Advice for Founders with Yele Bademosi
Meet Yele
Yele Bademosi is the Founding Partner of Microtraction; an investment platform that funds Africa’s most remarkable teams with technical founders at the earliest stages of their venture and helps them build enduring companies. Yele studied medicine at King’s College London before opting out to focus on technology entrepreneurship. When he is not working, you can find him reading books, listening to podcasts and watching documentaries.
The small change that made a big impact in my life is being curious. I use the phrase “Intellectual Curiosity” a lot which means being very aware and alert of what is going on around you. This is important because, for anyone working in technology, it is super difficult to predict the future or know what the next big thing is going to be. Five years ago when I was in Medical School, there was no way I could have predicted that I would be investing or will be interested in blockchain or crypto and so it’s very difficult to predict the future.
So my simple advice is to stay curious, spend time researching and talking to people who are doing interesting things around you because that’s where inspiration and good ideas will come from.
The advice I’ll give to someone starting a company is to have a sense of realism. Starting a company is one of the hardest things that you’ll do and so you need to make sure its something you are genuinely passionate about and something that you can see yourself working on for a very long time.
A lot of people have watched movies like “The Social Network” where it seems like starting a startup is so easy, you go from 0–100 quickly, there is money chasing you and everything is going well but most times that’s not the case. You need to make sure you are really passionate about the problem you are trying to solve and the market you are going after, so you can weather through the storms and difficulties of starting a business.
The last advice I’ll give is that if you are going to start a company and aim to raise venture capital for it then you have to understand what venture capital is really about. Most businesses that seek funding are not venture-backable and this is the biggest reason why most companies never raise venture capital.
Something I have learned and I lean on daily is the importance of focus because you can spend your week being busy but when you look at your calendar or to-do list at the end of the week, you’ll realize that you have not been productive.
It’s super important to segment your day and filter what’s important and what’s not. Everyone who works with me knows how I am with emails wherein I don’t rush to reply emails because emails are basically what other people want you to do whereas your own to-do list is what you want to do and your calendar is how you actually spend your time.
The impact of how you spend your time on a day to day basis compounds over time, so I plan my day and focus on what is really important. At the beginning of every day, I spend 15–20 minutes where I think about what I want to get done that day and make sure I get it done.
It’s never too late to get into tech but I wish I got into it a lot earlier. I am currently 28 years old and I have been in tech for about five years but sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I was aware of startups, programming and the impact technology entrepreneurship can have on Africa at a much earlier age. Right now I’m really interested in raising the awareness level of technology and startups amongst students in Secondary School as I believe that’s one of the best times to get started.
The book I will recommend for someone who is just starting out is to read How to Start a Startup by Sam Altman and you can find the E-book online. It is a fantastic read that covers the best practices for starting a startup.
I am a huge fan of reading historical accounts of companies during their formative years so I’ll recommend Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton which is about the founding story of twitter because it shows that if you have a product that has product-market fit and you are building something users want, even if the company itself is dysfunctional the company will be able to survive so the book shows you the importance of building something people want.
Another book I like is The PayPal Wars by Eric M. Jackson and its a fantastic read because it shows you the importance of building a high-quality team despite having a competition that is more funded than you and seems to have everything going on for them. It shows that the quality of your team matters.
The book that actually sort of got me interested in entrepreneurship is called The billion-dollar bet by Brett Pulley and it’s about the founding story of BET and it was my first time reading about a black person starting a company that exited for a billion dollars.
I make a lot of mistakes so I don’t dwell on my mistakes but try to learn from them. I have built and use a lot of mental models to help me on a day-to-day basis. The mental model I use focuses on decision making as opposed to mistakes themselves and I got this from Jeff Bezos.
He has this idea of two-tier decisions; Type-1 decisions are those that if you make a mistake and find out that you are wrong you can always correct it and the impact of being wrong is not detrimental to you, your relationships and doesn’t kill your business, so I spend less mental effort on these types of decisions and move fast on them. Type-2 decisions, however, require a lot of thought process because if you are wrong, the consequences could really be detrimental to your business, personal well-being or family. So when you have to make some decision, first determine if it’s a Type-1 or Type-2 decision then allocate the right mental resources towards trying to be right.
However, when you do make a mistake, your first reaction is that “it’s fine, everything is going to be okay in the long-run”, you just have to reflect and try to make sure you make a better judgment in the future. So I don’t dwell on mistakes as it’s part of my life.
It’s more important to identify your long-term goals or purpose, some people call it their “North Star”, mine is accelerating Africa’s economic development.
I think in three months, 12 months and 3 years and anything beyond that is impossible because I have no idea what will happen after three years.
Operationally, I try to think in quarters so I ask myself questions like what do I want to achieve in the next three months?
So in summary; 3 months short term, 12 months midterm and 3 years long term.
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