Timon Capital

The hangover in African venture is real as everyone digests mispriced companies: new cram downs and pay to plays every week.

Corollary to this statement—we believe the only way to have strong performance as a venture fund on the continent is to stay small (currently). Businesses that consume a lot of capital crush small fund returns with dilution (and founders).

Here we are with the dust settling and many others in the space blowing up and falling off cliffs… and Omni able to grow at roughly 10X the rate of $1 investment to GMV as any in the category via lower costs and higher margins. And they’re just getting started.

We didn’t really understand how you could get a venture scale outcome with an asset heavy approach as an early stage investor— and Deepankar had a compelling vision for how to make it work asset light

A major milestone for Deepankar and the team at Omni— techcrunch.com/2024/03/14/wha…

🐐 footnotes, 3— Scott McNealy on the realities of what a 10X revenue valuation actually means— tanay.substack.com/p/reasoning-re…

🐐 footnotes, 2— abovethecrowd.com/2011/05/24/all…

A subtweet 🧵 on startup fundraising reporting and doing arithmetic in addition to talking to “sources” to build out a story…

Seeing how all this plays out and on what timeline is going to be worth of a great business school case study—and extremely instructive on venture style financing in Africa

Which means you’re adding extra time duration risk to an exit. Said company could probably list publicly if the revenue was from the US or the EU. But with concentrated country risk, they’re a little stuck like another one of the forbears of Nigerian Fintech.

We think about this and comping cost of mobile data to things like GDP per capita. Without relatively affordable data, application usage will never truly take off.