No fund's portfolio looks exactly like its original thesis. Markets surprise you. Founders come from sectors you didn't anticipate. A deal you were lukewarm about becomes your best performer; one you were certain about struggles.
What we intended with Fund I: a concentrated portfolio of 15–20 pre-seed and seed companies in fintech, logistics, and vertical SaaS across Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana, with a mean check size of $250K–$350K.
What we built: 20+ companies across fintech, SaaS, logistics, healthtech, and proptech, spanning 8 African markets, with a slightly wider check size range than originally modelled. More concentrated in Nigeria than planned. Less concentrated in Kenya than planned. More B2B than B2C.
These deviations were mostly the market telling us something. Here's what we learned.
The companies in Fund I that are performing best are not always the ones with the clearest original thesis. They are, almost without exception, the ones with founders who can observe data, synthesise it quickly, and move in response to what they're seeing.
The companies that struggled are often the ones where founders held to their original framing past the point where the data was telling them to reassess. Strong founder quality at pre-seed is less about "is this the right product" and more about "can this person find the right product under pressure."
Several of Fund I's most interesting companies entered markets that looked almost too early at the time of investment. B2B spend management in 2022. Conversational commerce on WhatsApp in 2021. AI-native accounting in 2023.
Looking back, the signal in each case was the same: a structural enabling condition had quietly arrived (regulatory, infrastructure, or behavioural) that made the model viable, but the broader market hadn't priced it in yet. Our business model database — tracking analogous timing signals from comparable markets — caught each of these before they were obvious.
"The best early-stage investments are ones where the market thinks you're early but the enabling conditions say you're just in time."
The 2022–2024 market correction tested the Fund I portfolio. The companies that held up best were the ones with business customers — predictable, contractual, less price-sensitive in a downturn than consumers. The companies that struggled most were consumer-facing with discretionary use cases.
This finding has directly shaped Fund II's thesis: a bias toward B2B business models, with consumer exceptions only where the unit economics are structurally strong from day one.
We expected geography to be a major differentiator in portfolio outcomes — companies in Lagos have a different operating environment than companies in Nairobi. In practice, the more predictive variable was the founder's network density: access to potential customers, co-investors, talent, and regulatory relationships.
Founders with strong pre-existing networks in their sector — regardless of geography — consistently had shorter sales cycles, faster hiring, and better quality follow-on rounds.
Fund II is not a replication of Fund I — it's built on what Fund I taught us. Tighter sector focus. Stronger preference for B2B. Cleaner entry valuations. Earlier engagement with founders, before the formal process. And a more systematic approach to identifying the structural enabling conditions that make market timing possible.