I often think I’ve seen it all but once in a while, I get flabbergasted and gob-smacked at the same time when some things happen. I had that rare moment this week with the funny story of Linda Ikeji and her Hermes Birkin bags.
Even after Hermes confirmed that the bags are fake, Linda insisted they are original. I couldn’t stop laughing at the comments on Twitter. I also agreed with Hermes when I saw the Birkin’s bags on display here.
What I could deduce from the Birkin’s bags saga was that Linda isn’t well prepared for her success and she isn’t the only Nigerian entrepreneur that appears to have a shaky entrepreneurial foundation. I had a personal experience with a very popular tech founder several weeks ago.
Late last year, I conducted some research for a special report that appeared on Innovation Village and elsewhere, it was on the ecommerce ecosystem in Nigeria and I interviewed some major startup founders but one of them acted like a celebrity and I knew the attitude would hurt him sooner or later. I asked him some follow up questions but he decided not to respond. I went ahead to write my story adding that he declined response. But when the piece was eventually published, he speedily took to his Twitter account to refute an aspect of the piece – something he could have achieved by just replying my email.
I was enjoying my wife’s delicious dinner when I saw the Twitter notification and I began to ask myself what he wanted to achieve with the tweet. I wondered if he forgot that the published story would be more relevant than his tweet when it comes to official purposes in addition to archiving and search results. Even those that favorited and retweeted his post will forget about it the next day but my piece will continue to rank high among his search results.
HotelOga’s founder, Marek also called me out on Twitter last week in response to a mention of his name in last week’s edition of the week in review but he didn’t tell his followers that he refused to reply my numerous emails asking for clarification. Like the ecommerce guy’s tweet, his’ will also be forgotten but search results will continue to point people to the article.
A serious entrepreneur who is well prepared for success will take all forms of publicity seriously and would endeavor to ensure that his or side of the story is well represented. I have observed this perversion among Nigerian tech entrepreneurs who think they are too big to be interviewed by the local media. They want CNN and New York Times.
When they finally appear on CNN’s African Start-Up programme, they believe they’ve arrived even when they know that they are yet to be as impactful as any of the tech companies in Silicon Valley.
But not all of the entrepreneurs in Nigeria are ill-prepared for success, several of them are demonstrating good characters that confirm that they are well grounded, know the industry very well and have a global perspective.
Take the three co-founders of SureGifts as example. This week, it got to public knowledge that they have launched SureGifts in Kenya. Even though they didn’t blow their trumpet in everyone’s ears. The fact is that they’ve joined a very short list of Nigerian entrepreneurs that had successfully expanded their tech startups to other African countries. Even Konga.com is yet to expand to elsewhere and Jumia that did it was able to achieve that with the support of Rocket Internet that eventually kicked out the founding founders of the company, Tunde and Raphael.
SimplePay founder, Simeon Ononobi, is another entrepreneur that I see as well prepared. He is a very cool, confident and successful entrepreneur who doesn’t make noise but rakes in millions. He listens to everyone, doesn’t brag and is very humble. He’s the kind of tech founder you can chat with via Facebook messenger and wouldn’t be forming to be a celebrity even though he is. And I’m not surprised that his products are doing great in the market and he’s launching in faraway places such as India.
Without mincing words, the ill-preparedness of many startup founders in Nigeria is an attestation to the poor entrepreneurial training programmes in Nigeria (sit up CcHub) and it highlights the need for some forms of interventions to equip the entrepreneurs with required skills because it is obvious that entrepreneurs in Nigeria need more than money – they need reorientation and reprogramming of their mindset.
With the improving indices for startups in Nigeria – one of which is mobility as affirmed by Sage, and more money becoming available in the ecosystem through all sorts of initiatives, urgent actions need to be taken to ensure that Nigerian entrepreneurs are well prepared so that they don’t fail nor become global ridicule because they were not well groomed even though they walk around confidently, calling themselves CEOs of future Fortune 500 companies.
This is why startup founders in Abuja need to partake in Startup Friday launched by NITDA; open source entrepreneurs should participate in UNICEF’s open source investment opportunity, and Jumia-powered MTN entrepreneurship challenge and should begin to be planning towards attending DEMO Africa 2016 holding in Johannesburg South Africa. For female entrepreneurs, they can acquire skills at She Leads Africa Abuja bootcamp.
