Playfair The Green Heart of Kenya Beneath the Baobabs Audio Sans Frontieres
Angel Investor
Nairobi, Kenya
I operate as an angel investor, funding startups across sub-Saharan Africa with a particular focus on Kenya. I have been investing in early-stage ventures since 2010 and have backed over one hundred companies both as an individual and as part of Playfair Capital, the venture capital firm I founded in 2013. I remain its Chairman and sole LP today.
I believe that helping small businesses to grow is the best path towards a sustainable form of development. It took much of my 20s spent working for NGO to realise that, and it is now my mission to help empower entrepreneurs in developing markets with funding, support and mentorship.
Offer
It takes a unique blend of explicit economic activity, intrinsically intertwined with explicitly non-economic activity, to create platforms that can truly provide sustainable, systematic change. In terms of my skills, I am certainly more of an empath that gets by with a high EQ. My inherent characteristics of benefit to everything I do are: - Diplomacy - Mediation - Hosting - General social and professional Alchemy (bit like Bear on this one) In terms of my skills, I don't think I'm very good, or top of my game rather, at anything in particular. I am however, entirely passably well learned in a large variety of things given everything I've learned having invested in more than 100 companies for one, combined with a voracious appetite for knowledge I like to operate as quietly as possible, I value privacy and run away from public self-promotion. My motto is very much to make a lot of noise quietly, or as many ripples without and waves as I can.
NEED
Here in Kenya, the greatest challenges are administrative. Navigating the murky waters of regulation, taxation, corruption etc
Call-to-Action
What are the fundamental necessities to creat a friendly startup environment in developing ecosystems?
