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With me today is Mike Quinn, the founder of Zoona, one of Africa’s startup darlings for a period of time. He and three other cofounders built Zoona, a money transfer and remittance business, to over 3000 agents transactacting $2.5Bn across two African markets - Zambia and Malawi.
They earned $86 million in revenue along the journey. He was one of the first founders on the continent to ever raise venture money and raised through Series B before their Series C and ultimately the future growth of the company went into a death spiral.
He wrote his reflections in a book titled “Failing to Win” and he is now on to building his next venture, Boost.
Hear on this episode:
1) Learning from Failure - The Startup CEO & Founder Reality
- We are All Failing All the Time
- The Difference Between Having Failed and Thinking You Are a Failure
- Navigating Self Doubt in Tough Moments
- Making the Decision to Leave Your Own Company
- You are Not Going through the Founder Journey Alone if You Do it Right
- How Being a Dad and Husband made Mike a Better Leader
2) Managing Your Board
- Managing the Culture of Your Board as You Would Your Team
- Reduce the Drag Coefficient of Your Board
- Talk about What Actually Matters at Your Board vs Reporting and Updates
- How to Communicate to the Board When You Are Disappointing Them
3) Exiting a Key Executive
- Deciding to Exit A Key Executive Who Doesn’t Fit Your Culture
- When Your Culture Is Misaligned Internally and How You Know When Someone Breeds a Different Culture Internally to What You Have
- When International Expansion Fails in a New Market after it Worked in Others
4) Team and Culture
- How to Hire The Fewest “Right” People
- Culture Exists Whether You Care About it or Not
- Managing Culture and Morale When Contracting not Scaling
- Behaviours not Values are What Matter
- Finding a CoFounder Who Complements Your BlindSpots
Find Mike's book on Amazon and Audible.
Find out more at KindredCapital.VC/FoundersUncut
This podcast was produced by Fascinate Productions
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