Episode 16 - Investing in Africa’s Emerging Markets with Richard Okello
Richard Okello has had a vision all his life to leave every community or situation better than he found it. This started as a teenager and continues today in his role as Co-founder and President of Sango Capital, an investment firm dedicated to bringing global investments to Africa. He joins the show to talk about what it takes to invest in Africa’s emerging markets.
Episode Transcript
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Jacktone: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur Africa podcast, where we spotlight the voices of entrepreneurs and innovators shaping the marketplace across the continent. This week we are featuring Richard Okello. Richard is a co-founder and partner at Sango Capital, the preferred partner for global institutional investors looking for attractive, risk adjusted and high impact returns in Africa. Prior to co-founding Sango, Richard was a partner at Makena Capital, a large private endowment which invested over 15 billion USD into over 300 funds and co-investments across all major public and private asset classes globally. Prior to working at Makena, Richard was a partner at Bridgewater Associates, a $150 billion global hedge fund. Richard was educated in Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, receiving an MBA honors from Pace University and a B.A. program, economics and Public Policy from Swarthmore College. He joins us today to talk about his diverse experience on and off the continent. And he will continue to join us in the future as a co-host of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur Africa podcast.
Ndidi Nwuneli: Richard, thanks so much for being on the show today. We're excited to hear about the great work you're doing investing in Africa's emerging markets, but I think it's be interesting to go further back than that. I mean, you grew up in a Ugandan home with a father as a banker and your mother working for a nonprofit. It seems that intersection of finance and social change is sort of in your blood. How has your upbringing shaped your vision for what you do today?
Richard Okello: Ndidi, first of all, very excited to be on the podcast and I hope that we have some nuggets that are useful to the listeners. My upbringing, you know, I was very fortunate. I think in my upbringing you don't get to choose your family, you know, you just kind of landed your family. My dad, being a banker, definitely had an influence on my thinking about finance and thinking about macro, particularly macro issues and kind of how to shape the world. And my mother being in the nonprofit space definitely affected how I think about giving back. But I think even more than that, I'd say two other things really affected what I do now. I think one is I was fortunate enough to grow up in a Christian home at home that was sort of anchored around faith in very practical ways, right? I mean, sometimes faith can be a bit esoteric, but just very practical is living it out in very practical ways, being helpful to people, working hard, you know, being about more than just yourself, you know, aspiring to certain things, pursuing those things. You know, having an element of faith in pursuing those things. And so all of that, I think, has affected I've gotten to where I am today.
Ndidi Nwuneli: I love that. And, you know, as I reflect on your journey, I mean, there's a folklore that when you were 13, you actually rallied a team of students to abolish the punishment system in your boarding school. I mean, that's pretty brazen. Tell us about that.
Richard Okello: So so it actually took a little bit longer than that. It took four years. But, you know, my boarding school used to have a practice of caning. It's a typical British boarding school kind of practice prefix on caning. I got to the boarding school at 13, were all caned within a week of being in the boarding school. You know, you have this practice of kind of mass punishment, right? Someone does something wrong, everyone gets caned. And so myself and two other guys basically decided that this needed to end because what it essentially did was encourage people to do bad because they're going to get caned anyway. Right. And so we did. It's a long story, but essentially by about age 17, coming into 18, the school became the first school in the country to abolish caning. And when I think about that again, you know, that story sounds big because of the age of the students. Right. But again, for me, I think about my past, right? So my paternal grandfather, for example, I think he left home when he was 12, became a cattle farmer, put himself through law school and then had this huge impact on kind of law and justice in the northern part of the country from nothing. And so those types of influences for me have been instrumental in defining the range of what's possible, right? Breaking apart kind of things that we think of normally as impossible. Because I would say to myself, well, my grandad had so much less than I did, and he did that well I ought to be able to do so much more given what I have. I've been fortunate to have. So that's the story. But it was a big deal because obviously no one thought that students could change something like this in a country. And we did. And once you do that, obviously it starts to redefine what you think of as impossible to stop. That was impossible all of a sudden becomes very possible across all kinds of things.
Reuben Coulter: It's so good. I think one of the things is that we live in a generation of tick tock and desire for instant success. We all want to become millionaires overnight. And you watch the videos of people driving around in fast cars wearing fancy clothes. But usually success comes through grit and determination over a period of time. How have you cultivated grits in your career? What does that look like going through the ups and downs of your journey as an investor?
Richard Okello: So I think grit for me goes way back. I sometimes tell the story that my first business was a chicken business basically when I was like 12 or something. I just like buying chicken from the village. This massive chicken arbitrage, you could make 100% by just moving it across the country. But, you know, that sounds like a simple thing. You know, go find chicken and kind of sell it over here. But it's actually far more complicated because you have to you have to move it to the city. You got to find people to buy it. The chicken goes to the bathroom, right. With or on you or you know, there's no agreement with the chicken about the process and so on. Right. And so for me, even at that young age, I started to understand that if you wanted to do some amazing things, you needed to be able to stick with something just to start something and chase it down and stick with it and expect to be disappointed and then iterate from that process, right? Learn from your mistakes and kind of iterate. And so I did that and I did other things that were, you know, a bit bigger when I was 16. And so as I've thought about that pathway and the role that grit has in it, I think the way that I'd summarize that is that, you know, to me, grit is a muscle, right? It's a muscle that only gets stronger when flexed. And by definition, grit only gets stronger when you go through hardship, right? So if you embrace grit and think of it as an asset, it can very quickly become a competitive advantage over time. I think what happens for most people is that we give up the rights to flex that muscle or the opportunity that it offers too early. And at that point we sort of start to falter in our efforts. So grit for me I mean is defined how we built this business that we're in now. But, you know, I defined my pathway through and I did my college degree in three years. And it was a tough thing to do that I needed to do that. You know, there was a semester where I took seven classes and like without grit, there was just no way you sort of do that, right? And so but that started from way back and it was the cumulative build of that muscle that then enabled the things that people see now, I think. And I would say to entrepreneurs, right, entrepreneurs who have an idea if this is your first idea, expect that it'll be very tough and the chances that you fail are greater than the chances that you succeed. But that is not why you do that, right? You do that because somewhere along the way, if you stick with it, one of your ideas will pop up and it will be successful because you had grit throughout the process.
Reuben Coulter: That's brilliant. And so you've worked all around the world. You've been a senior investor at some of the biggest names in finance in the US. But you chose to come back to Africa. You chose to invest in Africa where there are many challenges in growing a business. And in fact, I guess on this journey over the past ten years or so, you've seen many of your competitors pull out of African markets because of those challenges. And yet at Sango Capital you've kept going. You continue to have grit and determination. So can you tell us a little bit about why you're still investing in Africa, why you're still excited about the Africa market?
Richard Okello: So I think I'll tell it this way. I'll explain that in 1995, Stanford University sent a number of managing directors with their families to China, and they spent the summer in China. This is the first time an endowment had really ever done this. And that single action catalyzed a lot of what we know about China today. I mean, the amount of capital that flowed to China across all kinds of investors, the development that happened, the funding of it, the acceleration of it, it wasn't obviously just driven by this one thing, but if you are observing that, which I was from at that time, you would start to draw parallels with what's going on in Africa. Now, if I think about if you are living in New York City in the early nineties and someone said to you that you needed to build out a cell phone network in Africa, you'd get laughed out of the room right at that point. I think there are more landlines in New York City than the entire African continent. That was in the nineties. Now, today, if you look at the sheer impact of just that one sector on Africa, right, the lives that have been changed, the money that's been made, I mean, you just go across all sectors. It's unbelievable. So what keeps us excited about Africa is I think we can see and for most investors, if you appear, beneath the noise, right? If you look past the noise, you will start to see things that are actually more exciting than the types of things people saw in Asia. The leapfrogging effect that's happening in Africa as people apply technology to their everyday lives is unlike anything that's ever happened in every other major economy in the world. This just never happened because you didn't have that type of technology and that type of access and that type of scale like a billion people are doing that. So as we see these things happening, it becomes clear to us that the world as we know it in Africa is changing faster than people think, and the opportunity that comes out of that is unprecedented. So we want to be a part of that, not just because you can make, you know, very healthy returns a lot of money, but because you can literally impact millions of people and that type of opportunity to have that type of impact is a once in every several lifetimes, I think. And we think this is the lifetime where that's going to happen.
Reuben Coulter: So most people associate private equity investors with being barbarians at the gates and stripping out value from assets. What is your approach at Sango Capital and how is your approach kind of, I guess, different in developing markets like Africa? Is that in a mature market like Europe or North America?
Richard Okello: That's a great question. So in the mature markets, you've got by definition, a lot more efficiency, a lot more competition. There's a lot less flat. There's very little information asymmetry that exists. Lots of people know the same exact thing. And if you compare that to Africa, there's very high levels of information asymmetry. You could be in a city and you could have people in the same exact city. One group of people have capital to invest and are looking for opportunities. The other group has opportunities that are very attractive and don't have the money, the same exact city. Now expand that to magnify that to 54 countries. Right. So I think if you let's say to try to summarize that for investors, private equity in Africa is really about growth. Africa is a growth market. You've got lots of businesses that have more that they could do if they were well-funded and if they had, you know, improvements to their management. Let's see. So the typical business is it will have a founder who is really good at one thing or two things, really good at selling, really good at manufacturing. But as their business grows, that starts to be a challenge for them, because then they need specialists across the business and they need the types of capital that is long term. Banks will not give them that. For the most part, banks will lend short term. So if someone wants to build a factory, someone wants to build or out to market, the banks just won't lend them that. Where the banks lend, typically, as Ndidi would tell you, they typically want assets, hard assets. So they'll say, like, do you have a house? Do you have land? Give me the title to the house and the land and so on. So the private equity story here is primarily about partnering with people that run fast growing companies, people that you trust, where the combination of capital plus an infusion of, you know, the combination of financial capital plus human capital. Right. Adding a couple of other smart, helpful people around the table accelerates that growth and brings the business to the next level. Now, if you look at the results of that, what you typically have is a lot less asset stripping or, you know, reduction of employment or mechanization, even, for example. Right. You have a lot of employment created because a lot of these businesses are still very simple businesses. They are grocery stores, they are pharmacies. They're very simple, but they're not complex businesses. And the process of creating value historically here has always had an effect around employment. If I think about businesses now portfolio. You know, if I go back to, let's say 2020 and I look back to when we started deploying capital, those businesses have created somewhere in the order of 35,000 jobs, half of which are jobs held by women. And those are permanent jobs. So forget the temporary jobs, right, that come in some of these sectors. So that's private equity in Africa. And that's going to be the case for a while, right? It'll take a while for Africa to get to the stage where the levels of efficiency are such that private equity is much more competitive.
Reuben Coulter: That's really helpful. So you're optimistic about Africa's growth prospects? I guess one of the things that we're hearing about is forecast of coming recession and economic turmoil. And of course, many African countries are heavily indebted. What's your advice to your entrepreneurs at the moment with kind of storm clouds gathering on the horizon, how are you helping them prepare?
Richard Okello: That's another great question. So I think the best entrepreneurs understand their operating environment, their one asset. They might not have the capital they need, but they understand their customers. They understand the challenges of the operating environment. They've seen lots of things go wrong and they know those things well and they know how to manage around those things. I think what we are doing less of is advising those entrepreneurs. So what we're doing is we're asking them questions to try to figure out how well they understand their operating environments, what they are worried about and where they see the opportunity. And I think one of the things that, again, if you look back historically, Africa, relative to the rest of the world, if you are to tally the predictions that have happened around what will happen to Africa, given what's going on in the rest of the world, that's a losing proposition. You know, if you looked at the global financial crisis 2008, if you looked at, you know, just go down the list all the way through to COVID, right? People thought Africa would fall off a cliff during COVID. It did not. It actually fared much better than people thought. And I think this will not be any different. I think, though, that entrepreneurs who are not as experienced ought to be getting together with people who have experience in those sectors and asking them what they should be worried about. Entrepreneurs who are very experienced, though, what we're seeing them do is they're stepping into this scenario as an opportunity, right? They are looking to capture market share. They are looking for smaller businesses to buy. They basically are doing the opposite of what other people are doing because they've been here before and that's paid off.
Ndidi Nwuneli: Thank you, Richard. I mean, listening to you gives me so much hope and gets me really excited because you clearly see opportunity where others often see lack. But just drilling in on some of Reuben's questions and some of your responses, private equity ultimately is about investing in people, taking bets on entrepreneur who see the world the way you've just painted. What do you see in these people? How do you identify the winners? And for those listening who want to be those winners, what is it that they need to do to kind of prove themselves to investors such as yourself?
Richard Okello: So if I had to summarize that, I would say the winners, they are people that have done this before. It is very difficult in an emerging market or even a developed market actually to compete. Well, if you've just never done that before, you might get lucky. But it's really hard to do it if you've never done it before. So the winners are generally people who have built a combination of experience and grit going through some version of this before and who are very humble about what they don't know. Right. They understand that there are lots of things they don't know. They are talking to lots of people about all kinds of different potential problems. They are up all hours of the night thinking about how to solve those problems. I think that's one bucket, you know, the make up of the entrepreneur. But I think the other things you look for are, I mean, entrepreneurs who are really good are generally great leaders, and they are people who value people who understand that human capital is ultimately what determines success. So the way in which they manage their businesses, the way in which they value people, treat people, the way in which they view the customer. The customer is not just the checkbook. The customer is a person that they think about and they try to understand and that they care about. And ultimately, those things come back in terms of revenue and resilience and problem solving into the business.
Ndidi Nwuneli: So you've described the culture of the business and also the mindset of the entrepreneur. How does your faith playing to your own willingness to give people chances? Because I hear you say they must have done it before, but who's going to give them the first chance? Who is going to give them that first chance? If it's not you. And how do you straddle that empathy? I want to help people move them along to where they are ready for private equity. I know they might not be ready today. I'm going to be patient with them. How do you straddle that?
Richard Okello: So I think it's not very complicated. So there are lots of people that I speak with that we haven't invested in. And oftentimes people will call me and say, hey, people at my church, for example, like they'll say like, hey, I ran into this person who's got this business idea. Can I send you their business plan? Okay, now that's a business plan. That's not even an existing business. So I have the option at that point of saying, no, let them actually build the business, I think, which is what you're referring to. And then who's going to give them a shot or taking a look at the business plan? Now, you can't do that for everyone because the limit is time, because for every business plan you look at, there is a business that exists that you could be helping get from here to here and do a lot more with lots of other people. Right. And so there's a balance. But what I have found is that there is a lot of value to listening to people and doing the one or two things that makes a difference. Right? You don't have to do everything. So there are lots of opportunities to connect the dots. So we invest, for example, we invest directly into companies. We also invest into funds where we've got a fund to fund a program. The number of people that we have spoken with for six months or a year and then put in touch with someone else who will take that call because they know us, who is the right person for them at that stage of their development is I mean, there are countless people like that, right. And so if I bring it back to faith, I think that, you know, ultimately we've been made stewards of some things. We've been made stewards of our investors capital. That capital has to be treated well. Right. It has to deliver a return. It has to invest in businesses that are sustainable, that are good businesses and so on. Right. We've also been made stewards of certain communities around us, right? Communities that we are placed in, communities that are placed in my neighborhood, people that work outside of the people they know, you know, and so on. And what we do with that stewardship, which often gets ignored, can actually be quite impactful. For example, I gave a talk at my church, I'd say maybe about seven or eight years ago, and there people that I did not meet at that talk. Who have done something. Who, let's say five years after that, ran into me and said, Hey, I came to your talk and I started this thing because of the talk. And that's how, in my mind, you take the faith, which can be esoteric and try to make it practical, given all the constraints we have as investors.
Ndidi Nwuneli: I love the idea of connecting the dots and almost building a community of support, an ecosystem that supports people from the idea stage to where they are ready for private equity. Right, because there are many steps in between or even helps them get a job if they are really not meant to be an entrepreneur. How should we go about building that community in in in this context of faith, where we are connecting the dots in finance and entrepreneurship and building the ecosystem to support our young entrepreneurs.
Richard Okello: So I think my so this is the first time I guess we are doing this in this context, right? So it's not like I could define I have no right to define the how should we go about it? It's not like it's been that I've done it before.
Ndidi Nwuneli: What is your hope? What would you like to see? Because clearly there are not enough Richard Okello to do all the work. And you can't meet with thousands of entrepreneurs every day. So how can we build this movement or this ecosystem?
Richard Okello: So I think there are a couple of things that I can point to that is instructive one is we need more people, more entrepreneurs of faith, connecting with other entrepreneurs of faith. So typically those circles are very narrow, right? So like, where would I meet those people? I'd meet those people through friends who share the same faith, for example, or, you know, through a church I go to or, you know, these are narrow circles. And the challenge with those narrow circles is that the concentric circles of connectivity that are actually valuable don't all reside in those communities. Right. I happen to be in the fortunate position as an investor of just knowing lots and lots of people that are relevant for the conversations I have. But most people who are in those communities have a smaller circle as a function of what they do. They might be, for example, a someone in the medical profession, right? So if they speak to you and you've got an idea that's manufacturing, agriculture, like they can help you right in their minds that can help you. So I think the first thing is to figure out how we expand the number of people that are connected through forums like this or through networks like this or through apps like this, etc.. And technology I think could be quite helpful, right, to start to connect the dots through areas of commonality that are deep and wide. So if someone wants to listen to this podcast, they ought to be able to come on here, come on some other app, let's say and say looking to connect with people that have ABC and someone else ought to be able to say, check, check, check. That's great. Love to connect. Right. So like when you go to a conference, let's say private equity conference, people get on there and they say, love to connect with someone that's investing in Nigeria or investing in Africa or ........... And then you that's how you connect. You've never met them. The conference facilitates that entire process, right? They bring these people together. So the question is kind of forum like this, start to connect the dots for people because then I think people will come out of the woodwork and as those people come on, they will bring their friends, right? They'll bring all the other people they know. And then that starts to become something that accelerates.
Ndidi Nwuneli: Yeah, I'm excited about the power of community that we can create through this podcast and beyond the podcast. How we also match make and help you know foster this community of trust, empathy, care, and also help our entrepreneurs graduate from unemployed youths to the business plan to this VC maybe even a challenge prizes and angel investors all the way to when they can come to Sango capital for that a multi-million dollar investment. So I'm going to go through a few rapid fire questions now. Yeah. Number one, what are the two investments you've made that you're most proud of?
Richard Okello: One, we invested in a business called Market Square its groceries business in Nigeria. You may have run into it. I think we have a couple of stores in Lagos. It was one store in 2015. It's 26 stores this year. We are doing a partial exit at a very, very healthy, which I cannot mention multiple and looking to take that business to somewhere between 50 and 200 stores, which if we do, would be the only business like that in West Africa, right at a time when the other incumbents, South African businesses have exited the market. Right. So that one was very, very proud of the impact it's had beyond the return and the fact that people can just go to a store that's clean and get groceries like everyone else around the world gets to do it, for me is just phenomenal. It's a very simple thing. So that's one. I'd say another business we're proud of is a business called Twiga. So we invest in a business called Twiga to guys disrupting the food space in East Africa. Lots of people, when they think about Africa, they basically, if they are removed from it, they think of Africa as lots of arable land. 60% of the world's arable land. We need to grow a lot of food there, which to my mind just misses the point, which is there's lots of food grown there and like 60% of it's wasted. So let's start with that. Let's just fix that portion, right? So businesses like Twiga are doing that in a way that is technologically savvy, very efficient, affects lots of people all through the value chain. People who grow it will get better pricing. People consume and get better pricing and everyone in between. Right. And so I'd say those are two examples of businesses that we're proud about, both from a return perspective, but also from impact perspective.
Ndidi Nwuneli: Richard That's music to my ears. They're both in my sector food, food, food.
Richard Okello: And I can talk about other sectors Ndidi and there's lots of other ones.
Reuben Coulter: There's just not enough time on.
Ndidi Nwuneli: I just can't imagine that until you've picked out an agricultural food ecosystem, which for me I think is phenomenal from an impact perspective and the returns perspective. So thank you. What growth sectors you see on the continent that every entrepreneur should be looking into as the the potential for the future?
Richard Okello: So one is, I think every entrepreneur should think of their business as a technology business. It's a good friend of ours that used to be the chief operating officer of VMware in the U.S. We've got a bunch of private equity people together anyway. And so he spoke at that thing on one of the statements he made, which was very profound. As he said, every company is a technology company. And the essence of that was if you're thinking of your wallet as like, there's what I do and there is technology over here, then you're missing the mark, right? There are farmers in Tanzania, women, basic farmers that are identifying cassava disease. I'll talk about food Ndidi because you get excited about food, cassava disease, using their cell phones. Right. And like so like agriculture is a technology business. So I'd say the first thing is every entrepreneur should be thinking about how does technology affect or disrupt or enable or accelerate my business. I think once they look outside of that, there are very few sectors where there is not a need for high quality goods and services that today are not being supplied or are being supplied in a suboptimal fashion. There's not a single sector. I mean, we could go through the list, right? So health care, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, education. Right. Online education, offline education, books, access, financial services. You could talk about that for days. You know, power. Right. And we've got a business called [...] in Nigeria. Okay. That's a power business. That, again, was basically like did not exist in 2015. Essentially, 2014 did not exist today. It's like the largest distributed generation business in the country, which, as you know, is like needs power cannot get enough power. Right. Good, clean power. Right. So to my mind, the issue is not like what sector should you be looking at, but are you looking closely enough to identify the needs that people have and finding innovative, profitable ways to meet those needs? So like the ladies, for example, that sell eggs on the street, they figured out that someone wants to buy boiled eggs on their way to work and they are doing that profitably. Like if you ask them what sector that is, they couldn't tell you, but they're making money doing it right. So that would be my advice, I think, to entrepreneurs find the gap and then fill the gap.
Ndidi Nwuneli: Find the gap and fill the gap. It's loud and clear. We hear you and leverage technology to fill that gap as efficiently as possible. And my last rapidfire question is there's a war on talents, a global war on talent, and the great resignation. And Africa is not immune. Every single entrepreneur in Nigeria today is worried about one thing. We have a serious brain drain, and it's not just unique to us. We are seeing this in many of the African countries and in countries around the world. In the US, investment banks and consulting firms are struggling to find young people who want to work. What is your solution? How are your entrepreneurs handling this. And what recommendations would you give? And finally, what message would you give to those young Africans who are leaving the continent at this time?
Richard Okello: Okay. So it's two part question, I think, on the first part, which is how to address this. I think entrepreneurs should be building leadership pipelines in their business as a matter of course. I think families should be building leadership pipelines. I think societies should be building leadership pipelines. There's no downside to that process except the work. There's lots of upside, and if people are doing that, they'd actually be fine with some of those people leaving because there's like a line out the door of other people who can step into those roles, right? I think part of the problem has been that the way in which we have approached human capital and talent has been to mop up what's available as opposed to creating talent. So for example, I'm very active, as you know, with the African Leadership Academy and African Leadership Foundation. I sit on the board of that. If you look at the effect of each student coming through that program and the things they have done and are able to do, it's just mind. Like, I couldn't get into the program in my year. There's no chance, like with all the things that we talked about that I feel like I've done. I don't think I could get into the program. So those people are out there and they are waiting for someone to find them and guide them and hold their hand, you know, not all the time, but, you know, hold the hand for a portion of time. And I think if we did that, the human capital problem, the nature of it would change. We would still have people leaving and you'd still get some brain drain, but you'd have a lot more volume of leadership that actually wants to be in Africa dealing with problems. That's part A, part B, though, is that we are also seeing lots of African talent that is not leaving because they could do what they want to do from here through technology. Right. They can work for people in New York or in whatever they want from here and get paid what they would like to get paid and live the lifestyle they'd like to live, eat the local food that they've gotten used to. Right, right here in Africa. So I think that that dynamic will only accelerate given the combination of the young population in Africa that is very tech savvy and the fact that mobility of work and labor, electronic mobility, has just accelerated coming through COVID. So I think you will see that start to affect that dynamic for us. So I'd say those are my two thoughts. I think on the entrepreneurs, you had a part B to your question, which I can recall.
Ndidi Nwuneli: Yes, I was saying, what is your message to the African youth who want to leave on the verge of leaving? What would you tell them?
Richard Okello: So I left when I was 17 and I'm back and I'm doing a lot of exciting things. And so I wouldn't necessarily say to them, Hey, don't leave. Like, here's why you should stay still. There's all this cool stuff in Africa. I think I would say to them, Where do you want? And this is the question we ask every single person we hire, right? Where do you want to be in 15 or 20 years? Where do you see yourself? What does success look like? And most people don't actually think about that question. They think about the next 12 months, the next 24 months, the next five years. Right the check that's been offered. But my experience is when you ask those people that question and people think about where they'd like to be, some of those decisions or the paths they take around those decisions effectively bring them back. So what I'd be saying to someone who wants to leave is I'd be asking them that question and saying, Okay, well, do you see yourself in 20 years living in a foreign country like what success look like for you and how do you feel about that? Which of those things can you not get here today or in five years or in ten years? How do you feel about that? And I think that engagement is sorely lacking, but people don't have that engagement. We've brought people back from the US, from London who are paid exorbitantly well, but where that thought process has affected the way in which they want to craft the path that they take, and that path has a significant component in Africa. And by the way Ndidi, we also take lots of calls from people from China and all kinds of places who are dying to come here because they can see the dynamic that's happened elsewhere, except that on Africa like that, they're trying to figure out a way to get in here. So it's not it's not just a one way street.
Ndidi Nwuneli: Well, let me just tell you a quick, interesting story. I was on the train going to Davos, listening to a few Asian girls speaking to each other, some from China, some from Korea. And the Chinese girl said, What we learn about in school is about Africa being the next frontier. The Koreans said, We learn about America being the next frontier. The Chinese said, No, America is no longer the next frontier. It's Africa. And we learn about the histories of countries in Africa and how to position ourselves for Africa. My mind was blown. If this has been incorporated into the curriculum in Chinese schools, then African youth need to be listening. They know something about our future. We better take hold of that future.
Reuben Coulter: Amen to that. Richard, Ndidi and I have put you on the receiving end of questions tonight, so it's doing just great to get your wisdom and insight. But we're also really looking forward to when you'll be asking the questions and you'll be hosting this podcast and talking to entrepreneurs and investors from across the continents and really just gleaning the wisdom from this community and hopefully building that network of trust and encouragement which can just accelerate faith driven entrepreneurs and investors to renew and restore and grow our continent to its full potential. But before we close, we love to ask our guests, what is God speaking to you at the moment? What's he talking to you about at this point in time?
Richard Okello: So I think lots of things I'd say. It's to obstruct to one thing that that's standing out perhaps the most. It is finishing well. And it's this notion of being a, you know, sort of a last strike person. And, you know, Paul in the Bible, Paul talks about completing the race. Right. You know, you don't win the prize unless you finish the race. And so I've been thinking a lot about that and hearing a lot about that, not just as it relates to business, but, you know, before private equity. I'm a husband first and then the dad second. And then I also have this other job called private equity investing. Right. So so how do I finish? Well, as a husband and I sort of teach my kids what that looks like, how do I finish? Well, as a dad, right. As the kids grow. Like sometimes as kids go through teenage years, like parents just sort of like they just throw their hands up and just ask God to help. I just hope that it works right. But how do we finish strong and how do we model for the people around us that there is value? And this to some extent gets back to your grit, to finishing strong. And there's a lot of celebration around starting these days. Right. And you alluded to it where you said we are operating in this microwave culture. Everything right now. Everything. Real quick question is, how do you finish strong and what does it take and how do we get people to value that? So that's I'd say that's the loudest message that I'm hearing right now.
Reuben Coulter: Amen. So, yeah. Really appreciate your time. For all of us, it's late in the evening and we probably have families who need us. We should probably be good husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and go back to our families. So thank you so much to both of you for this time and this really enjoyable conversation.
Richard Okello: Thank you, Reuben. Thanks Ndidi good to catch up again Ndidi.
