where the company is headed.
Every hour matters and the reason for that is when you compound on a daily basis by saying one percent i.e you are improving by one percent on a daily basis, at the end of the year you will have improved by 38 times. Little steps count when it comes to improvement in life and work.
However, most times we are always in a hurry because we want to see immediate results and we then lose sight of the big picture which can become extremely important in five years time
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