I have zero tolerance for victim mentality. I’m very deliberate about regularly upskilling myself through reading books, learning news skills…etc
2. Mediocristan:
What differentiates high performers and mediocre people is self-pity.
3. On Measuring success:
I measure my success in the absolute, not relative to the size of the tank
4. On Tesla’s Work Culture: –
Pure hard work and intensity.
Zero tolerance for bureaucracy.
Research & Development (R&D) is non-existent but rather embedded in the work processes throughout the company.
There is a key focus on ONE goal and speed from concept to launch.
5. On Work-Life Balance:
If you work for a company that reinforces you and you know your work will create value, you will remain satisfied and extremely motivated that you hardly feel burn out.
6. On Cars
A car is the second most expensive expenditure in a household, but on average, it is only in use 8% of the time
If you own a car for 8 years, you’ll have driven it for 6 months only.
With Tesla investing in automation and self driving technologies, they are opening the door for a smarter and more efficient sharing economy in the automotive market.
6. Career Advice:
Be super deliberate about where you are. Understand the opportunity cost of where you are. Understand your true value including your weaknesses. Focus on upskilling yourself.
A lot of professions have a very distinctive feature. Your effort is directly proportionate to the reward you receive. Your income is pegged on your physical appearance. Your pay is billable by the hour. These are non-scalable careers.
If you are a dentist, the more mouths you open, the more cash in your pocket. If you are an events organizer, the more people who book your space, the more headway to pay yourself. The flipside is that there’s an upper limit to how much money you can make, because you can only have a finite set of clients, energy and hours.
If we were to get together, the richest set of professionals in a non-scalable career, and combine their income with the average professional, and derive a mean it might not look like a true bell curve. It would likely have a longer tail towards the richer professionals – but you won’t see any one of the richest professionals making 10 million dollars a year – at least not legitimately.
Now, instead of dentists, bakers, event organizers, the freelance illustrator, let’s take an author, actor, musician, software entrepreneur, and e-course seller. If you were to pin the total income of the richest against 1000 random professionals would you be surprised to find that the average professionals’ income combined is a rounding error to the richest professional income? These are scalable careers.
Consider:
97% of book sales are made by just 20% of the authors.
The Wilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 Principle can be broken down further into 64/4, and 50/1, which means that 1% of the players can reap something to the order of 50% of the rewards in most domains.
Scalable careers don’t follow a normal distribution. Instead, they follow a power law distribution earmarked by grotesque inequalities. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how hard working you are, most of the wealth is aggregated around very few players.
Compared, scalable careers produce extreme outcomes and non-scalable careers produce mediocre outcomes with lower variance. One is predictable, non-scalable and certain, a property called mediocristan. The other is extremistan charactised by uncertainty, non-predictability and scalability.
In Mediocristan, players gamble dollars to win pennies. Conversely, extremistan players gamble pennies to win dollars.
Foreknowledge that success in scalable careers is a heavy concoction of randomness and luck, doesn’t stop ambitious people. But is a scaleable career worth the risk?
For fitness enthusiasts, there is a good reason why we avoid the centre of a barbell. It is unstable. Likewise, taking the middle is only an illusion of a successful building block.
Remember, if, in a scalable career for ambition, there is no average. There is only success or failure.
Nassim Taleb recommends ditching the golden middle and pursuing the two extremes at once.
Take one safe “9 to 5” gig with “few intellectual demands, and high job security, the kind of low risk job that ceases to exist when you leave the office.”
Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working. Be selective about professions.
After work, specialize on the speculative side-hustles.
Examples:
Write online.
Start an online business.
Invest in futuristic skills.
Join a rock band.
Create an e-course.
The barbell strategy is not limited to careers, but can apply to investments, psychology and health.
Remember, there are positive swans and negative swans. This asymmetric strategy curtails the downside – you have to stay alive – and positions you to maximize the upside.
Inside the C-Suite is a new podcast focused on showcasing African startup stories. The series is powered by I-DEV International, Metta and the East Africa Venture Capital Association (EAVCA) with an aim of telling success stories and struggles behind Africa’s most innovative companies.
In Episode 3, we invited Ken Njoroge, CEO of Cellulant- an award winning digital payments and digital commerce service solutions provider- that recently raised a whopping $47.5M Series C round from TPG Growth’s Rise Fund. This episode provides a glimpse of an entrepreneur that has been resilient and bullish in his dream to build Africa’s largest fintech company.
Established in 2004, Cellulant is a true Pan-African tech company with operations in 11 countries and 338 employees. The company serves 94 banks and 7 mobile money platforms and supports 40+ mobile networks, 21+ mobile wallets, 600+ e-commerce platforms and 120 million consumers in Africa.
Here are my key takeaways:
Successful entrepreneurs backgrounds are erratic.
Can entrepreneurship be taught? Do successful entrepreneurs have a certain shared common history? Which characters make the best entrepreneurs? Vanity questions.
According to Ken, people have a misconception that you need to be experienced to start a business. He advises early entrepreneurs that the only validation they require will come from listening to the market, customer, and employees. Along with his co-founder, Bolaju Akinboro, he is proving that regular Africans can build a world-class business. Regular meaning never went to Ivy League Schools, never left the country, wholly bred & educated in the local system, no political connection, and no corruption.
When you have skin in the game you behave differently.
Main Hustle vs Side Hustle Dilemmas. Should I? Should I not? Brain Cell 1 vs Brain Cell 2.
It is difficult to be a master of your craft when you’re running two or more things at once. If the side hustle represents a big enough opportunity and you have a big vision, give it 100% attention.
Ken believes that the only reason he has outmatched his competition is the sheer hard work, time dedication that has gone into eliminating possible threats to the business.
Identifying a problem + Coming up with a solution ≠ Success
One key determinant of an entrepreneur’s success is their mental model. This refers to a decision-making system that embodies the thought process of how we understand the world. Mental models set the tone and approach to solving problems and executing tasks both in our personal and professional lives.
Listening to Ken, one thing that stood out is his bullishness, resilience, and vision when he encounters barriers. Throughout his entrepreneurial journey, he has encountered numerous barriers that threatened his life’s work. For example, when Chase Bank went under receivership the company took a major hit since the bank at that time was their biggest credit line. Ken had to personally dispose of personal assets to keep the company afloat.
Fundraising is a full-time job.
Never stop fundraising. You never know when the well (economy) will dry up. You never know how long it will take to close a round. You never know the opportunity cost for a lack of investment readiness.
Despite Cellulant’s popularity within the FinTech space, it took them 2 years to close their $47.5 Million Series C round. That’s 400 presentations across the world in the process approaching 60 different investors and ultimately yielding to 1 successful investment. <2% success rate.
For a CEO, there comes a phase where day to day running of the business takes a back seat and you have to trust your team to make decisions. So from the get-go, build better teams than you from the start. Be comfortable with sharing decisions. Trust that growth (shared decisions) makes you a little bit more resilient because there are more people interested in solving the problems of the business.
Learning how to articulate yourself is real value on the table.
Unfortunately, Kenya’s and many African countries’ education systems do not appreciate, encourage and support storytelling. Just how far can memorizing take you in the investor round table?
Ken believes a lot of Kenyan entrepreneurs lack storytelling skills. In fact, he adjudges himself as having been poor in the initial years and having had to invest in up-scaling himself to become a much more effective entrepreneur. He believes if he went back to the same 60 investors, he would close a 50% higher valuation.
Securing partnerships is the fastest way to accelerate your business.
It allows businesses to work cooperatively to further their self-interested goals, and in the process, share their risks and rewards.
Companies can’t always rely on their own internal capability to create value. Sometimes, it makes more sense to find a partner. Other times, it is perhaps the only way to achieve a specific end goal.
For resource-strapped and next mile focused startups, corporate partnerships signal a silver bullet for growth. A possibility of leveraging a plethora of resources, riding on an established brand and accessing a latent customer base.
That possibility, though elusive, can create an enamoured feeling. A feeling, if not kept in check, can lead to a slippery slope.
This essay attempts to clear up some blindspots for startups entering partnerships with corporates.
Partnership Cues
The best things in life happen in clusters. That’s why the success of any business is pegged on its ability to create cooperative networks. These networks consist of customers, distributors, suppliers, investors and the government. But what makes one a partner?
A partnership is a sharing relationship that is not purely transactional. It is built on the combinations of value from businesses, which don’t depend on paying each other for a service. Often the key drivers of a true partnership include:
Acquisition of resources.
Optimization & economy of scale.
Reduction of risk & uncertainty.
While these benefits would be welcome in any business, not all partnerships achieve this end goal. Certainly, not the wrong partnerships. So, just how do we gauge the right ones?
Defining intent should be the starting point for determining whether you’re best suited to execute alone or through a partner. This can be achieved by running your business model through a partnership intent puzzle.
Value Chain Generation by Bart Doorneweert
If your genuine answer is ‘no’ to one of these questions, that could be an early sign for the need to explore a partnership.
Backward Induction
A partnership is a parallel of two or more business models. The sooner you understand your intended partners’ model and how it aligns with yours, the easier it will be to come up with a winning pitch.
The partnership canvas, a prototyping tool for modeling key business partnerships, will help you judge the potential from the onset.
Created Value: What output will be created for your business?
Desired Value: What are you looking for in a partner?
Transfer Activity: How will you bring together these values?
Value Offer: What is your matching offer?
The crux of a partnership design is value creation and transferability. Your value offer is your contribution to the partnership. The desired value encapsulates your expectations for your partner(s). The transfer activity represents the barter trade zone between the parties. Lastly, the created value is the litmus test of the newborn value.
It is relatively easy to spot constraints, identify opportunities across the supply chain and generate subsequent partnership focused solutions. The main drawback of a partnership design process often lies in the transfer activity block.
Just like in bartering, there must be a coincidence of wants. The flipside is that people have different valuations for the same offering. And to add to the complexity, no one party puts in an equal measure of value on the table.
Ensure the end goal is worth navigating this complexity. More importantly, ensure the intent is customer centric.
Partnership Asymmetry
No partnership is created equal. Especially one that is between a startup and a corporate.
The principle dynamic to be aware of is who has more to gain relative to the scale of their company¹
Brand, capital, distribution, and labour leverage are owned by the corporate. Startups have the leverage of ideas and innovative products with no scale [yet].
As long as you stand to gain more than the corporate, they have the leverage.
The small fish is friendlier. (Icons c/o FreePik)
To mitigate a raw deal
Be so good that they can’t ignore you. This means avoiding corporate partnerships in idea or pre-chasm stage when potential is all you got. Potential is a high-risk return ratio for the corporate and high-risk of replicability for you. Give yourself a chance. Convert the potential to an incentive. An incentive would make them more motivated to seal the deal and sustain it. Additionally, it would also dampen their chances of going out SOLO. And in the case, things go sideways, you want to give yourself a head start to the market. You also want to build that innovation identity clout in the ecosystem- assign a face to your product for everyone to see.
Show them their competitive advantage. Partnerships will always be a driver for corporates to further their self-interested goals. That said, corporates’ main focus is on their competitors- other large companies. Nothing speaks louder than showing them how to increase their competitive advantage.
Use FOMO. Fear-of-Missing-Out is a high stake game. If corporates don’t act on new technologies, business models and technologies, they’ll miss out on valuable growth opportunities. Being left out of the innovation table is one of their deep-lying fears for the future. The line chart would be along the lines of “this is how much money you stand to make and this is how much money you stand to lose” if you don’t capitalize on the opportunity. Plain simple.
Exploit the inflection point. All companies experience a decline in their business lifecycle. This stage can only be pushed further away through innovation. The R&D department might save the day on a couple of occasions, but they won’t always turn up with all the answers. Shockingly, it takes some companies’ an awfully long time to figure out that they can’t always rely on their internal team. Luckily, their bottom line will always give them that wake-up call. And this is where you come in. Your innovative products and understanding of their target audiences will be a high yield opportunity that they can’t dare pass out on.
Pruning Naivety
Truth is, partnerships between corporates and startups rarely work. And the few that have passed through the seal of a pen, haven’t quite lived up to expectations.
Sometimes you just have to wait for the industry to mature. For corporates, to start feeling the pinch of technological evolution. For the bottom line to veer a bit off course for their liking. Holding the line is sometimes the solution. Chartering your own path is another.
Sometimes it is just unrequited love. A relationship founded on onerous terms. To charter a successful partnership, you need to put up measures to avoid failure. Legal traps. Irreversible traps.
History is your friend. There have been others before. Use their experience to your advantage. Always assume that
They could be a competitor waiting to happen.
They might use you as a guinea pig for their next product.
You could just be part of their optics or PR budget spend.
Long term partnership is not guaranteed. They change with the tide.
They will not have the same urgency as you.
This will help you determine information you can share, situations you can negate and opportunities you can capitalize on.
Pitching to Signing
Cold pitching almost never works. A warm referral is your best chance of getting into the room. If you can’t get a referral, work your way up, network and find people who know people that get you inside that door.
Joan Kelly famously said, “Before going into a partnership with someone, spend time with them in three different kinds of situations: a relaxing one, a competitive one, and an intellectually stimulating one.”
When done right, partnerships can be a boon to both startups and corporates. They provide linkages to resources, close knowledge gaps and allow cross-functional value creation. These sweet spots can only be achieved if there is a mirrored connection between the parties. A connection that needs to be probed through a partnership design process.
In the end, it is the human relationships and working camaraderie that make partnerships last.
Freedom ‘to’ (positive freedom)- do whatever whenever wherever.
Discipline is the ultimate building block for negative freedom. It locks in the desired behaviour, binds you to good habits and restricts you from bad behaviour.
Only the disciplined one’s are purely free in life and the indisciplined are slaves to their moods and passions — Eliud Kipchoge
An effective hack of building negative freedom could be having a certain time period each day where you’re highly disciplined. For example, this can be implemented by having a time management schedule that blocks out time for:
Just-enough sleep.
Meditation.
Working out.
Good nutrition.
Creativity.
To safeguard against (To have freedom from):
Fatigue and apathy.
Mental obesity.
Muscle atrophy.
Diseases.
Rent-seeking status.
Negative freedom provides the foundation to exercise options (positive freedom) that are closest to what you most desire and want in your life.
Positive freedom, marked through optionality, is the pathway to the freedom that we all yearn for. Unbounded freedom.
It is amazing how little information we needed as kids to make a decision on who we wanted to be when we grew up. We didn’t need to get embroiled in the “back end” when we fell in love with the “front end.” Most of our career choices were as a result of peer mimicry, family preference, something we saw on TV or a random pick from our school textbooks.
Growing up, we quickly realize opportunities are scarce and focus on the low hanging fruits. Granted, we chose what’s available to first get our heads inside the game then we can navigate to our passion. But again, we continue to assess work based on the “front end” albeit a little bit more advanced. It’s no longer just about the fascination but also about the availability, salary, job title, job description, and the boss.
If we were to look behind the scenes, we would find every worker tossing, juggling and trying to balance different work components on a day to day basis.
Every job is a sum of all these work components – it’s just that they are not all equally distributed. The variance is a result of factors such as seniority, industry, profession, company stage, personal preference (knowingly or unknowingly) among other things.
I believe work falls under two broad categories: Menial Work and Creative Work. Menial work is what society has already defined for us. It comes by default since we operate in a shared world with systems, processes, and laws. Creative work, on the other hand, is about forging our identity. It is a product of our imagination. A way in which we can leave our footprint in a world not least traveled.
Comparative Advantage = high creative to menial ratio.
Net Productivity = creative work – menial work.
Average = high menial to creative ratio.
Ratio is Kinetic
Jobs at the very core are about adaptation. An oscillation between the M:C ratio based on the stage of our careers, the needs of our company and megatrends in our industry. The unspoken rule is that we should be able to perform any task when needed. Nothing is not our job.
A lot of unhappiness in the workplace is a result of the ratio not coinciding with our expectations. We are at our happiest when we feel our contribution is unique and useful to our organization. Not when the bulk of our work revolves around following a well-defined path complete with signages.
In a world where job adaptability is glorified, problems are solved as they come along, money acts as an end to a means and mimicry is the norm, the ratio is construed to be highly asymmetrical. Our current M:C ratio is always a by-product of the evolving nature of problems present at any one given time in our work environments. One day we are brainstorming over high-quality problems. The next day we are trying to figure out how the copier works.
The nature of problems in our noosphere is heavily influenced by our work environments. A noosphere convoluted with mundane problems results in averageness. Conversely, a noosphere convoluted with high-quality problems results in a higher success probability.
The sweet spot is finding a delicate balance, without veering too far off the “good at both” quadrant. If we find ourselves in jobs, that utilize little of our creativity, our after office hours are crucial to reducing the disequilibrium. If we find ourselves in highly creative roles, we should not forget that it is through menial work that rails are created to complete the cycle of creativity.
To be a billionaire you must have a stomach for meetings with regulators, lawyers, and public appearances. To ascend in a corporate hierarchy, you must perform a slew of low-value procedural tasks handed to you. To succeed as a junior, you need to have the humility to handle the dog work thrown your way. To build your business from the ground up, you need to put on a hard hat, throw some work boots on and get right into the weeds. To understand a business bottom-up, you need to get to the ground and experience pain points as if they were your own.
Mental Energy is Finite But Replenishing
Our productivity is based on our ability to build greater energy capacity. To build greater capacity, we must be able to distribute our 96 energy blocks (1 hr = 4 energy blocks) in a day in the most effective way possible.
We operate in a work environment governed by the industrial chronological system of the 9 to 5. Keyword is “industrial.” This is a system built for machines. Not for us. According to chronobiology, our bodies are built for sprints followed by periods of rest in what is known as the Ultradian Rhythm. These are biological rhythms that break down our days into sizeable recurrent chunks of alternating periods of rest and activity. Naturally, we experience 90 minutes of activity followed by 20 minutes of rest cycled over and over throughout a day.
Not all 90/20 time blocks are equal. With fatigue as the leading cause of this inequality. It is on the same breadth, that we would expect to get more value from a $100 haircut than a $5 one, that we would aim to get creative work done on a high energy block than on a low energy block.
This is why time blocking combined with the Pomodoro technique is such an effective productivity technique. It allows us to be in sync with our natural energy rhythm without leaving us at odds with our energy capacity. There is value in knowing objectively when we are good to tackle our most cognitively demanding tasks and when the only thing we are good for is watching Netflix.
Having a daily to-do-list as a primary productivity organization system shouts that we do not have control over our schedule but trust in our ability to get all the work done by the end of the day. That is fine – but often what tends to happen is we subconsciously lose track of efficiency. We fall into victims of Parkinson’s Law which states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. We end up doing more with what can be done with less.
Higher internal efficiency is repeated action enhanced through batching of tasks that operate on a similar energy frequency. The secret lies in allowing for the least cognitive switch between the M:C to reap the benefits of the other. In other words, it is infinitely easier to unstick ourselves from one menial task to another. Rather from a menial task to a creative task. This speeds the leeway through which our basal ganglia trivializes, automates and dumps tasks into our “no-brainer” category.
What we do with the extra brainpower is the biggest differentiator of the success levels in our careers. Average people will sit on the 10 perfect reps of the same weight for weeks – even months. Then there are those who will always aim for that one-rep max every single week.
One thing we must come to terms with is that net energy never never finds a home. It is either sub-consumed by other people’s demands – both socially and professionally. Or worse yet it exiles us to rest in motion. After all, our brains are wired to conserve energy.
Different Rules but Inter-dependable
The capacity to be creative lies within every human from birth. Yet creativity exists in disproportionate amounts in society. This asymmetry is an outcome of the nature of the creative process itself. Just like the wind not everyone can harness it.
If creativity is a process that allows us to extend our ideas beyond apparent limits prescribed by our society then there must be a form of transcendental inter-level movement of ideas. Nothing captures this process better than the Wallas four-stage model of the creative process.
Preparation.
Incubation.
Illumination.
Verification.
Curiosity naturally drives us to the preparation stage where we investigate a problem, need or desire in all directions. We read books, attend trainings, watch YouTube videos and subscribe to online courses. Through this immersion, we contemplate, form mental pictures, and incubate our ideas.
Often we put pressure on ourselves to process the ideas on-site through some concerted effort, but the bulk of high-quality ideas come with no direct effort exerted upon the problem at hand. This is largely because creativity is combinatorial. A remix of knowledge, bits of information, experiences, sparks of inspiration and other existing ideas that combine and recombine to morph into something “new.”
Temporary suspension of information processing allows us to maximize the upside of randomness and utilize the triggers in our external environment to solve problems that have been simmering at the back of our minds. It can take place on time spent either in conscious mental work on other problems – most likely solving menial problems- or through relaxation from work. This explains why some of our big ideas come to us in a wide-ranging prism from while in the shower, taking a walk or doing nothing.
It is counterproductive to start off our days with menial work for the simple reason that we won’t reap the benefits of the upside of performing menial work with a creative problem in mind. By starting with a creative problem, we open ourselves up to our external environment where lies the answers. We must always remember when our conscious brain is half asleep performing menial tasks, our subconscious is alert to solving the problems encountered in the creative process. One shot two kills.
For the last 4 years, I have spent majority of my time driving conversations of all kinds. Panel Discussions. Fireside Chats. Drink ups. Over 100+ events if I try to be more precise. And in some regard, I have been lucky to listen to really amazing thinkers.
One thing you get to realize having sat down all those conversations is that each and everyone of those people you are awed by are just ordinary people. People no smarter than you and me. But a key thing that they have set about is to be thoughtful.
For me, I can’t think of a better way to be thoughtful than to write and share.
Writing for me is how I distill my thoughts to the fine matter that is useful to me. Sharing for me is akin to teaching. It construes me to revisit how I present my material. Teaching is the best way to understand something.
Every week, I’ll be sharing key discoverings and fascinating lines of thoughts that I came across in my reading and in my watching. And from time, I will be publishing essays about things that strike me.
In some way, the best way to learn is through other people’s experiences and lenses. Use my lens, to learn about things that you probably wouldn’t have come across concisely packaged for you in your inbox.
I’d highly recommend subscribing to my weekly newsletter that goes out every Saturday morning. In some way, I hope that it gives you the mental stimulus to kick start your weekend with something worth simmering off as you enjoy your down (up) time.
