Wole Odetayo, Executive Partner Wennovation Hub has told Innovation Village the hub convened the Lagos Angel Network.
Speaking to Innovation Village in Ibadan, Odetayo said Wennovation Hub was able to convene like minds to invest and mentor startups in building scalable solutions.
Concerning the current state of the angel network, he said the stakeholders expected that it would take time for the network to be well established.
“We expect that there would be challenges, there would be slow takeoff. However, Lagos Angel Network is working. They meet every month to discuss the way forward,” he said.
According to him, the best way to grow angel network is to allow it to gradually form.
“It is usually a slow takeoff,” he said. “Angel networks are not like product-selling companies with targets – even such exist as goals. It takes a lot of time for an angel network to take off and I think that is the phase the Lagos Angel Network is now.
“We set up the network because we discovered there is funding in the system but they are series funding. The particular year we founded Lagos Angel Network, we received 6 venture capitalists (VCs). 4 out of the 6 VCs were international VCs looking for funding opportunities. They include part of the investors in the now Rocket Internet in Nigeria. They were looking for deals they could invest in. the least we got was from the Millicom brothers and they were willing to invest US$250,000.
“The way VCs are structured, you cannot play with their money. What we needed was ‘patient capital’ to help the startups at early-stage level. There was no finance that was willing to put money in whole lot to help 98% of the startups fail and 2% of them to cross the early stage. The 98% that failed would have learnt a lot in the business.
“We saw a gap for patient capital and we felt that the only way we could solve that was to set up an angel network.”
