Idea!!! · venture capital

The 5 Dangers To Scale In Emerging Markets

Every industry has its jargon. In venture capital, there’s traction, scale, product market fit, etc. The problem with jargon in venture capital is it’s purposely elusive and nebulous.

The core of private equity markets is information arbitrage. There’s information asymmetry between capital and operators. As a result, different stakeholders create different definitions and everyone ends up talking past each other.

Why am I starting this conversation with jargon? It’s important we have a unified definition of what I mean by scale. Scale, from an operators and investment perspective, means I know what inputs I put in and I can predict my outputs/outcomes with reasonable certainty.

Emerging markets present unique challenges when it comes to scaling. They transcend business types and sectors. It makes scaling super challenging for emerging market companies and sometimes create zero-sum industry dynamics. This is why I’m launching a series on the 5 dangers of scaling in emerging markets and how to overcome them. The five dangers we’ll be diving into are:

  1. Customer distribution – Most of the time, market organization is one of the core challenges for companies. How do you organize your market in ways that are scalable and repeatable? Is repeatable important at this point?
  2. Customer education – While building/organizing a market, you might have to do more education to customers which might lead to higher acquisition costs. How do you teach customers but still keep your cac down?
  3. IC ramp up – how do you train people fast enough to execute on your behalf?
  4. Management / scaling operations – How do you create management expertise so your operations can scale with the market opportunity?
  5. Irrational Competition – How do you compete/navigate irrational competitors? what are irrational competitors?

Over the next couple of weeks – I’ll be diving deeper into these areas and exploring potential solutions.

#MentalNote

34

I wrote a Twitter thread I thought I’d capture on my blog. To read in its original form, here you go.

Yesterday was my birthday. 34 – A lot of great things happened in the last year across the board. I’m grateful for the continued success and evolution.

First off have to thank my tribe – my family, friends, and professional colleagues that have been in the trenches. Someone in a board meeting I was at mentioned a quote that stuck with me; “Many hands make light work.” I disagree.

It’s more like – Quality people with a noble purpose can overcome just about anything. Reminds me of the Margret Meed quote – “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Looking back at what I’ve done to get to where I am now at a point where brute force just won’t work anymore. Just by sheer hours committed, I’ve put more time into my areas of interest and reaped the rewards. But that’s not going to get me to the next level.

1. My body doesn’t respond like it use to – I need my sleep more than ever…lol… 2. TBH – I’ve traded off my wellness over professional execution for such a long time…. I’ve got some health and lifestyle debt to pay off.

3. With more responsibilities and even more audacious opportunities, it will become less about what I can do and more about who / what institutions I can build to accomplish the things I want to do – I’m excited about focusing more on building people than anything else.

4. Focus now is more important now than ever. At 34 – I hope to be ruthless in my focus. A lot of balls will drop for sure – but I think the most important – most impactful opportunities will rise to the top and I’ll shepherd them to the finish line.

5 . I’ve believed in doing work / operating in silence > making noise and not doing much. But for my star wars fans… Only the Sith deal in absolutes. There’s a middle ground where sharing and leading the conversation in areas you’re interested in benefits your work product.

My life’s been amazing so far – I’m so excited because I think we’re just getting started. 🙂

business · Design · Development · Education

Embracing Open Source

For the last couple of years, my companies tiphub and ParallelScore have been working at the frontier of emerging challenges. We’ve had a lot of learnings that we’ve used to build and scale our initiatives over time.

I believe the best way to create more value is to share learnings and observations with the larger community of technologists and investors. To demonstrate our continued commitment to growing the pie for all – Over the next year, I’m pledging to increase our learnings and open source some of the methodologies we’ve built over the last couple of years. My hope is that we can help our partners in the market learn faster and drive more impact.

Open source has been transformative in the technology space. We hope we can leverage the success of open source in code and apply it to processes, documents, and models/frameworks.

#MentalNote

Less Is More

I had an amazing 2021. There’s so much that’s happened to radically transform my life in 365 days. I’m super grateful but success begets new problems.

I’m constantly overwhelmed and feel like I don’t have time to get basic things done. I feel like weeks go by faster and faster but I have less time to do the things that are important to me.

I’ve tried to be more deliberate about my time toward the end of the year. I’ve started playing basketball again, taken time to jump into photography, and I took my ps4 back from my brother. (GTA 5 online)… Things that give me daily joy.

For 2022, I’m going to optimize for minimalism. Professionally, personally, and spiritually. I need more energy to focus on high-impact initiatives and relationships. What does this look like in practice? Here are some ideas:

  1. Selling some of my companies or hiring people to run full time.
  2. Getting rid of clothing
  3. Selling / consolidating my tech (apps/ hardware)
  4. Hiring people to deal with my complexity 🙂
  5. Elevating simplicity as a key factor for my decision making
  6. Decreasing social media footprint.

I’m going to reflect more on this as the year winds down. To be continued.

#MentalNote · Learning · Self-Revelation

Jesus Year

The Jesus Year is age 33, the year that scholars believe Jesus started a spiritual, political, and intellectual revolution. The Jesus Year is the age at which young people decide it is time to get serious about life, time to accomplish something.

I turned 33 at the beginning of April and to be honest, between COVID and some deaths in the family, there hasn’t been much to celebrate. My sister and Crystal mentioned they both do gratitude journals and I thought I’d share out 33 things I’m grateful for this year.

  1. I’m grateful for improving and overall good health
  2. I’m grateful for my parents and their health
  3. I’m grateful for my siblings.
  4. I’m grateful for Crystal.
  5. I’m grateful for my sister-in-law to be.
  6. I’m grateful for my extended family
  7. I’m grateful for my framily and family beyond blood.
  8. I’m grateful I get to do what I love every day at Google.
  9. I’m grateful for what I’ve built at tiphub
  10. I’m grateful for my past mistakes.
  11. I’m grateful for the time I enjoyed in Chicago.
  12. I’m grateful for my mentors that have guided me in this journey.
  13. I’m grateful for all the impromptu adventures around the world
  14. I’m grateful to be alive at this time.
  15. I’m grateful for having the opportunity to teach and share more about product management at General Assembly.
  16. I’m grateful for my car. It’s beautiful.
  17. I’m grateful for the pain and the joy in my life… It’s given everything more color.
  18. I’m grateful for the wisdom that comes with age
  19. I’m grateful Jay – Electronica actually came out with an album and I got to listen to it in my lifetime.
  20. I’m grateful for my time in DC. What a time.
  21. I’m grateful I had the chance to volunteer two years of my life for a greater cause.
  22. I’m grateful for my ability to continue to learn new things.
  23. I’m grateful for the luxury of watching all the bad movies on Netflix.
  24. I’m grateful for my youtube music subscription.
  25. I’m grateful I survived COVID-19
  26. I’m grateful for Jonathan Perrelli. He gave me my first shot at venture capital back in the day.
  27. I’m grateful for all the entrepreneurs I’ve had the chance to collaborate with.
  28. I’m grateful for Moderna.
  29. I’m grateful for Twitter.
  30. I’m grateful for Bollywood and Nollywood movies.
  31. I’m grateful for rainy days.
  32. I’m grateful for Cape Town’s beauty.
  33. I’m grateful for all my DM subscribers.

I’m grateful for all these things and more.