,

We believe the power law is not valid in the world of ‘creating the winners’

 

What are we working on?

We are a bunch of product-category fit (PCF) scientists, and serial entrepreneurs who are challenging the validity of the ‘power law’ governing venture investment.

As stated by Peter Thiel – “We Don’t Live In A Normal World; We Live Under A ‘Power Law’.  The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined“.

The implications, as we diminish this limitation (power law) for mankind, are mind-boggling. Instead of trying to predict the future (pick and hope for a big winner), we are able to create the future (generate big winners reliably).

We are now ready to bring the breakthrough to Africa.

 

In Summary:

 

We can now Answer this Question = How can we find, found and fund the next great new companies more reliably?

 

Problem (Limitation) = Today, our ability to find the next great new companies, is only as good as our gut-feeling or trusted success patterns.

 

Solution = To raise the bar by 10X, we have to move beyond our trusted success patterns – one has to find the real first principles that govern the creation of these great companies.

 

For those less familiar with the development of a science, the following might help to understand the suggested solution.

 

For anything to be called a science, it has to progress through 3 stages.

 

Stage 1 = Classification (The What);

Stage 2 = Correlation or Pattern Recognition (The HOW);

Stage 3 = Cause-Effect or First Principle (The WHY).

 

We are trying to move the Start Up / Venture world to the 3rd stage. 

 

Benefit  = The first principle way, is far more reliable and far more powerful than the pattern recognition way, because it enables the deliberate creation of the future (creating great new companies).

 

Secret Sauce = We have actually found the first principles (two of them), developed the resulting new methodology (product-category fit test structure), and have turned it into a reliable application (New Market Category Creator).

 

Resulting Product = A vehicle called the “New Market Category Creator”:

 

Output = Creating (finding, founding and funding) New Market Category Kings, more reliably.

 

Return = Above market average returns

 

Our Purpose = We are officially challenging the validity of the Power Law of Venture Investment.

 

We believe the power law is the result of the world of ‘predicting the winners’, based on pattern thinking.

 

We believe the power law is not valid in the world of ‘creating the winners’, a consequence of first principle thinking.

 

 

What are our next steps?

 

We are ready to launch our pan-African focused “Market Category Creator (MCC)” (housed in an investible vehicle) and seeking like-minded strategic partners/investors to launch into Africa.

 

Regards,

 

TEAM TMARA-ALKEBULAN

 

https://tmaragroup.com/contact/

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Reinventing Existing vs. Creating New Markets

Broadly speaking, there are two types of startups I meet with as a VC: those reinventing an existing market and those creating a new one.

These two types of disruption are commonly thought of as distinct, but there’s actually a lot of fundamental overlap that goes unseen.

Take Uber. Which category does it fit into? The answer is not as simple as it may first appear. In the short term, they’ve reinvented an existing market (taxi-hailing). But their bigger vision in the long term is creating an alternative to car ownership.

Often, the bigger long-term opportunity is in creating entirely new markets. Transformative companies that create the greatest value often fall in this category.

But not every startup that ends up creating a new market starts out that way. Amazon began by reinventing the bookstore online. Using that as a beachhead, they have now created whole new market categories from e-readers (Kindle) to smart speakers (Alexa), while simultaneously reinventing cloud services (AWS) as well as shipping and logistics.

This essay is intended to help Founders identify and anticipate the nuances between reinventing an existing market and creating a new one so that they can accurately understand where they stand and what their right strategy is.

Not all startups begin with creating a whole new market and trade off market risk for execution risk. Other startups are truly staking out terra nova. Either path is viable; the important thing is to know which signposts to look for that indicate which path you’re on. In both cases, the scale of value creation that’s possible is consistently underestimated.

What Reinventing Existing Markets Looks Like

 

One of the biggest ways in which we continue to see existing markets reinvented is through digitizing and organizing existing offline behavior.

The covid era has accelerated digitization in every industry. This is most obvious in e-commerce, but it’s visible across the board — every part of life from going to the dentist (which now requires online booking) to eating at a restaurant (online reservations) has increasingly moved online.

One of the big lessons from digitizing offline behaviors is that if you incorporate a compelling network effect and embed some sort of payment or fintech component, what initially may look like a small niche business can eventually turn into something quite massive.

For example, many restaurants in the Covid pandemic don’t take walk-up diners and have moved the formerly offline activity of going to a restaurant partially online through platforms like OpenTable, which has a powerful 2-sided marketplace network effect and has built a business worth billions of dollars simply by digitizing offline behavior.

One of the biggest trends we are seeing is that offline behaviors are permanently shifting to online behaviors at an accelerating pace, and this presents continuing opportunities for startups reinventing new markets.

This trend of digitizing offline behavior falls under a broader framework that has stood the test of time: the formula for reinventing markets is to take a compelling new technology or approach and apply it to a specific industry.

Vertical search engines like Kayak and Trulia are examples from the early 2000s. Born in the wake of Google, which, at the time, represented a compelling new horizontal technology (i.e. search engines), they found success reinventing their respective verticals (online real estate and online travel) by applying search technology.

We saw many other examples of this in the first two waves of the internet, with mixed success. Zynga, for example, had the same idea (applying new social media tech to the gaming vertical), but they turned out to be too entrenched in the platform they were born from (Facebook) and incurred too much platform risk as a result.

Now, in the internet’s third wave, we’re seeing a similar formula with AI and blockchain applied to new verticals. In general, if you’re a startup doing something like “AI + mortgage”, it’s a sign that you’re in the business of reinventing existing markets. This approach can be a helpful way to start. The best companies are those that evolve their value proposition rapidly and develop a deep understanding of their customer.

While this is a tried and true formula, timing is key. If you’re a Founder looking for new startup ideas, how do you know which markets you might potentially target

 

One of the telltale signs that a market is ripe for reinvention is traditional advertising.

If you see a lot of advertising in a market category, that’s a good signpost that there’s significant product atrophy. Usually, advertising signals that existing players are competing for significant revenue, but they can’t rely on product differentiation and therefore they compete on ad spend.

Think about the amount of advertising that goes on in categories like automotive and insurance. Look out for this: where there’s large advertising spend is often the biggest opportunity for disruption.

Companies that recently went about reinventing the automotive and insurance categories — i.e. Tesla and Lemonade or Hippo — are now the largest companies in their industries by market cap by choosing to spend significantly on product development and not on advertising.

 

Why? Because they were able to reinvent the market, creating innovative and differentiated products in a market overcrowded with commoditized players.

However, Founders should keep in mind that reinventing existing markets isn’t all about product innovation; it’s often just as much about execution and go-to-market.

The near-term objective, if you’re a disruptive new startup, is to scale up distribution before the incumbent can copy you. The expectation for many startups and investors is that the incumbent has many structural advantages that will enable them to copy a new innovator. But if a startup is able to get distribution quickly enough, you should be much less worried about incumbents because their ability to innovate is generally weak and it’s quite hard for them to copy you.

Don’t Become What You’re Trying to Disrupt

 

While there is a danger of incumbents copying startups, I find that startups copying incumbents can often be an even bigger danger.

If you’re reinventing an existing market, don’t become what you’re trying to disrupt. For example, when Amazon was starting out, one of the biggest mistakes they could have made would’ve been going out and hiring a bunch of executives from the incumbents in the market they were trying to disrupt.

Imagine if the early leadership of Amazon had included people with long careers at Borders or Barnes & Noble. Those executives would have wanted to implement the same basic business model all over again.

The point is that this is a danger you should be aware of if you’re a startup reinventing an existing market: you might start out with a disruptive model, but end up getting pulled in the wrong direction to do things the same way as the market incumbents — which is less innovative and more about capturing pre-existing revenue.

This often manifests by hiring too many industry veterans. When I was at lastminute.com, we hired a lot of travel executives, and I felt this kept us too tethered to old ways of doing things. So when I founded Trulia, we deliberately didn’t hire people who worked in real estate. The more you fill the executive ranks with industry veterans, the bigger the risk that you’ll end up copying the incumbents too much to really reinvent the industry.

Startups can’t afford this. You have to think like a contrarian. You have to resist the temptation to follow the tried and tested. Startup innovation is all about venturing into the unknown and blazing your own trail

Frameworks for New Market Creation

As mentioned earlier, while reinventing existing markets is often a good way for a startup to start out, creating a new market is often where the real value ultimately lies. If you want to become a truly transformative company, it means creating a new market.

But that’s a daunting prospect. How do you even begin to think about this? To help structure your thinking, I want to offer 5 places to look for the potential to create new markets.

1. Organize Informal Behavior

Organizing previously informal behavior into something that can be done commercially and at scale is one place to look.

TaskRabbit, Airbnb, and Uber are all recent examples of this. In the early days of TaskRabbit, for example, one of the biggest use cases was getting rides at the airport — a previously informal activity that TaskRabbit was able to commercialize.

You see a lot of new market creation via organizing informal behavior in horizontal marketplaces, which often serve to unlock latent supply in a situation where there was previously constrained supply paired with large demand.

For example, Instagram, where you see influencers selling products that they use — a previously informal activity (people recommending products to their friends) that got organized, commercialized, and eventually professionalized, creating a new profession.

Wherever there’s a potential to organize informal behavior at scale, there’s a potential new market opportunity.

2. Behavior of Early Adopters

The behavior of early adopters of new technologies is often a good place to look for new markets.

One good prompt I like to use: look at what students and engineers are doing. These have been the leading archetypes of early adopters in the past because they have very dense social networks with a high propensity to discover, adopt, and disseminate new technology.

The hot new products that engineers use so often become the hot things that we all use — products like Discord and Slack. The same applies to students and young people, as we saw with Facebook, Reddit, and Snapchat, or new lifestyles like digital nomads.

 

The behaviors of students and engineers are leading indicators of new markets.

3. Exponential Curves

Another place to look for new market creation comes from either the exponential growth of a new adjacent market (e.g. the growth of the internet > e-commerce) or an exponential collapse of pricing (e.g. genomic sequencing for biotech, Moore’s Law for computing, solar energy cost for EV / clean energy tech).

The nature of exponential growth or collapse is such that it tends to happen much slower than we think, and then all at once. This can make the state of the market hard to judge because our intuition is linear — not exponential.

But exponential behavior is something you find again and again, and that often creates a breakthrough opportunity. Startups by design are able to attack fast-moving markets more quickly than incumbents. As we often say, speed is your number one advantage as a startup.

4. Feature Abstraction

Another framework that has been used for identifying potential new markets, particularly in B2B, has been feature abstraction, i.e. turning features or products into platforms. Shopify, Twilio, Stripe, and Snowflake are all examples of B2B businesses built around products that were initially features.

Engineers in a company solving a particular problem is a signpost for this. “Is this a feature, or is this a company?” is often a question we ask startups as investors. Often, it can be that this is just a feature, but sometimes a feature can become a company if the market need is sufficient.

Slack started off building an internal collaboration tool for a game. PagerDuty began as a notification service that is now a SaaS instant response platform for business IT departments and is valued as a billion-dollar company.

5. Resource Sharing

Turning fixed costs into variable costs is another place we often see new market creation. For example, WeWork turning office space from a fixed cost into a variable cost according to office space usage, or AWS doing the same for cloud storage.

A lot of the easy versions of this have already been done, but though the low-hanging fruit may have been picked there are likely still opportunities.

Consistently Underappreciated Opportunities

 

The framework I’ve outlined here is useful for thinking about where your startup lies between reinventing vs. creating markets, but keep in mind that it’s a spectrum, not a dichotomy.

Did Tesla create a new market (EVs) or reinvent an existing one (Automotive)? Rarely do companies fit into one category or another, and sometimes where you lie on the spectrum changes over time.

But it’s good to know where you are on this spectrum for a couple of reasons.

The first is about playing to your strengths. As a VC, if I meet a team with a lot of industry experience, they tend to excel at creating businesses that focus on reinventing an existing market because they have built up the ability to execute well over their careers and it makes more sense for them to take on execution risk.

On the other hand, the archetype for Founders creating new industries is that they’re often creative, technical, and positively naive (in a good way, as they lack industry experience which can be a double-edged sword when it comes to innovation). Founders who have success creating new industries are often people who are able to think from first principles and are outsiders with limited business experience, but with deep domain knowledge from a technical standpoint.

The second thing that’s important about knowing where you stand is recognizing that creating new markets often produces larger outcomes because they’re contrarian — businesses creating new markets are doing something much less obvious than reinventing existing markets by applying a new technology, which means that they rarely have much competition to deal with.

In either case, however — whether a startup is reinventing an existing market, or creating a new one — I’ve noticed that the TAM opportunity tends to be underappreciated.

In new markets, this is because it’s consistently difficult for people to visualize the value created by something new, especially when it comes from exponential growth or exponential collapse of prices.

With existing markets, many don’t see that when you digitize something and add network effects, your potential market share can be much higher and your margin structure can be much more favorable. So you can’t just look at the offline equivalent and extrapolate from there. The “restaurants booking” TAM is a completely different beast offline than it is online.

So while creating new markets often creates the biggest outcomes, no matter where you lie on the spectrum, if you understand this framework and play to your strengths, your startup will have a good chance of defining or redefining a category.

www.tmaragroup.com

 

Creating new market category leaders

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How Investors Value New Category Creation

Nakul Mandan, investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners, talks about the dynamics of investing in companies that are building new market categories.

By Anthony Kennada Edited by Dan Bova 

ver the last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet with a number of founders building new market categories of products and services. Although the end product may differ, the conversations are all very similar, helping support my thesis that we’re still writing the playbook for how to do this. The most popular conversation topics tend to be on naming your category, how to host your first conference or how to hire a marketing leader who has done this before — bad news on that last one, we’re all pretty new.

But one question that has been coming up quite a bit lately is funding. Do investors think in terms of category creators and disruptors? Is there incremental upside in valuation for companies who are building a market? And what about that pesky burn rate thing?

Nakul Mandan, investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Image Credit: Lightspeed Venture Partners

Related: The 10 Most Reliable Ways to Fund a Startup

I sat down with Nakul Mandan, investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners to get his take on how Sand Hill Road is thinking (and investing) in companies who are building new market categories. Nakul is focused on early and growth stage software-as-a-service (SaaS) investments, and previously spent five years at Battery Ventures working with companies like Gainsight, BlueJeans Networks, Marketo, 6Sense, Intacct, Yesware and Groupon.

Q: New horizontal categories in enterprise software don’t come around that often. What leads to a new category opportunity?

You’re right. Most enterprise software opportunities get created by a couple of macro trends coming together to make the incumbents in an existing category redundant. Completely new horizontal opportunities don’t come together often.

In my mind, a couple of factors can lead to a new category:

One is the rise of a new business function — this is what happened with Gainsight. Prior to SaaS becoming the dominant business model for technology, Customer Success wasn’t a huge priority for large tech companies. With the advent of SaaS, this changed and we started to see a new function emerge in the form of Customer Success. Every time, a new horizontal functional team emerges, I expect a new software category to emerge to support that function.

The second factor could be a major technological or customer behavioral shift that leads to a new way of doing business: For instance, in the mid-2000s, business-to-business (B2B) marketing went through a transitionary phase. Prospective customers were increasingly researching products and services online before buying. They began to attend webinars, download white papers and overall, were leaving a greater footprint of their buyer intent online. As a result, the new category of B2B marketing automation emerged which led to the rise of companies like Marketo, Eloqua and Hubspot.

The category of social-media marketing is similar. It came about, because social media emerged as a new way for brands to engage with customers. That has led to the rise of several successful SaaS companies such as Sprinklr, Hootsuite and others.

Q: What makes you lean in on a new category? For instance, what got you convinced that Gainsight is creating a category that can support a massive company?

Ultimately, what gets me excited as an investor is the opportunity to back a team that is attacking a massive market opportunity and has an edge on the rest of the competition. In new categories, the tricky piece is that the market size always looks small in the beginning. So what makes one lean in? I think the market size may look small, but the macro trend it’s riding may look massive.

Going back to the social-media marketing example — in 2010, if you didn’t believe that social media would become one of the most dominant forms of online marketing, you probably wouldn’t invest in Hootsuite, Sprinklr and others. Because at the time, there were definitely a lot of questions around the return on investment on social-media marketing, and whether it’s going to be effective for a broad cross section of brands. So it all comes down to your belief in the macro trend.

In Gainsight’s case, I have always believed that Customer Success is more than about managing churn for subscription businesses. Helping subscription businesses manage churn was just the starting point, but I believe Customer Success is relevant for any business that wants to establish a repeatable relationship with its customers.

In this age of Twitter, Facebook and Yelp, every customer experience gets amplified on social media. If you’re not proactive about making your customers successful, you’re not going to be successful. Period. So while the initial market for Gainsight could have appeared small, my belief that its solution applies more broadly led me to invest.

Related: Be Meticulous About Your Investor Funnel to Achieve Funding Success

Q: Is there a quantifiable impact to market-share potential or valuation to category winners versus their competition?

There is definitely a dynamic of success begets success in enterprise software. If you establish early leadership in a category, you have more access to funding, more resources to attract the best product, engineering, sales and marketing talent, and as a result, you will have a better chance of winning more market share over time. Accordingly, the perception of leadership definitely gets you a higher valuation multiple than your competitors.

Q: What are a few examples (besides Gainsight) of SaaS companies who have succeeded in creating net new product categories? What do you think contributed to their success?

The ones that come to mind instantly are Marketo, Eloqua and Hubspot creating the B2B marketing automation category — Sprinklr and Hootsuite creating the social-media marketing automation category and InsideSales.com leading the charge in creating a new category around sales productivity and enablement. But even more interestingly, we are now beginning to see SaaS companies really push the envelope in terms of taking software to places where it didn’t exist earlier. So for instance, MindBodyOnline and StyleSeat are effectively creating a new category of software around appointment scheduling and customer automation for very small consumer services businesses.

I think one common theme is that these startups were able to build a narrative around not just themselves but also their category. Ultimately, you want your prospective customers to feel bought into the use case, even before you pitch them your solution. And the ones that win the category tend to make it so that they are the default company associated with that narrative or story.

Q: There’s a lot of talk about startup burn rates, especially in the public markets. Creating a new category takes rather significant investment early on in sales and marketing. How should entrepreneurs, founders and marketers think about that in context of budget planning and board expectations?

Every startup has its own unique needs from an initial investment required to seed the market opportunity. In a new category, sometimes it might take more upfront capital to get to $2 to $3 million in accounting rate of return (ARR) than in a category which is already established. Everybody understands that.

But the tricky phase is during the $2 to $100 million phase, when the burn rate for a SaaS startup can be high relative to its scale. I think it’s important to start becoming metrics-driven in terms of measuring churn and up-sell rates, gross margins and burn rates once you enter that phase. The burn rate doesn’t exist in isolation as a metric. If you are seeing that you have a good business based on the core fundamentals of having high gross margins by the time you have $2 to $3 million in ARR, you should absolutely double down on the opportunity and plan with the board to invest in the growth.

On the other hand, if these metrics are not favorable and don’t seem to be trending that way, then it’s only fair to question whether the growth investment is justified. Ultimately though, it does take conviction to invest upfront in new categories. The metrics can inform you, help you believe more, but ultimately you have to believe that you have a big market opportunity in front of you and that the business is working at its core.

Related: Slack Creates $80 Million VC Fund to Invest in Third-Party Developers

Anthony Kennada

VP Marketing, Gainsight

www.tmaragroup.com

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The road now yet travelled

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Unlocking the true value in Africa

Being 100% authentically African holds the secret kept from Africa for centuries. This understanding holds the key and within this lies the solution to a full life for all in Africa. The more we come to understand this, the more a life filled with purpose comes alive.

It was always thought that Africa is a continent of need, however it is us that needs Africa more; as in this understanding lies the purpose for Africa and only then does grace become a reality causing Africa to come alive and serve and ignite the world in ways never seen before

Unlocking the true value in Africa requires us to create rather than build, as building requires something to already be in place, however creating requires nothing. However saying this, we soon come to realize that creating is so easy yet so difficult as it is a function of being rather than ability. We strive in our daily African lives to achieve and our ability has a great role to play here. Yet resting in our being requires no performance, just being 100% authentically African.

It is this understanding that Africa is missing; yet already have to change the continent from within. All is where we decide to go, go left and all goes left however it might not be right in the left, but the power of creating is in that which we decide. Once this reality comes alive, then us as Africans will come to know that either way is right, the experience however is just less or more. This reality lays the foundation for Africa to come to the understanding that we can create.

We as Africans need to use the world to merely save time in accessing existing examples of capital use and not to use the world to teach us how to create as this lies within us already.

Making the change over in understanding is the challenge. Once we adopt an understanding of finding a way where there seems to be no way as the new way in Africa, then from within this new understanding power and provision is birthed in abundance and the face of Africa will never be the same again.

For centuries we have been told that we are not worthy and that we do not have what it takes to experience a full life. And for most of Africa this lie has become the reality. The time has come for Africa to break the shackles of our own understanding and lead a new era of coming together in new relationships as the new way for Africa and serving our way into abundance and provision is a new way very few has ever experienced.

Message to the rest of the world:

We as Africans invite you to go big as Africa is not small, this is Africa and not you, the big is not big in your understanding, but big in Africa’s splendor. The result of Africa’s bigness is then only manifested in awesomeness in people; they can’t touch but will only experience Africa. Then only is big great.

Regards
Derrick de Necker

Written in 2017 and updated in 2023

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DEFINING THE AFRICAN ECOSYSTEM – A required change in understanding

 

ATTENTION:

Investors, Corporates, political figures, NGO’s, commercial players, entrepreneurs, governments and all who might have a need for a new African strategy; please continue reading.

 

NOW:

 

For centuries, we as Africa have been told that we are not worthy, and that we do not have what it takes to experience a full life. For most of Africa this lie has become our reality. The time has come for stakeholders wishing to become a participant to the African renaissance, to break the shackles of our own understanding, and lead a new era of coming together as one in new relationships; as the new way for Africa and serving our way into abundance and provision will be a new way very few has ever experienced.

 

It was always thought that Africa is a continent of need, however it is all of us that need Africa more; as in this understanding lies the purpose for Africa, and only then does grace become a reality, causing Africa to come alive, serve and ignite the world in ways never seen before.

 

Being 100% authentically African holds the secret kept from Africa for centuries. This understanding holds the key, and within this, lies the solution to a full life for all participating in Africa; personally, and financially. The more we come to understand this, the more a purposed filled life becomes a reality.

 

Non-consensus has brought the world to a place where we are trying to establish what normal will look like, post Covid. The only way to answer this, is that the way we identify solutions; needs to change. The way we wish to approach, enter and make a change on the African continent, needs a new understanding.

 

Normal is no more, and normal going forward is yet to be defined. In this global uncertain time of our lives, nearly all Global and African participants find themselves in a desperate state to have some clarity on what the “new normal” will look like. Given this desire, a new era for Africa is opening up right in front of our eyes. A normal that has no option other than being accepted, and a New normal that Africa has the chance of being an author of.

 

Never has Africa been in this position to change the way the world talks, relates and interacts with Africa. How we go about communicating this new understanding and African strategy for the world to follow, designed and defined by Africa, is now in our hands.

 

DEFINING THE NEW NORMAL:

 

This new normal is defined as an ecosystem which functions as an all-inclusive economic and relationship-based strategy. Where coming together as one is the only way it was ever meant to be. What does the African ecosystem look like? How was it meant to be?

 

When we remove all traces of slavery, colonialism, racism and capitalism globally, when reference is made to the African continent, then the true African ecosystem rises up and becomes clear for all to see and experience.

 

Changing to this understanding as a new strategy is the challenge. Once we adopt an understanding where life can only truly come into its fullness within an ecosystem, then we will start to experience a way of life that all Africa participants yearn for.

 

When we say ecosystem; we by default say relationships / coming together as one. Acting

and functioning as one body of many parts = ONENESS. The collective oneness being more powerful than the effective individual parts.

 

From within this new Understanding; strategy, power and provision are birthed in abundance and the face of Africa is forever changed.

 

What are the components that make up this African ecosystem? What part does banking, mining, education, agriculture, regulatory, investments, human recourses, people, health, our precious earth and each one of us play in this African ecosystem?

 

Knowing that success in Africa is not only measured in capital forms, but more so in how relationships are formed and how each of these relationships, in a defined ecosystem, makes a difference and change to the people and the continent from within.

 

An Ecosystem is a practical way of life where each component in their own way serves for the greater benefit of the ecosystem, over the beneficial perceived and always short-lived individual benefit.

 

Africa is building a way of life where it has one body of many parts relevant to business, actually; anything we wish to do or be in life has this ecosystem template. The world where relationship is the foundation to all we do. Relationships that bind us together in ONENESS and relationships that allow us in an ecosystem to talk and engage even when we disagree, have different cultures, different race or even religions.

 

An ecosystem is a world where “US” is the only focus and where “I” have no place. An ecosystem where we serve each other, and in that, become one body of many parts, a body where we know we need each other, each limb effective in its time.

 

The world has given us a warped perception of how Africa is supposed to function; we have been sold a lie. Colonialism and Capitalism has taught us globally that such individualism has no place nor any longevity.

 

If we come to understand, that in the future the whole world will in some way or form, play a part in the African ecosystem, then we will realise and effect our role, use resources and efforts in becoming the best part of the ecosystem of Africa; which in its own time will play a part in the global ecosystem.

 

Never before has Africa had such a chance to display itself. The future African ecosystem is before us, in the now. Normal is now defined by the strategy we now follow; the way it was always meant to be and in that, life is birthed in a way never seen before. All we need to pay attention to, is the African ecosystem found and birthed in relationships, however upside down it might seem at the time.

 

TMARA ALKEBULAN’s ( https://tmaragroup.com/home-page/alkebulan-africa/ ) Corporate Finance Partner (  https://www.ecosystemcapital.africa/ )  service our partners in a very non-traditional.

 

Corporate Finance, Advisory and Investment way. Ecosystem Partners and our partners are all

bound by our love for Africa and its people. We live a strong belief that Africa is launching itself as a solutions-driven continent, which will ignite the rest of the world in the years to come.

 

We purposefully birth all-inclusive ecosystems that attract participation from all components within each company, investments, government and or project.

 

The past has taught us that there always needs to be a winner and a loser when we ‘do’ business with Africa. However, Ecosystem Partners believes that within an effective ecosystem, this old draconian lie and way of thinking is outdated, and it’s time for us to set in motion a new way of thinking and engaging.

 

For us, creating the African ecosystem is a way of life. We invite all global players to come to understand this way of life and become part of the African renaissance which we believe, will lead to a global economic and personal re-alignment value creating strategy.

 

Message to the rest of the world:

 

We as Africans, invite you to go big as Africa is not small, this is Africa. The big is not big in your understanding, but big in Africa’s splendour. The result of Africa’s bigness, is only then manifested in awesomeness in people; something one can’t touch, but can only experience.

Then only is big great – coming together as one “ONENESS ECOSYSTEM” perfected.

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Written by Derrick de Necker

July 2020, updated in December 2023

Ecosystem Partners in partnership with TMARA ALKEBULAN

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Co-create and invest in AFRICA’s (non-obvious) new market category kings – that can gravitate up to 75% of the market cap in their new-found CREATIVE spaces

Welcome to IFFAC – Impact Fund for African Creatives

There are disappointed investors who passed multiple times on opportunities to invest in nascent-stage ventures like Uber, Airbnb and Google.

How can the world’s best early-stage investors not be able to see the future potential of some of the greatest start-up success stories, those that became mass market ‘must-haves’

Simple. They needed more evidence of market momentum (traction) before placing their bet on these would-be new market category leaders, precisely because they were non-obvious innovations, that where frankly (too) new for them to consider.

Today there is a scientific LEADING indicator of future new market category success that can be applied rationally to early-stage ventures before traction occurs – and powerful enough to predict future mass market adoption.

We know, the highest returns are only available to those who invest early enough, happen to be right, and also whilst the innovation remains non-obvious to others. Enter later, once it becomes an obvious winner, and your investment advantage disappears, as you now must compete to participate.

Never before has there been a rational, reliable and repeatable LEADING indicator of future market adoption.

TMARA’s (Target Market Adoption Risk Assessment’s) unique ability to locate the illusive market sweet spot for innovative start-ups like Uber, allows investors to know at the earliest stage, if home-run success is a potential outcome – and investors can then secure options (within IFFAC’s Fund), which can then be exercised once the success is realised (again through TMARA‘s embedded scientific product-category fit process).

Background to what’s behind the science of value creation:

For the first time in history, the business process of creating new value (market ‘must-haves’), has been reduced to a science-backed formula and recipe, built on the shoulders of giants, namely: Dr. Eli Goldratt (Theory of Constraints) and Dr. Nassim Taleb (Optionality) – that:

1. Enables start-up jockeys to perform at a much higher level of proficiency (decent jockeys can become great jockeys, and it will even cover the blind spots of the greatest jockeys.

2. Reducing something down to a formula or science thus shifting the focus from guessing the outcome (which needs great intelligence and lots of luck), to interpreting the progress (which needs great rationality and less luck) – logically determining where you are vis-a-vis the ‘promised land – aka the market’s sweet spot)

3. Provides a progress indicator -“are we on track or do we need to pivot towards the market’s sweet spot”.

Bottom line:

Knowing how to create value in the eyes of the market is no longer a mystery and is causing a major shift in the early-stage (Zero-to-One) space.

IFFAC (Impact Fund for African Creatives) now has TMARA ‘inside’ and is focused on making an impact in the African Creative industry, by co-creating new market category leaders in this space.

In a nutshell:

We co-create and invest in non-obvious new market category kings – that can gravitate up to 75~% of the market cap in their space

Our investors secure options on our early-stage creative ventures, all of which have the potential to become significant successes, because the scientific methodology of accessing and affecting mass market ‘must-haves’ is reliably and repeatably embedded into the IFFAC fund.

We invite superior non-consensus investors, who decide their own mandates, and who would personally appreciate a command of the science of creating market ‘must-haves’, to join our journey.

Co-create and invest in AFRICA’s (non-obvious) new market category kings – that can gravitate up to 75% of the market cap in their new-found CREATIVE spaces.

Welcome to the science to turning innovations into market must-haves.

For more info:

Roberta Annan

https://iffa-c.com/

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