For every $1B invested in African startups. The expectation = $10B in liquidity. So the $3B invested in H1 2022 needs to see $30B in liquidity. Incl 2021 ($5.2B) thats $82B in liquidity required. I believe at last glance the NSE is <$100B. 🇳🇬Financial services total market <$20B The internet services opportunity is definitely massive. FOMO & funding environment definitely got ahead of our ability to create liquidity events. Globally the worst hit in terms of valuations appears to be fintech & crypto. An area where Africa over indexed in. Best time to see

So I was stopped by the South African police (whilst in an uber) en route to the airport this afternoon. They asked me to see documents, I had my 🇬🇧passport in my pocket. They asked where I'm from in Africa. I said 🇳🇬. They made me come down for a thorough search. They saw sims When they saw my dozens of sim cards & several phones they were 100% convinced I was into cyber crime. Apparently it's illegal to have so many sim cards 😂. I told them I was a product manager who travels testing different Momo across Africa. They had my passport stamps so 🤷🏾‍♂️

I have whiplash at how quickly advice has moved from sieze market share at any cost to survive survive hold onto your cash. Now is the perfect time to expand insanely (why PMF & strong unit economics is always important) Less competition😂. I guess dumb unsustainable growth doesn't solve all problems afterall. I know NJOKU Holdings aren't hunkering. We've been in survival mode for years. It's what happens when there's an almost 100% failure rate for your funded startup in its core 🇳🇬market. SVOD in Africa ⚰️💀🙏🏾😇

Over the last year I have spent quite a lot of time speaking with friends / mentors in their early 50's. I thought life changed at 40. Wrong. At 50 it appears to be radically differently. Radically. Planning for retirement, kids leaving home, resizing, looking back at life etc #1 regret was the limited time they spent with theirs loved ones, the impact the money game had on those relationships🥲. Its super daunting to be honest & definitely makes you reset & rethink. I am only 40+1 so by God's grace have many decades ahead.

Telling these stories are actually important in how we grow our ecosystem into self sustainability. In the long term thats all that matters. What we have now is hypebole to an extreme. Been saying it for years. Hot emerging market money poured into 🇳🇬 with zero checks & balances. There is so much wrong doing happening right now across Nigeria. We need to heal. We fortunate enough to have the 💰 & chance need to hold ourselves to a higher standard. Nigeria Inc has been in the mud for a while now. We were supposed to be different. Time to show difference ✊🏿

So I've never met my father before. So the most important job I simply prioritize is not failing at trying to be a good dad. Mrs says I'm an average husband (still work in progress still under training 😁) but a great father. I actually put in a ton of father led research 😇 Last year I travelled 20/30 days in a month. Honestly it almost broke my family. Wife unhappy, kids missed me dearly. Thankfully I control my time so I simply stopped. Right now it's 6/30. Everyone is happy. They have my time. For my kids that's all they want to be honest.

50 years of Globalisation passed us by, a unique opportunity to upgrade our civilisations. Outside of Africa most moved forward. We squandered the entire period. Education & technology was always the key. We largely regressed in both. Maybe this nation building isn't for everyone Everyone is looking inwards now. The great decoupling is happening and we are commercially irrelevant. Not even at the great tables let alone shaking them. Democracy isn't a pre requisite for development. Education is.

Nigeria Broadcasting Commission (NBC) In making exclusivity illegal, compelling sub-licensing of content & regulating price, are effectively turning private enterprise into state property. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾. Interference Distorts Markets. If implemented this 100% destroys PayTV in Nigeria Under these proposed terms it makes zero sense for @irokotv @ROK_DSTV @NetflixNaija @irokotv @africamagictv @FilmhouseCinema @SilverbirdTV @SceneoneTV or any other platform or independent production house to invest in local content. Zero sense. No consultation no thought. Nothing

As of this morning across @freetrade @ChakaStocks @investbamboo @trovefinance @Risevest I hold a basket of different stocks. £888 (888 Holdings)👇🏾6% £WMH (William Hill)👆🏾15% £PTEC (Playtech) 👆🏾1% £CINE (Cineworld) 👌🏾£AO (AO)👆🏾14% £AVST (Avast)👆🏾10% (Eventbrite)👆🏾10% Sabre 👆🏾1% (Atlassian)👆🏾26%, Netflix (NFLX)👆🏾2%, Delta Airlines 👇🏾1%, Twitter 👆🏾21%, Zynga 11% Boyd Gaming👆🏾6%, Televisa 👆🏾3%, 👆🏾1%, (Hertz)👇🏾5%, (Match/Tinder)👆🏾21%,

In 2014 I bought a piece of undeveloped land for N1.3m (at the time N166/$). In Dec 2019 I sold the same piece of land for N1.8m. ~50% ROI sounds great right? Wrong. 100% wrong. N360/$ (its now ~420/$). In $ terms I bought for $7.83k and sold for $5k. I lost -$2.83k. Now x100 to understand the real impact of my land deal. When people talk about Naira billionaires I always 🙃🤣. N1B in 2014 = $6m. Same N1B today = $2.38m & falling. So much of Nigerians inflow is linked to remittances. So many people poured money in Nigeria for investment

With all the 5G brouhaha I wondered whether Nigerians could even afford 5G? To my knowledge we can barely afford 4G. A good Africa data proxy I find is AirtelAfrica. I perused their annual accounts. Data customers = 1,760MB/subs/month generating $2.4 (N960) in ARPU👇🏾 I believe in numbers. The beauty of them. I'm surprised people were even interested in launching 5G in Africa. It is the same $2,000 GDP per capita that would give a positive ROI? See the data behind the trends. Where-ever there is noise there is logic also. 5G isn't our problem

My mum has been an @NHSuk healthcare worker for 25 years. 14-16th March she was ill at home with ALL the symptoms of Covid19. Mrs Njoku & I screamed at her to go to the hospital. 17th March my mum went to A&E & was hospitalised. 20-21st March were on verge lungs collapsed as she battled with Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). They prepared her for ICU & intubation (Mortality rate is 40%) We cried & we prayed through the entire weekend. 6 people on her ward died. Aged 20s, 40s, 50s and 60s. She is 73 with diabetes. @NHSuk saved her life. 🙌🏾🙌🏾

12/02/2010 - for 13mths I sat in this room alone. No team no nothing. I left the apartment maybe once a week. My earnings were ~$100/month building the first Iroko product - NollywoodLove. My friends were scared about my unhealthy obsession with 'making it'. Was it worth it? Yup. It was. The blunt force trauma changed me. I can embrace pain consistently. No one invited me to any tables. No one mentored me about what it took to take hold of entertainment in Africa. I simply walked up and fucking grabbed a chair.

Dress how you want. Banish the belief it will smoothen your path to success. That's straight up stupidity. I know many Nigerians who investors (myself included) have beat a path to their door to invest. Iroko raised $3m in 2011 from Tiger Global from my apartment in Festac. When investors came. Iroko was doing $70k/mth gross revenue (incl YouTube share) with 30-35% profits. We didn't need them. @markessien was in the Calabar when I convinced him to relocate to Lagos. He lived in my apartment. Our first msg from almost 8 years ago

Employee theft is the cancerous pandemic which has overrun the soul of corporate Nigeria. There isn't one company I am aware of which hasn't fallen victim to this. I am writing an article to share my experiences and how we escaped it and examples. At @irokotv every transaction $100+ is approved by me. Then once a week we have a weekly payment run / approval list which I review again (on email) with the finance team. Then I add comments & approve. That's the only way money moves out of Iroko. Bastian established this system

Valuation means nothing. To founders only actual equity and exits matter. 2 of my mentors sold their companies in 2016. A sold for $470m (VC backed with $200m+) B sold for ~$70m (raised ~$7m). Mentor B had 75% of the company at exit. Made more money than A. That's when it hit me I was commenting in a group that Fawry founders had ~3% of the equity at exit. At $330m IPO valuation that's $9.9m. Not bad. But not great. I was in Israel and met one of the founders of LSE listed 888. 22 years after starting he still owns ~26%. 888 do $100m ebitda / year

I was reading the comments under @benmurraybruce post re electric cars and became really concerned + sad. Why are our children so negative? Electric cars to my mind is basic tech. Its a battery. If you can run an inverter in theory you can run an electric car. It's not a big deal It dawned on my that most folks may never have come across a hybrid of full electric car before so it seems like sci-fi or something from 2050. Cue the insults. In the near future it will be default. In like 15-20 years. That's not a long time.

Meet Bimbola Fawehinmi. He is 3 months older than me but for the last 17 years he has been one of my dearest friends and a earliest mentors. He took me under his wing from my first day at university and opened my eyes to the opportunities in life. I have no idea why. Yet he did At one of the lowest points in my life he gave me a lifeline. he restored my hope, I was almost in tears last week when I reminded him how important that moment was to me. June 2006. I was down and out. Literally sleeping on the floor of an empty apartment with no furniture.

Afrobeats is huge. I agree. But its much smaller in $ than it should be. Where is the M&A to support this mega industry emergence? Every niche to major music industry created was followed by intense M&A. Motown. Geffen. DeafJam. Interscope. Virgin and many others. Afrobeats?😑 I believe if Nigeria wasn't so lawless there would have been easily several >$20m acquisitions of independents Easily. Its not even my business 🤔 but I still earned an opinion having lost $2m with iroking. There are so many lessons to learn. I'm going to try to share them.

Reading Golden Tap about hyper-funded Indian startups is amazing amazon.com/Golden-Tap-Ins…. More so because it was driven largely by Tiger Global (one of my investors). Anyone building companies in Africa must read this book. We have largely taken the US model of building startups Wrongly I believe. We all built 1-dimensional co's. In India (more like Africa then any other country in my mind) and Russian and China and Africa* they are all essentially investment holding companies. Examples LSE listed $7.5B Mail RU Group = 30+ co's

Nigerian's love the noise.Follow the signal. Tune out the noise. This is less sexy than glamours premieres and everyone talking about your movie. Most of these cinema movies you reference have their investors nursing massive losses. Like 100%. Real talk, I know the numbers The only reason this isn't widely known is Nollywood primarily attracts vanity investors. There I said it, in 2015 @irokotv lost $120k on a cinema movie Never again. Every ROK produced movie has been profitable since. 100% hit rate. No glitz, no glamour. Just sauce. Hot sauce.