Money Management and Navigating Venture Capital in Nigeria with Maya Horgan Famodu – Smart Money Africa
Welcome to the Smart Money Tribe Podcast with your host Arese, the founder of smartmoneyafrica.tv and the author of two best selling personal finance books; the Smart Money Woman and the Smart Money Tribe. This podcast will include money conversations for African Millennial women and will focus on personal finance, business finance, lifestyle and the economy. On our podcast you’ll get a mix of no nonsense discussions with real women and entrepreneurs who are making a real impact in their industries. Find out how established and emerging female entrepreneurs, authors, business women, and other inspiring leaders manage their money, create good money habits and more. Join us as they give us insight into their career journeys and we learn real ways to get, keep and grow money In this episode Arese shares how comparison is killing your budget and strategies to improve your financial health.
Episode 9: Money Management and Navigating Venture Capital in Nigeria
Maya Horgan Famodu the founder of Ingressive Capital and a partner at Ingressive for Growth which is set up to encourage young Nigerians to acquire viable and valuable technical skills, sits down to talk with Arese about her Journey from her first private equity company when she was 23 after she had left her role at Morgan Stanley to currently being the Founder and Partner to the company responsible for the success stories of the likes of Paystack. She lived most of her life in America and it wasn’t until a series of unsuccessful deals did she look inwards into her Nigerian heritage to find a viable an opportunity-rich economy to raise funds in
She discussed how as a young entrepreneur at the age of 23 she had to learn how to pivot to find other viable opportunities for her business. Having made the mistake that most entrepreneurs make, that is to keep pursuing leads that do not align with the idea profile of their customer she narrates how she had to manoeuvre to identify the right kinds of clients by spending more time at the front-end of operations and how she learnt to be go after smaller wins and work with them as she prepared for the much bigger clients.
After Arese pointed out the at time forceful and often predatory nature of PE firms in Nigeria the conversation proceeded to go in-depth to the tendencies to focus investable funds into more infrastructure dependent ventures and Businesses like real estate, oil and agriculture instead of their counterparts with more intangible products and a different business model.
She and Arese touched on the topic of self-improvement which can only come from a certain level of self-awareness and this took a different turn for her as she realised that the quality of her work was directly related to the state of her mind because she mentions how her company’s productivity improved. She mentioned how self-affirmation is an important part of her self-development process. Arese, mentioned the tendencies within the Nigerian corporate space for things to, ”take time” to which Maya went in depth to explain that it is a function of lack of focus on Key Performance Indicators and how her company culture is based on personal responsibility to completing a task and not how long or how hard you worked to complete the task. As she said, “Either you do it or you don’t”. Being a self-starter or being willing to do a deep dive into the work you are given is an important aspect of her hiring process.
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