It’s Benjamin here, and I wanted to personally invite you to a conversation I’m having this evening with an early-stage investor and a founder who just raised her first institutional VC round.
The investor is Dr Dotun Olowoporoku, and the founder is Seun Alley.
Dr Dotun is a General Partner at Ventures Platform Fund, while Seun is an operator and two-time founder who currently leads the Fez Delivery team as their CEO.
We thought hard about who to bring to the show to discuss this topic. We knew that we wanted a mix of founder and investor, but we also wanted people who were tuned in to the stricter times that we are in. Finally, we wanted a founder who could empathise with first-timers.
Seun is not new to entrepreneurship. In 2016, she founded her first company that offered a service to enterprises—that was bootstrap. A few years later, she started Fez Delivery to solve a problem she experienced in her first company. But this time, it’s a product company.
And because of this, it fits neatly into the description of a startup, which is characterised by high growth and low marginal effort to serve new customers. Hence why investors like Dotun keep backing them because of the potentially high upside.
Owing to Seun’s relatively new experience in fundraising, I expect her insights to be closer to the current realities and more practical for first-time fundraisers. As for Dotun, he is an OG, and I’ve known him for many years. He’s been an operator and investor for a decade.
Apart from VC funding, founders can raise funding through grants. For instance, the HiiL Justice Accelerator is offering about €10,000 in grant funding to justice startups and social enterprises in Nigeria. Applications are open and will close today by 11:00 PM (GMT).
You don’t want to miss this conversation with two of my friends and senior colleagues. The time is 7:00 PM (WAT), and the venue is Twitter Spaces.
See you in three hours.
Regards,
Benjamin
