Everything you need to know about 88mph Nairobi from Nikolai Barnwell

Other than Kenya and South Africa, where do you see the programme going?

We have a longer term vision where we cover the whole continent. So Lagos is next, and then we want to do North Africa, our current thinking is also Dubai, to cover North Africa and the Middle East. I’m also very curious about areas like Saudi Arabia – these countries in the Middle East that are very wealthy, and have great mobile and high internet penetration,

The long term idea is to be in these focused nations, and run one or two programmes per destination per year, aiming at about 50, 60 or 70 investments per year.

How fast we can get there, it’s a little hard to say right now, that’s why this next round in Nairobi and the next round in Cape Town will be the proof of concept that we can use to get enough money in the fund to open in new locations.

That’s where we want to be in maybe two or three years – the place where entrepreneurs and investors know that if you want to do startups in Africa you go to 88mph, they are the market leaders there.

What do you see as the benefit of 88mph for a startup over another funding platform such as the Youth Enterprise Development Fund (YEDF) or Kenya Youth Business Trust (KYBT)?

If you take it to the extreme, the option of taking of NGO grants versus taking 88mph money, I think the incentives are much better aligned with us because we are commercial and we get in the same boat as you. We only succeed if you succeed.

The reality is that the funding is not really what you need as a startup – what you really need is experienced people, you need a lot of help, all the kind of stuff 88mph provides besides the funding.

The success rate of government or NGO funding is very close to zero because they basically just throw the money out and the startup is like “great I now have US$50 000” but what they don’t get is any of the kind of expertise around what you can do with US$50 000 dollars, how do you take the next step, how do you actually build a company.

I would always recommend a startup to, of course, apply to 88mph and take our money if we can get along, but at any point take a commercial investor who takes an equity. Because even though you might think you are giving up some of your company, the flipside is that you are getting someone in your company – even just an angel that you give 5-10%, for not that much money you are getting that guy in, he is in the same boat as you, he is going to spend time, his networks, to see you succeed.

What are the investors looking for, specifically from a startup coming out of Kenya?

I haven’t met any investors so far that are looking for anything particular here. If it is just commercial investors they are looking for returns, of course, it depends what level you are at. If you look at us for example, we only look at mobile-web.

In general a big interest from investors is this local content gap. So producing stuff for the African consumer – music, entertainment content, games, that tends to go down well with investors because they are seeing it as we are seeing it, a tsunami of mobile-web users rising on this continent – that is mostly hidden from the rest of the world. Most of the people you speak to have no clue what is going on, and how fast it is happening, so most of the investors that are clued in tend to like companies who bet on the internal market rather than trying to build big global competitive businesses out of Africa.

What do you look for in a potential entrepreneur-in-residence or a potential mentor?

Mentors are a double-edged sword, because everyone likes to share their knowledge except for the really good ones because they are too busy. So for mentors we only look for industry experts who really have something to contribute. The true value of the programme is the people and networks you get out of it and the knowledge you get out of it, not so much the money. So it’s important we get people who really know what they are talking about and can give valuable advice.

For entrepreneurs-in-residence we look for all sorts of jokers and crazy people who want to come be part of this wild west atmosphere. We look for people with all sorts of skills but a lot of very practical skills – crazy coders, great graphic designers, entrepreneurs who have built stuff before who want to come look at what opportunities are here and get a feel for what kind of startups are here.

I think most of time we look for people who have a more long-term interest in the continent, people like ourselves who could see themselves spending 10-15 years working in tech in Africa. We are looking for people that we would hire full-time to work either for the fund, or for one of the startups that we grow ourselves.

To all the potential applicants to the Nairobi programme, if you could give them one piece of advice, what would it be?

Think more about who you are rather than what your idea is. It’s a very typical mistake we see from people who pitch to us – they think they have this fantastic idea, and they are the only ones in the world who have it. But that is not at all how investors look at it, more so at an early stage, but even up to VC level.

Investors look at the people. Always. So when you apply think as much about selling yourself as your idea.