The Black Gary V

Gary Vaynerchuck is a man that needs no introduction. Over the last 9 years he has transitioned from the CEO of Wine Library TV to the founder and CEO of global digital media company, Vayner Media. His rise to popularity has been well documented on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Gary is known for his brutally honest delivery of speech and as a thought leader on emerging social media. Over the same period of time, Vusi Thembekwayo is a man that has risen to prominence but has no Snapchat profile, no Facebook account and no Instagram, he is just about on Twitter and Youtube. However what these two gentlemen share is that at the core of their message and what they represent, it is about being a practitioner and not someone who talks the talk about being an entrepreneur.

Vusi is a global renowned public speaker, Managing Director of Pan-African and EU Private Equity Fund, Wtaermark Afrika Fund, an investor on Dragons Den South Africa (SA), CEO of My Growth Fund and Non-Executive to a host of companies. Despite all these illustrative titles, Vusi’s story starts with humble beginnings of how he overcame adversity in a country still wounded by the scars from Apartheid, South Africa. He was thriving and succeeding in school, quenching his thirst for knowledge in the Gauteng province of SA when due to a lack of affordability he had no choice but to drop out of university. You can imagine that this is a pivotal moment in anyone’s life, young, confused and depressed with the pressure of thinking about what next. There are many traits that mark the skillset of an entrepreneur, two that are not so easy to quantifiably measure but are so sought after are grit and determination. These two traits really show how hungry you are for an opportunity and how far you are willing to go. Vusi showed the first signs of this as a university dropout (not by choice), as he walked with CV in hand into two of Johannesburg’s biggest malls at the time, determined to get back on his feet and start working hard. He handed his CV to over 50 stores and received rejection after rejection. This problem became an itch he had to scratch and gave birth to his first company, a recruitment agency ran from his bedroom, GPSA (Global Professionals South Africa).

Between the experience of leaving university due to financial constraints and starting his first company, at such a tender age he had figured out what he wanted to do with his life and what the steps were to achieve his goals in the year ahead. This shouldn’t be taken lightly, we hear time and time again how important creating a vision and goal setting are to entrepreneurs as well as companies. He openly admits that the most difficult part in making your dream (vision) a reality is the “just doing it” part, as in getting on with it and making progress each and every week. He never used his environment as an excuse, his finances or the lack of infrastructure in comparison to the Western World.

Instead he became a craftsmen at spotting and executing on opportunities that surrounded him. For Vusi, entrepreneurship is about the study of “gapology.” It is not something you can teach people, you either have it or you don’t. It involves the ability to see opportunities where they don’t currently exist. He summarises 3 ways to find the gap:

1. Find something people are willing to pay
2. Something they need now
3. And they have the money to pay for it now

There are 3 key lessons he shares about what he looks for in founders he invests in:

1. Someone who has failed before

He compares this experience to swimming. If you give someone a textbook on ‘how to swim’ and they read it for three years and they jumped into the pool, they will likely sink. You learn by doing is the lesson here. Swimming isn’t a theory thing, it is a practice thing, you learn to swim by swimming. Same holds true for entrepreneurship, failure gives you the experience of attempting to start and grow a business. We need to break away from this culture of reading Paul Graham essays, Business Model Generation and The Lean Startup and feeling like we are now qualified to start a business. Businesses were started by the authors of these books before they wrote a word down. It is a humbling experience to fail and know what lies on the other side of not succeeding, it is a feeling you have to experience not just read about.

2. You need to be somewhat crazy

The probability of succeeding as an entrepreneur is ridiculously low. To think nearly 93% of VC-backed startups fail means you have a very low probability of succeeding as you are much more likely to fail like the majority. Successful entrepreneurs, believe in themselves even when no one else does and there is ridiculous odds stacked against them. This is the conviction that allows them to make it through the obstacles that running a business throws at you. You have to be a little crazy to start a business and believe you will make money at month end when often you don’t to begin with. You have to believe you can compete with existing competitors who are much bigger than you, which often you can’t. You have to believe you can reach all of your addressable market (customers) which often you won’t and you can do so cheaply and make a profit which often you can’t for months or even years as we see with many startups.

3. You gotta love what you do

There are so many opposing schools of thought when it comes to ‘passion.’ Some believe you don’t have to be passionate about the business you create or the problem you solve. I believe it is a lot harder to do something you are not passionate about for a long period of time, in fact it sucks. We have all been in jobs where we daydream about being our own boss and living life on our own terms because you are using 5% of your mind doing something you dislike in exchange for money. In the early days of being an entrepreneur, it won’t be the money that feeds you but the passion. It won’t be the money that sees you through the hard times when you’re cash strapped and struggling sell, it is your passion. Loving what you do provides the energy to keep doing it.

The hard truth about entrepreneurship in the Black community

The 32 year-old self-made entrepreneur is laser focused on nurturing more successful founders from the African continent. His mission is to change the African narrative by challenging the mindset and approach towards achieving economic freedom through entrepreneurship.

Vusi is passionate about people starting where they are with what they have, not racing to raise funding. He gives the example of a young lady who wants to buy a chicken farm. The lady has no prior experience running a farm or looking after chicken. Vusi proposed giving her a small amount of seed capital, 50,000 ZAR (equivalent of ￡3,000) for the young lady to purchase eggs. He then encouraged her to sell batches of eggs (pack of 6) to people selling food and managing street stalls. The profit may be meagre to start with and 50,000 ZAR may grow to 75,000. However when you iteratively keep going through this cycle you can retain more profits of up to half a million Rand. This would equip the women with the experience and track record of retailing eggs as well as a book of customers. At that stage an investor would have more faith in making an introduction to someone who can supply the eggs at a lower cost so the young lady can retain more profit. By this time, you have a great understanding of the end customer, supply chain and the entire cycle. Only at this stage would Vusi as an investor have the confidence of providing capital for the young lady to acquire a chicken farm. This ladies and gentlemen is a playbook on patience, hard work and entrepreneurship.

Vusi shares his thoughts on the lack of diversity in business let alone tech in SA. When he appeared on Dragons Den SA, he was joined by 3 other black investors, one was a women and one white investor. Yet from the 16 investments made, 4 founders were black and only one was female. This stands out given the demographics of the population in SA. The investment complexion doesn’t reflect the people who are investing, not on purpose but because Vusi like Gary V believes entrepreneurship knows no color. They both believe that the market decides, Vusi was never shown favour in business because of his skin tone, and neither was Gary V grafting in America as a Russian immigrant. Capitalism is colourblind and the market wins regardless if you are black, white, blue or from Mars as long as you deliver a market need and solve customer problems.

The problem in black communities Vusi feels is that we are struggling to nurture ‘real black entrepreneurs.’ Not the ‘Wantrepreneur’ who gets a logo designed, sets up a website, registers the company and gets a business bank account then applies for funding. That is typically just administration duties in business not sales and not growth. He goes further to say many well educated black people are taking the low risk approach to focus on security for their family’s future and secure high paying jobs and rise through the ranks. The risk and reward of entrepreneurship is more extreme at both ends of the spectrum as you risk everything you have today in the hope (not promise) of future rewards tomorrow.

Vusi goes on to explain the importance of generational wealth. Building businesses not for today or tomorrow but for your children’s — children to benefit from. He says he sees this in abundance in the Kenyan entrepreneur as the driving motivation but it is lacking in the SA based entrepreneurs mindset and approach. If we look to communities who have thrived on this same approach, we can turn to the Jewish community who build with generational wealth in mind. Nowhere in the world do you see homeless of poor Jewish people. Within their tightknit communities they own nearly every shop and local business from the grocery store to the schools and banks. Jewish people are people like the rest of us but over the generations they have understood how entrepreneurship can play a key role in wealth and betterment for the community. For example the father starts making bread and passes the bakery business onto his son. He son expands the bakery business and sells other goods and grows into a grocery store. Then his son inherits the business, takes the grocery store and opens a logistics business to serve other Jewish stores and you can foresee how the story continues. Jewish founders have never been motivated by running towards the exit (exit rounds) but rather have focused on profitability from the outset.

What do you think about the philosophies and views of Vusi? Do you agree with his mindset and approach?

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