SAN FRANCISCO, May 12, (THEWILL) – ‘Venture: An Entrepreneur’s Journey’ welcomes viewers into the entrepreneurship journey of a group of young African entrepreneurs.
Beginning at President Obama’s 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), hosted in Nairobi, Kenya, the documentary follows the winners of DEMO Africa 2015 from the continent to Silicon Valley.
DEMO Africa is a flagship initiative of LIONS@FRICA and a continent-wide venture launch-pad that provides the most innovative African companies with a platform to present their products to the world.
At the 2015 edition, 30 of the best and most innovative African start-ups who made the final list from an applicant pool of over 600 got a chance to pitch their products to a roomful of investors and innovation stakeholders at the two-day competition.
The top four start-ups, whose founders are the principal subjects of the documentary, were then awarded a week-long trip to the Silicon Valley for the LIONS innovation Tour. The four entrepreneurs, or LIONS, each represent an important and diverse role in the African entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Kelechi Anyadiegwu, a young woman of Nigerian heritage who grew up in New Jersey, founded Zuwaa, an online community and marketplace for African inspired fashion. Bayo Balogun, a native Nigerian who spent the latter years of his adult life working as a technology consultant and entrepreneur in North Carolina, is the founder of Car Parts Nigeria, a search engine aggregator for finding location-specific auto parts and auto service technicians in Nigeria.
Gagan Hayer is a native Indian resident in Nairobi, Kenya. His start-up, InsureAfrika, is a digital platform that allows people to aggregate insurance quotes and purchase a variety of insurance products online. The fourth entrepreneur is Karogi Kamau from Kenya, whose startup, Bamba-POS, allows retail merchants to access point-of-sale and inventory management automation with any smart device.
All four of them participated in the LIONS Innovation Tour, a week-long knowledge sharing and networking experience in Silicon Valley aimed at exposing African start-ups to a select group of investors, industry leaders, diaspora groups and sector experts. During the tour, the LIONS met with management teams of leading companies such as Airbnb, Ernst & Young, IBM, Salesforce, and Draper Associates, and attended curated events that allowed them to pitch their products and receive constructive feedback.
The film, which was co-produced by Stephen Ozoigbo, CEO, African Technology Foundation, the LIONS@FRICA initiative, and the Global Entrepreneurship Network, was also supported by Edutainment Africa, DEMO Africa, and Cogswell College, California, USA.
It shows the struggles that entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley go through as well as the kind of impact such challenges can have on a promising young entrepreneur. It also peels back the mask of the valley environment from the African entrepreneurs’ perspective and highlights the role African expats, immigrants, and indigenous afro-preneurs play in redefining the future of entrepreneurship in Africa.
The US State Department (Office of Global Partnerships) and White House-sponsored documentary was shot in Silicon Valley, California; Lagos, Nigeria; and Nairobi, Kenya.
The film director, Nigerian-born Ejiro Onobrakpor, was selected as an Alumni of the Hollywood in Focus program of Relativity School in Hollywood. While in Beverly Hills in 2015 for three weeks with twenty other film makers and actors through the Relativity Media scholarship, he had volunteered to do all the pictorial documentation of their time in LA, even though people had been hired to do it.
In 2016, he got a call from the executive producer, Stephen Ozoigbo, to direct the documentary for the US State Department as part of the GES in Silicon Valley. It was an opportunity of a lifetime.
In his words, “The documentary was all shades of amazing, as it was a learning process for me, not in terms of film making but entrepreneurship. There I was at Google, SAP, IBM, Ernst & Young, meeting all the great people, and engaging the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Not to mention being in the same space with President Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Brian Chesky, and many others. The documentary changed my life, and allowed me to tell the story of true African ingenuity.”
The Executive Producer, Stephen Ozoigbo, said in an essay that guided the production process and story arc: “Within this new era of knowledge economies, where the internet has flattened the world and digital entrepreneurs are building companies on the backs of binary codes and software modules, members of the African diaspora can play unique roles in re-inventing Africa’s future and catalyzing the growth and development of entrepreneurial ecosystems in their homelands.
“Over the last decade, governmental agencies, multi-lateral institutions, diaspora organisations, and other civil-society groups with an interest in Africa have stepped up their collective efforts to re-engage the diaspora and re-invigorate the continent — a continent that is bursting at the seams with entrepreneurial actors, and poised for an innovation renaissance that will dwarf our most recent economic revolutions as a human race.
“The signs are everywhere, and Africans in diaspora are urged to pay attention and join the movement to positively influence the sociocultural perceptions of entrepreneurship.”
He says of the Afropreneur (African entrepreneur): “They wake up every day and engage a marketplace that is filled with uncertainties. Their addressable markets within Pan-African borders are shrouded with infrastructure challenges, lack of seed capital, a dearth of mentors and advisors, and 54 other national policies that govern trade flows.
“The Afropreneur needs an international network of expats and repats. She desires the support of a league of well-trained female engineers to fuel the fire for product development that she is confident will take her to the next level. He yearns for a backbone of business advisors that will guide his thinking around venture creation, and scaling an idea to the marketplace.
“They require relevant market data, methodologies on rapid prototyping, seed funding, technical and managerial team members and a shoulder to cry on.”
Of interest is the fact that the Executive Producer, the Director, and two of the four entrepreneurs who are the subjects of the film, are Nigerians.
These embodiments of brains, courage and innovativeness have not asked what their country can do for them, but what they can do for their country, and, by extension, the continent, even though, as Ozoigbo said, “They wake up every day and engage a marketplace that is filled with uncertainties.”
