Visionary leaders play a crucial role in the emerging economies’ dynamic environment, where entrepreneurship and innovation are defining the future.
In a recent chat, I had the privilege of engaging with the Co-founders of Dream VC, Mark Kleyner and Cindy AI.
With a trail of expertise in ecosystem building and early-stage investing, the co-founders’ journey have spanned the globe while forging collaboration with venture capitalists.
Dream VC has emerged as a beacon of support for aspiring founders and entrepreneurs throughout the African continent, guiding them on their journey into the intricacies of the venture capital industry.
As we delved into the conversation, the co-founders unravelled insights into the investment landscape, the dynamics of the African startup scene and the untapped potential that lies within the continent’s burgeoning startup ecosystem.
Empowering Emerging African Angels, Venture Capitalists, and Ecosystem Builders
Dream VC is passionate about bridging information asymmetry and building confidence through practice and community.
According to the co-founders, this is an industry that’s very much run on who you know and dealing with long feedback loops, so having a solid network and support system is critical.
“The issue for many is that they have no idea how to even get started, and have no community or available resources to fall back on.”
Dream VC wants to address all three of those: bringing fellows an in-built community (social capital), an extensive database of resources (learning the ropes), and fostering a culture that encourages mutual uplifting and support (network effect at scale).
Throughout its programs, the platform brings in some of the top African-focused investors and founders in their respective crafts for intimate fireside chats and helps facilitate direct and relevant intros between key stakeholders and our fellows.
“This helps build connections across some of the more siloed startup ecosystems, and opens up countless opportunities for collaboration and value, whether that’s through dealflow, partnerships, or more.”
According to Mark, Dream VC is able to support aspiring investors and ecosystem builders through an intensive on-ramp that can accelerate years they would’ve spent trying to build connections in the industry, upskill and learn on the job, and get into closed-door conversations.
The platform is also setting a standard and structured pathway for the new generation of African investors and helps inspire many young people to get involved in the innovation space, which can further bolster economies.
How Dream VC Addresses the Unique Challenges and Opportunities in Africa’s Startup Ecosystem
Siloed & Emerging Ecosystems
As explained by the co-founders, many ecosystems across Africa are all greatly fragmented with their own specific cultures, challenges, and players.
There are several emerging ecosystems that have significant potential if catalyzed but face ongoing infrastructural challenges and a lack of investment readiness resources.
In this case, Dream VC has been especially keen on connecting and bringing specific ecosystems into the fold, namely the Arabaphone and Francophone African countries, as well as some in the Horn of Africa and this year, it has specifically done a lot of work to bridge the North African and Sub-Saharan African geographies, as well as run VC workshops in countries such as the DRC, Ethiopia, and Sudan.
“It is our hope that by facilitating these connections, we can support the rise of investors in these ecosystems and also plug them into existing networks from more established geographies.”
Training & Talent Gap for Investors
Mark explains that this a two-pronged challenge, but on the other hand, African-focused investors had a lack of resources and learning opportunities related to VC and angel investing in the African context.
Secondly, many African investment firms struggle to hire qualified talent (and have very little time to upskill them).
According to Mark, Dream VC’s core programs come in, “where we take up the time-intensive task of upskilling prospective investors, and also directly facilitate intros for VCs looking to hire talent.”
Diversity & Inclusion
It has been mentioned many times before how the investment space faces a huge lack of diversity, whether that’s with the representation of women in the VC space or people of color overall.
According to the co-founders, Dream VC is proud to contribute to a more diverse and inclusive future for African VC, with 55% of their fellows identifying as women and 97% as individuals of color.
Dream VC also actively collaborates with other organizations to run specific D&I programs (such as their sponsored VC bootcamp with Norrsken22) and connect their fellows to female founder initiatives (for example Women Who Build Africa).
Dream VC’s Success Stories
On the impact of Dream VC’s accelerator programs, Mark commented that Dream VC don’t necessarily define success as “we have trained X amount of investors in Y years”, or enforce that everyone absolutely needs to pursue a career in VC (in fact, even if they choose to plug into another aspect of the venture space, that’s fine!).
According to him, fellows who went through the programs and are founders have utilized the information to successfully go on and fundraise for their startup, and some are now at the point where they angel invest on the side into their own startup friends.
“Our alumni have gone on to join as the first hire in emerging VC funds (such as Blessing, our 2021 fellow who joined Ajim Capital as Head of Platform), start the first syndicate in their region (such as Lionel, our 2021 fellow who helped manage Ivoire Angels), and get promoted within their firms (such as Christine, our 2022 fellow who is now Head of Ventures at The Baobab Network).”
Dream VC also has an undisclosed number of fellows who are in the process of launching a VC fund, and some have found their own co-GPs within the Dream VC community.
Dream VC’s Criteria for Selection
Dream VC thoroughly discerns if an individual is a cultural fit for its community. “We are able to generally filter out individuals that don’t fit the criteria below in our rigorous 4-stage application process.”
The process is broken down into 3 main aspects according to the co-founders:
Is this person genuinely and enthusiastically passionate about contributing to the African VC & startup space, and have they shown this through initiative/action?
Dream VC is looking for above and beyond – do they relentlessly pore over African ecosystem news? Does the idea of supporting startups and the investment space keep them up at night? Do they inceshttps://incafrica.com/santly mention this to people around them? etc.
Is this person positive and excited about the potential of Africa’s startup ecosystem?
This might seem like strange criteria, but the co-founders have actually come across a number of individuals who applied to the programs but then are overwhelmingly negative or bored about the growth potential of Africa’s startup ecosystem.
Also read, Dream VC reveals Insights from 4,000+ Applicants
Are they inherently collaborative and respectful of others?
A large bulk of the programs in Dream VC are group-driven and the co-founders have a strong focus on collaboration, so it’s a big problem if someone is either uncooperative or bulldozes all over others.
“We are also looking for people that are relationship-driven and empathetic, and as we joke internally, we have a ‘no-jerk policy’.”
Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) at Dream VC
“To be perfectly honest, we don’t have an internal D&I framework in place in Dream VC. However, we do try our best to ensure diversity and inclusion through 4 key steps: pre-application, internal review process, internal initiatives and external initiatives.”
For pre-applications, Dream VC casts its net wide and reach as many individuals as it can, and specifically host sessions with certain communities that are promoting D&I, such as women in tech/finance communities, black operator networks, and more.
For its application processing, Dream VC have a blind review process for the first 2 stages where we don’t see the individual’s name or other personal information while our team assesses their fit.
This helps prevent any preconceived bias at this point and has worked very well for us in the past few years.
According to Mark, Dream VC internally runs a safe space community for all the women, as well as individual community groups based on location, to encourage in-person meetups.
“We also run an internal Francophone fellows community where French-speaking fellows can support one another and share resources.
Finally, we have collaborated with several organizations to launch external initiatives that specifically spread more awareness of the African VC space to specific communities, and most of these are on a goodwill basis as we see it as being a critical part of our ethos.”
Roles of VCs and Angels in Driving Innovation and Economic Development in Africa
Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors play a crucial role, as the first risk-takers and major innovation drivers advocating for and driving innovation and economic development in Africa.
Across the continent, there are multiple entrepreneurial ecosystems with largely untapped potential, and these early investors are the ones that can “activate” these ecosystems.
There are several ways in which VCs and Angels do this according to the co-founders:
Angels and VCs invest much-needed capital (money) into startups that help entrepreneurs develop and scale their innovative ideas towards fully working products, creating jobs and driving digital adoption across both existing and new sectors of the industry.
VCs and Angels alike provide guidance and hands-on support, offering mentorship guidance and strategic support to help founders overcome the challenges of building in very challenging business environments, to help them build truly global businesses.
Both Angels and VCs also act as catalysts. As more Angels and VCs start to invest in an ecosystem, this creates an industry of service providers and ecosystem development opportunities around their investment, as this can create a market need for accelerators, incubators, startup hubs and venture studios.
This all leads to the development of more sustainable, long-term support infrastructure for more startups to succeed.
Dream VC’s Collaboration with Stakeholders in Africa’s Innovation Ecosystem
Dream VC works actively with other stakeholders such as governments, foundations, associations and entrepreneurship support organizations (such as incubators and accelerators) in a capacity-building manner.
“We are always happy to see governments and ESOs alike express an interest in doing more in Africa’s innovation ecosystem and have previously taken on various projects, to set up conferences showcasing the startup opportunity in emerging markets; to organize programs focused on creating more local investors and to help governments, accelerators and incubators to think through developing their own direct investment capabilities.”
How Dream VC keeps up with key Trends and Emerging Sectors in Africa’s Startup Scene
“One trend we notice is how more and more startups are recognizing the nuance of the African market size for various consumer-driven products.
Despite the enormous demographic advantage, not all 200m+ people in Nigeria are serviceable or even reachable customers for tech startups.
More and more businesses are thinking about expanding strategically across countries to access market size, so we are seeing more internationalization among some startups.”
Another worthwhile trend according to Mark is the ‘reality’ of the narrative of the potential investment power of the African diaspora.
“I think this is one of the most common points mentioned at African-focused conferences around the world and it’s definitely not something that is very easy to access or solve – as diaspora remittance comes through hundreds of channels and isn’t always formalized.
Despite this, over the last 3-4 years, there has been an explosion of startups who try to service Africans abroad, both within other African countries, in Europe and in North America.
Whether it’s remittance, financial services, care, entertainment, verification or investments, many startups are actively trying to connect the private wealth and earning capacity between the diaspora and African-based opportunities and we can only see these services growing larger.”
Dream VC remains highly proactive to stay on top of developments. By investing time, money and focusing its operations on its fellow community, the team is constantly interacting with past fellows (alumni of Dream VC programs), friendly funds and ecosystem builders to have up-to-date viewpoints on market dynamics.
The platform tailors its programs, and updates hundreds of hours of content every year, with new case studies, new scenarios and new training, to reflect the latest realities and this ensures its programs remain very high quality.
“At the same time, when it comes to staying on top of the growing power of the diaspora base, we are quite proactive in engaging with partners, collaborative funds and African-focused communities in many parts of the world.
Through these, we help to reconnect professionals in the diaspora with opportunities in Africa – bridging those ties.
These efforts have helped us reach aspiring investors in the European and American diaspora and I can only see that reach growing over time – with dozens of Dream VC fellows now based out of the UK & US for example.”
The Future of Africa’s Startup Ecosystem and the role Dream VC will play in Shaping it
“We are eternal optimists at Dream VC, so we believe in a bright and inspirational future for the African innovation and entrepreneurship space, and the investors that we are supporting in the pipeline into it.
It is our hope at Dream VC that we are making the investment space more accessible, and also championing the best minds and empathetic individuals to truly build out the ecosystem.
These individuals will drive more capital and support to the local startup ecosystems than we have ever seen before, and we are especially hopeful about our influence on inspiring more women to be represented in the space.
We aspire for our fellows to become important cornerstones in the African investment space, who will set an example of ethical investor behavior and foster meaningful collaboration between various ecosystems.
Finally, we envision a future where our fellows can empower the continent to reach true wealth creation, with African investors investing in African companies, in partnership with African corporates, high net worth individuals, and more eventually playing a part in the ecosystem, whether that’s as Limited Partners in funds or directly investing in startups themselves.”
Do you have what it takes to become the next African angel or VC? Join the next cohort of Dream VC fellows here to start your journey.
Featured Image: Dream VC Co-Founders, Mark Kleyner(Left), Cindy AI (Right) Flat6Labs Event During RiseUp 2023 in Cairo, Egypt
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