1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hernan Fernandez of Angel Ventures Mexico (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Hernan Fernandez was recorded in May 2019.

Hernan Fernandez is Managing Partner at Angel Ventures Mexico, a firm  that invests in Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Colombia. This is an excellent discussion on trends in Latin America.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get to know you and let’s get to know Angel Ventures Mexico. Tell us about the fund. Tell us about your activities. Where do you invest? What size fund do you run?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eghosa Omoigui of EchoVC Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: My last trend question is B2B versus B2C. It sounds like it’s largely a B2C entrepreneur pool.

Eghosa Omoigui: Actually, it’s the other way around. That has some correlation with the difficulty of access to capital. What you find is that more entrepreneurs are entering businesses where their path to revenue is much shorter.

No one is going to give you three years of financing to go out and build a customer base and not monetize. We’ve done a few consumer plays, but many investors favor B2B.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eghosa Omoigui of EchoVC Partners (Part 4)

Eghosa Omoigui: Education is a very significant issue. These markets are growing very quickly. Nigeria is adding 26,000 babies every day. Education and how you create a pathway to households is a key part of this.

We invested in a company called Kukua, which is based out of Nairobi. What they built is a platform for early age education on STEM. There’s a heroine and she loves STEM.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eghosa Omoigui of EchoVC Partners (Part 3)

Eghosa Omoigui: We have four investment thesis that we’ve talked about internally, but this is the first time we’re sharing them outside. One of them is that there is a recognition that in many submarkets in Africa, almost all economic activities are offline. It continues to be offline.

There was a very large opportunity, in our view, where you can build a defensible moat where you could organize the offline activities and bring that online. One example of that, where we invested in at the seed stage, is a company called Printivo.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eghosa Omoigui of EchoVC Partners (Part 2)

Eghosa Emoigui: I decided that it made sense to look at those emerging markets. I ended up picking Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, in part, because they felt very highly-correlated. You had very similar signals in these markets that suggested they would evolve.

I went out to those two markets. I had no luck, because everybody thought I was insane. Those two markets were completely uninteresting in 2011. I then decided that I was not going to quit. I picked sub-Saharan Africa and went into that.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eghosa Omoigui of EchoVC Partners (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Eghosa Omoigui was recorded in May 2019.

Eghosa Omoigui is Managing Partner at EchoVC Partners, a firm focused on the African market. This is a fascinating discussion about African startups and venture capital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get to know each other. Tell us about EchoVC. Tell us about yourself.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vikas Choudhury of Pivot Ventures (Part 5)

Vikas Choudhury: Another investment is a cloud kitchen. It’s a company called Inner Chef run by someone I know. That company was riding on the wave of logistics and delivery, which was designed for the e-commerce ecosystem.

As you know, food delivery is becoming very large across the world. A lot of marketplaces have come up in India. Inner Chef has also diversified into local fast food. A lot of millennials today are eating 30 meals a month outside of their homes, which is a huge shift in consumer behavior across the country.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vikas Choudhury of Pivot Ventures (Part 4)

Vikas Choudhury: Entrepreneurs today are either second-generation or second lifecycle. They come to us after having tried something on their own, so we do believe that they will just look at the funnel that is out there.

You have tens of thousands of new companies in India. Less than 1% get angel funding. Less than 1% of that go into venture capital. We’re simply making sure that we are able to pick up companies that have their foundation risked out.