… is officially here!

Both Briter Bridges and Disrupt Africa released their 2020 funding reports, and additionally, Kinyungu Ventures released a report entitled Chasing Outliers: Why Context Matters for Early-Stage Investing in Africa.​

On Monday, Briter Bridges' CEO Dario Giuliani hosted a Clubhouse chat with a bunch of Africa-focused investors to discuss the findings. It was interesting to hear long-time investors express their concerns about rising early-stage valuations which are, in part, a function of increased "undisciplined" money coming into the ecosystem (from overseas).

On one hand, more money means more startups getting funded, which is a good thing. And the sign of an evolving ecosystem is the influx of "tourists", and the old guard's distain of them.

On the other, the downstream effects of inflated valuations are real, as we heard from growth stage and private equity investors in Season Two, Episode Four of The Flip.

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Every company is a media company

Speaking of VCs that pissed off the old guard... here's a great piece on a16z that's been circulating, entitled The Unauthorized Story of Andreessen Horowitz.

The recurring trope about the firm is that they are "a media company that monetizes through VC".

It is astounding to read that 10% of their 200-person workforce is on its marketing team. And they are growing their editorial operations - they recently announced the launch of the a16z podcast network (maybe they should acquire The Flip ‍🤔).

But in all seriousness, The Flip is a disciple of a16z's way of looking at and investing in content.

Our ambition is not to be a traditional, ad-driven media company, but to build products and services on top of content and community. We'll be sharing more on that in the coming months 😁.

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Invisible Innovation

Here's a nice "screenshot essay" on invisible innovation.

New infrastructure enables new apps. Over time those apps need more infrastructure, which in turn enables a wider set of apps and create even more customers for the original infrastructure provider.

This was a topic we explored a few months back, when Paystack's Shola Akinlade argued in our interview that payments are so fundamentally broken that "if you build it, they will come".

With the chicken and egg question about building infrastructure, while the immediate size of the may look unclear, we can see how innovation and growth compounds. And as more use cases develop on top new infrastructure built to service new use cases, the original infrastructure provider benefits, as well.

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Stay safe,

Justin

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