Eric Muli

I spent years telling a number of African VCs they should get involved in building their early stage pipeline. Basically an accelerator pre funding. They have kept on explaining why they cannot Now that a16z has launched a16z speedrun https://speedrun.a16z.com watch them copy.🙄

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Hisham Halbouny is a managing partner at P1 Ventures, a $50m Africa-focused fund who's often referred to as contrarian. Hisham was previously a partner at Man Capital, the family office of Egyptian Billionaire Mohamed Mansour where he invested in Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Bolt, and more. Timestamps: 00:00 - In this episode 00:36 - Introduction 01:13 - Investing in Uber/Airbnb/Spotify 03:16 - Going all-in on Africa 06:20 - Global VCs have pulled back, yet the timing is right 07:43 - DFIs as the default LPs for African VC? 08:54 - Tailoring the VC model for Africa? 13:03 - P1's investment thesis 16:33 - Personal evolution as an investor Link to the full episode in the first comment below.

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FORGET INVESTORS Pitch ready. Investor ready. But the room is empty. African entrepreneurs are trained to master the art of pitching to investors. When the time comes to meet them, the chairs are empty.   THE MYTH OF READINESS Investment readiness has become a ritual – a default checkbox. Entrepreneurs are to develop decks and rehearse pitches. “If ready, money shall come” is the assumption. If it doesn’t, it is because the entrepreneur wasn’t ready. Ready for what is the question?   The assumption is linear: Readiness leads to capital. But investor readiness only matters if there is an investor on the other side of the table. At the early stages where most African entrepreneurs sit, that someone is absent. This is the flaw - activities continue to prepare entrepreneurs for encounters for a room and people who hardly exist. The aspiration of investors for early stage African businesses doesn't match the African reality.   THE MISPLACED ANALOGY A logic analogy would that as students in education are trained to meet the demand of employers, entrepreneurs are trained to meet the demand of investors.   But the analogy collapses under scrutiny. Jobs exist (for a later post). Industries exist. At the USD 50k-200k stage, investors in most African markets barely exist. The ecosystem is teaching a language for a marketplace that is empty.   THE EMPTY CHAIR This is not just theoretical. If every entrepreneur trained in “investment readiness” were to face the investors supposedly waiting, the reality would be bleak: a crowded room of founders with only a handful of investors - if any at all. The result is disillusionment, not opportunity.   This is why a fact check is overdue. How many investors (investors and not other types of financiers) are genuinely deploying at that early stage that most current projects are focusing on? Enough to warrant the money spent on training this discipline to everyone regardless of maturity? Or is this narrative kept alive because it is easier than confronting and addressing the scarcity?   TIME TO REFOCUS The real tension is one of timing. Entrepreneurs are being readied for a capital landscape that funders hope will exist, rather than the financing they actually need - need now and the foreseeable future.   Businesses grow in stages; capital should follow those stages. Instead of collapsing everything into “investor readiness,” we need a more realistic sequence: Bankable, then fundable, financable and only then investable.   Shifting the language will not conjure new money, but it will ground expectations in reality and force us to design support that makes sense - that meets the market.   The difficult question is unavoidable: Does the story of early-stage investors reflect reality, or are we preparing entrepreneurs for empty chairs?   If the latter, then the task ahead is not more training. It is to build the finance pathways African entrepreneurs genuinely require - stage by stage, market by market, reality by reality.

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