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- [00:00]
Vusi Thembekwayo
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Kafui
This is one D from Davidson. So I was just listening to this episode here, above and beyond. And I want to say, if you want to talk to me, talk to me directly.
- [00:18]
Vusi Thembekwayo
If you want to talk to me, talk to me directly.
- [00:21]
Kafui
Don't cut through the corners. Do not cut through because.
- [00:26]
Yeah, so, yeah, that was a great episode. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Inspiring stuff.
- [00:35]
Rosemond
Hi, busy and hello family. My name is Rosemond.
- [00:41]
From Lagos, Nigeria and I just want to say what an incredible gift you are not just to the continent of Africa, but to the world, the globe. I am specifically sending this saying that I am super, super blessed. The podcast on the power of continuous learning has been super incredible for me and this in particular because I've always been a superstar, you know, getting compliments for the work I do, winning awards and I, I recently transitioned into a higher and.
- [01:26]
Which has now put a different level of pressure.
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On the expectation. You can only imagine when you are kind of like a local champion and then you will find yourself in a.
- [01:41]
Simi
Global.
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Rosemond
Place and you are surrounded by superstars who are equally as amazing, you know, and so many things may want to come, you may want to be intimidated, you might feel like, oh, do I have what it takes? But, but the experience of having to do the work has kept me going. So your podcast on the power of continuous learning literally was just a blessing because one of the things you talked about was how you must realize that you must keep growing and evolving. And I'm. This is just confirmation. I made the best decision ever to aim higher. And it's been challenging, it's pushed a couple of things for me a bit. But I love the experience and the journey and I can't wait to see myself in six months time. So thank you.
- [02:30]
Kafui
Vusi hello Vousi. I'm Kafui from Benin in West Africa. I want to thank you a lot. I've just listened to your podcast, Ideas that Matter, especially.
- [02:50]
The podcast which was about, was about the power of continuous learning. It seems like you were talking directly to me because I feel like I just need it in my life. I just need it in my life. I'm.
- [03:11]
Engineering student at third year of my studies and at this state of my life, I've started asking me a lot of questions and listening to your podcast helped me a lot, a lot to, to figure out many, many questions I've asked myself about and I thank you very much. I thank you a lot. I don't know if my English is correct and if you can understand me and, but I, I want to tell you that I appreciate it very much what you are doing for, for the young people like me. I'm just 20 and. God bless you. God bless you. Busy. Thank you.
- [04:09]
Simi
Hello, Vosi, this is Simi from Nigeria. I started listening to your podcast really this year, although I heard about it from my brother since like early last year. But, you know, anyways, I, I really love your, your content, the content of your podcast. Even though I found it initially hard to key into most of the. What you are talking about because it feels like you were talking to people who were already clear with what they, what they are doing or what they wanted to do or, you know, you were already passionate about, you know, a particular field or industry and we're looking to better themselves in certain industries. Whereas I'm still struggling to, you know, gain that clarity to know what exactly I'm going or what I want to do. And I also found that you always, you know, you always talk about what to do and not really how to go about doing it. Anyways, I decided to keep listening. I tried to listen, or I did actually decide to listen to your podcast like from the start, from the beginning, the internal stories, like maybe you might have said something about, you know, this initially and I missed it. So surely enough, I found in your earlier content that you said something along the lines of, you know, being more about preparing the mind and creating a mindset, you know, as mindset, ready for the change, ready for success, than just, you know, preaching about how to do and stuff like that. You talked about, you know, getting the mindset ready. That's what you are really. Oh, that what you were really out to do, preparing the mind. So, you know, I, I took that and I kept on listen to the podcast. Now I just, you know, listen and take the principles as, as they come because that's what I feel I, I gain from listening to your podcast. You give these principles that which, which, by, by which these things work, you know, this success in any field, they are looking in all this, you just give the principles which if you follow, you surely cannot, you know, go wrong. So that's, that's why I keep listening to your podcast and I really do enjoy it. Anyways, not to talk too long. I just want to thank you for, you know, all you do. And also, I must say, out of all your accents, which you do, I particularly love the South African accent. So, yeah, that's just me. Anyways, thank you.
- [06:46]
Vusi Thembekwayo
Vosi, it's time to take your seat at the table. Find out how with Voci Tembegwayo as we discuss ideas that matter, a catalyst for bold action.
- [07:02]
Hello.
- [07:05]
Family.
- [07:08]
Hello, family, and welcome to another episode of the VT podcast. And here we talk about ideas that matter. I am absolutely so excited by the feedback that we got from you family around the last podcast that we did, which was really around building systems for scale and systems for growth and making sure that you can take your business to the next next level. Very, very excited by some of that feedback. We launched a really great tool family. It's a founder's DNA. It comes from the past 12 years that we've spent working with business owners and founders and helping them scale their businesses. One of the things we noticed in the early days was that most business owners actually don't really know who they are. They know who they are, but they don't know who they are. Does that make sense? So kind of like the person will know themselves at a surface level, but they don't really take the time to fully understand themselves, to diagnose themselves, to understand who they are, how they show up, what experiences they've had in the past that have shaped them, but more importantly, to know what it is that they are akin to, where are their gifts, where's their area of competence, and where the areas in their life where they have the most amount of work to do in developing. And so we built this tool that we've been using now for a really, really long time. And as I say, it's our founder's DNA tool and it's a really, really great tool. And every year, this young lady, in fact a couple that I mentor, Heti and Papa, they run a community. Heti is a monetization expert and Papa works with her in the business. When I first met them, I should tell you, I had just launched our very, very first accelerator. It was called Top 40. And the basic thesis was that we would have 40 businesses in this accelerator, and we were going to work with these businesses to help them scale and to help them grow. And so we'd had businesses apply to become part of our top 40. The top 40 was of course, run by myself and the my growth fund team. And I had an accelerator team inside the firm. So we had the team that was helping with the portfolio companies, and then we had this accelerator team who were helping these entrepreneurs grow and develop. It was great. 2017, you can go online and you can still find the literature about the stuff that we did in this accelerator program. Anyway, when we were running the accelerator program, we received over 4000 applications can you believe it? Now this is before artificial intelligence and all of these things where you can now basically export a file with all of the data and then tell an intelligent system to give you the report or give you a sense of who qualifies. So we've got over 4,000 applications and we manually had to wade through all of these businesses. And by the way, for the 4,000, I should tell you, these were the actual 4,000 businesses. Not people who had ideas, actual businesses. We had people who were running schools K through 12 schools, we had people who were running pre primary schools, we had people running laundromats, people running car washes, people who are running IT development houses, people who are running funeral parlors, people who are running loan sharking businesses. There was one guy who was a taxi owner, right? Like he owned two taxis. And he wanted to scale his business. So we had like all of these really interesting businesses that applied. We had a criteria that we had set for who gets to qualify to be in the firm or to be in the accelerator program or not. And from these 4,000, we whittled it down to 40. Our goal was to get to 40. We eventually reached at about 42 or 41, I think it was. And then we started this intense program. It being our very first program, we decided that we were going to run it over 18 months.
- [11:03]
Saying that now just sounds ridiculous given the rate at which you can build, scale and systematize and optimize businesses today. Today, the kind of work we're doing that in 18 months, we've kind of taken down to three months. And that's just on the instrumentation and tooling side of the business that sets apart the work from strategy and capital, planning and development, right? But even then, two to three months and you can run a strong process of building and accelerating a business. This thing that I'm mentioning is actually the precursor to what we have today as the school of scale. Back then it was called my growth fund. Accelerate was a division within my growth fund. And here we were accelerating these businesses. When we started, we would ask these entrepreneurs questions about themselves, about their strengths and their weaknesses. And we realized that a lot of entrepreneurs actually don't take the time to get to know themselves. So what happens to a lot of us is you see a business, an opportunity, a market, you think of an idea and then you go, I'm going to do it. But you don't really think about yourself. Are you technically minded? Are you a visionary? Are you a person who's driven by detail? Or do you Enjoy planning or do you enjoy dreaming? Are you financially savvy or are you the person who's more process orientation? Do you see the world in boxes or do you see the world in color? Which of these are you? I imagine listening to this is a healthy sum of you entrepreneurs who probably are in the same space where you just don't know yourself. That's the truth of it. Most entrepreneurs don't know themselves. So in the firm we were at the time, and we continue to still, we run these assessments when we're hiring people. These are the assessments that they do where they tell a person, you know, of the four colors, right? It's yellow, blue, green and red. They tell you the color, the character, who you are, and it's an assessment that gets done. It's a very famous assessment. The name escapes me now, but you answer these series of questions and at the end of it, it tells you a bit about yourself. It tells you how you, you know, how you think, how you see the world. And we were using a company called Itemba Labs in South Africa at the time to run these assessments for us. Great assessments. We still run them today.
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But I realized these assessments assess people. They assess talent, they assess the people you can hire. Who assesses the entrepreneur, who assesses you as the visionary, the person who wants to build a business and who tells you where you're strong and where you're weak and where you need to grow and develop. And then how. And so we started diving into this. Now, I should say this is perhaps my number one criticism that my team has around me.
- [13:50]
Simi
Me.
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Vusi Thembekwayo
If I have a question at the back of my mind, it bothers me and I will not sleep. I will look for answers until I find the answer to that question. And so we started going down the path of trying to answer this question.
- [14:04]
And then we found literature. And what we found was there were various schools of literature written in the world of entrepreneurship. Everything from, you know, the E myth to rework all of the kind of seminal books that every single entrepreneur should read.
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And each of them has a thesis, a hypothesis about what an entrepreneur is and who an entrepreneur is.
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And then when Carol Dweck wrote her book the Growth Mindset, and that was followed by the book Grit, the author escapes me now, you began to realize that there is actually more to being an entrepreneur than just being the visionary or just being the person who can see an opportunity in God after it relentlessly. There is actually an archetype, there is a DNA. And what you want to do is you Want to know who you are and who the market is and how do you show up. So we decided we would build ourselves this tool. And the reason we were doing this was because when entrepreneurs were applying to become part of our accelerator, and we have a very strong, what we call institutional business, but basically ecosystem collaborators, whether they are banks or financial services companies, governments even, or innovation labs and innovation agencies come to us and say, we are running an innovation program. We want you to help us execute by delivering the program on our behalf. So they might be the technical expert. At the moment, we're busy working with a bank in the Caribbean. They are the technical expert around what it takes for businesses to be fundable, but they don't necessarily know how to run a program that helps entrepreneurs build a holistically robust business, E to E, as we say in the coding world, end to end. So this is. We started doing this and as I say, we do it for entrepreneurs on a one to one basis who join our school of scale. And then in our school of scale, we've got what we call a corporate track, the institutional business where corporates and institutions come to us and we help them execute this work. Here is the secret I wanted to share with you today. At the very beginning of all of these programs, we run this diagnostic. The purpose of the diagnostic is for the entrepreneur to answer 60 really detailed questions. Takes 10 to 12 minutes, but it diagnoses them. It's a DNA test. It tells them who they are and how they show up. And it tests entrepreneurs along these six dimensions. I'll share the dimensions with you. This is the purpose of my podcast today, the six dimensions that determine entrepreneurial success. Dimension number one is vision orientation. Vision orientation. The person who has the highest level of vision orientation typically has very strong ability at pattern recognition. So you can see two or three things that are unrelated either by time, space, geography and or culture. And you can relate those two things and create the same sense of logic. Pattern recognition. Most entrepreneurs tend to be really good at pattern recognition. That gives you a sense of why they're able to spot the gaps, able to see what will work and how to make it work. So the first part of vision orientation is pattern recognition. The second part of vision orientation is creativity. Because once you've recognized a pattern, your mind should be creative enough and that should come naturally to you that you can imagine a new way of doing that thing, or you can imagine a more efficient way of getting to the same outcome that often becomes the business, the product or service that the entrepreneur will actually Launch. And then the third and finally the part of vision orientation is around opportunity spotting as a capability. So can you actually spot these opportunities and how capable are you at executing on these opportunities once you've spotted them? That's the first part, vision orientation. The second part of our DNA focuses on execution drive. Execution drive, what is that? Well, that has again, three or four subsets to it. The first part is discipline.
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Typically, it's been our experience in the firm that when you meet somebody that's got a very high score on vision, their execution score tends to be lower because what they do is they're constantly pattern recognizing, constantly opportunity, opportunity spotting. But they never sit in the moment to build the thing that's going to fix that opportunity. Because once you start building, that doesn't require of you to be imagining things. It requires of you to be planning things, executing things, building things. So the first part around execution drive is discipline. The discipline to work beyond, long beyond the moment where you feel like working. The discipline to continue to execute long before that. But the excitement you felt when you first got the idea, this is what I call the Karl Lagerfeld test. Karl Lagerfeld is an incredible fashion designer. He has a face that if you saw him, you would know, right? He now has the very famous brand of sneakers, I think, and jerseys, or what we call jerseys in South Africa, but they're like sweaters, they call them in the United States.
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That very iconic image of the, of the, of the gent wearing those sunglasses. But every time you see Karl Lagerfeld, every time his hair is in a ponytail, he's got his sunglasses on, and he's got that really, really high white collar with a black top. Disciplined execution. He's recognized that a part of his vision orientation is around building a brand, and that a brand must be recognizable, consistent and repetitive. So he's recognizable, he's consistent, and it's repetitive. The second part of vision, of execution drive is focus, man. The amount of time we have had to work with entrepreneurs who are in accelerator programs who begin to lose their focus, they jump off, or they jump to the next thing, or they move on to the next thing, or here's a new. It's like just focus. We're busy migrating our business in school of scale from a services business to a product business. And so what we've realized is all of these services we were delivering, if we actually productize them, we might build a rail that other people in the ecosystem can run their trains on. We don't necessarily want to be the Person running trains all the time, running accelerator programs all the time. But the system that we have been using to run our accelerator program, we've developed that over years. What would it look like if we took that to market and sold it? Our scoring system, our diagnostic system, all of these very intelligent systems that we have built. What would it look like if we took those to market and sold it? So you know what happens when you start with this, right? Like, that's the vision. That's the. Yeah, we're gonna do this. It's so great. Let's do it. Then you start with a. With a plan. It's typically a waterfall plan with a Kanban chart. And then you start executing. And once you start executing, you've gotta focus feature for feature for feature. And so I have had to step out of the Vision Drive and come into the what. What are we building this week? What feature are we launching this week? What are we shipping this week so that we can get that right? So Execution drive is around one, discipline. Two. Focus. Three. A relentless grit. Relentless grit. At the end of the day, grit, in my humble opinion, is more reliable, a determinant of success than talent grit.
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And by the way, you can test for grit. And it's the grit, not just for the purpose of grit, but it's grit to turn ideas into reality. Why? Because there is friction between the idea world and the real world. That friction is whatever constraints might exist as you're beginning to build those features, what they call in engineering the hard points. What are the hard points that you're going to come upon as you're building your system, as you're building your product, as you're attributing, before you launch into the marketplace, relentless grit to turn ideas into reality. The third thing we learned in our DNA was you have to have adaptive resilience. Adaptive resilience. It's not just resilience. It's not just being adaptive, but it's having adaptive resilience. What is that? Well, first, stress tolerance. If you're building anything worth building, you're going to experience stress. So stress tolerance is important. Second, flexibility. How flexible are you? Because if you're too rigid, then what's going to happen is you're going to make the path more important than the destination.
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The hard part here is not necessarily being flexible. This is what we've learned. It's about knowing what to be flexible about. That's the hard part. How many entrepreneurs actually know the thing they should be flexible about vis a vis the thing that should never Be ever change.
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And third, a third part of adaptive resilience is being optimistic. But not just being optimistic. It's being optimistic under pressure. Can you be optimistic under pressure?
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When he arrived in what was then Zaire, Muhammad Ali was.
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Booked to perform and to fight in Zaire. You might remember there was also the time when he fought in Manila. Manila in the Philippines, which is what Don King very famously called the Thriller in Manila. But for his bout against George Foreman. George Foreman at the time was completely undefeated. And not just that, but George Foreman had knocked out Fraser so badly. So badly that he embarrassed Joe Frazier, the same Joe Frazier who had embarrassed Muhammad Ali. So Muhammad Ali comes into the ring to fight a George Foreman who has beaten a Joe Frazier who's beaten Muhammad Ali. Leading up to this fight, there is a lot of talk about the power of Joe Frazier and how hard Joe Frazier hits and how no man can stand a Joe Frazier punch, and how Muhammad Ali is just not at his peak. And this is not the Muhammad ali who was 21 years old. This is a different Muhammad Ali. Joe Frazier is younger. He hits harder. He has more endurance. This is not a fight that's going to go well for Muhammad Ali. So what does Muhammad Ali do? First, he maintains a sense of optimism. He floats. He stills speaks lightly, makes jokes. Second, he plays the game for his strategy, not Joe Fraser's strategy. Joe Frazier is a brawler. He's a puncher. You don't go against a brawler and a puncher fist on fist. You've got to find a way to tire him out, because there's no ways he is going to lose the fight on power. He can only lose the fight if he overexerts himself. So if you watch that fight, Muhammad Ali, of course, uses a technique that has since become very famous in boxing called the rope. A dope where he leans against the ropes and takes an inordinate number of punches from. I beg your pardon, an inordinate number of punches from the young man. So many punches that eventually he ties him out. And that's how Muhammad Ali was able to beat him. That's how Muhammad Ali was able to reclaim his title. So when you're in the marketplace and you're competing, it's about recognizing when you're fighting a Joe Frazier versus when you're fighting a different opponent. And if you're fighting a different opponent, how do you show up? And how do you stay optimistic, even under pressure? How do you stay optimistic even under pressure? Because George Foreman is gonna hit hard. The market's gonna hit you hard. The competitors are gonna hit you hard. That's the game. The third or the fourth part rather of our DNA tests for this thing we called influence and leadership here, it's about your ability to mobil resources and drive them towards collective action. And by the way, it's not about the capacity to do so. It has nothing to do with how much money you have, but it's about your ability, your actual ability.
- [26:56]
Fourth, learning agility.
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Fifth, rather. I'm so sorry I keep losing my place. Fifth, rather, Learning agility. Learning agility is about how receptive are you to feedback, how curious are you, and how well you rapidly iterate so that you can improve. And then lastly, and this is my favorite of all of the elements in the six part that make up a DNA of an entrepreneur that we test for in our assessment. It's called risk intelligence. Risk intelligence, about exercising sound judgment under certainty as well as taking calculated risks. So over the years, we've learned using our system that these are the six elements that make up an entrepreneur. And we've been testing for these. We developed this really, really cool, highly technical, very complex, very expensive to build, I should tell you, tool. And so a few months ago, one of my team members said, hey, what would it look like if we had a version of this tool that we could launch free to the marketplace and give it to entrepreneurs to take? What would that look like? Well, what could it look like? And so we tested it and tried it and we've launched it. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to share in the link to this podcast. So go and check the notes in the podcast and you will find the actual DNA tool. For those of you listening to this who might not necessarily have been able to click on the link, go to sosfounderdna.com sosfounderdna.com all one word and there our test will pop up and you can take it. Once you're done, download your results. And I would love to hear from you on the other side of this. What did you learn? Was it an honest reflection of who you are? And most importantly, what do you commit to doing to improve your score? Because, and this will be my final note, the best thing about the way we've built this tool is it's a growth tool. It's an assessment. It's not a test, which means you can't fail it. It can only reveal to you where you are at, tell you what you need to do to improve, and then you take the actions and improve. Good luck with the test and I look forward to seeing you for what will be our last podcast for the year next week, Sayonara. You can send us a WhatsApp voice note about your thoughts on our podcasts on 278-150-57 double 67 that's 2781-5057 double 6 7. We look forward to hearing from you. This podcast was proudly brought to you by my Growth fund in partnership with Sound and Sounds Media.