Touchstone Business Sustainability Series (10) with Iyin Aboyeji

A Special Welcome to Our Guests

I want to extend a warm welcome to our guests. We are all highly distinguished, and I hope you will permit me to acknowledge a few individuals who have been a source of tremendous support and encouragement. While I don't want to embarrass anyone, I feel it's important to mention a few key people.

Tonight's keynote speaker, in particular, is a subject of great interest, and I am so glad that he is here. I will introduce him shortly, but for those of you who are even slightly familiar with technology, you will know the name Iyinoluwa Aboyeji. If you don't, then you may not be very familiar with the tech world. However, if you've heard of companies like Andela or Flutterwave, then you should know him. His most recent project is Future Africa.

He will be speaking on the topic of the mission-driven business. This is a topic that is very close to my heart. Many years ago, I honed my skills in strategy, and I continue to do so today. I know that if an organization is not mission-driven, it will be out of business in no time. This is the very tenet of what we do here at TOUCHSTONE BSS. We've spoken with many thought leaders, or rather, they have spoken to us, and I am so glad to tell you that one of them is here with us today.

Please join me in welcoming the founder and managing director of SystemSpecs, the owners of Remita, Mr. John Obaro. Thank you for joining us. I am sure that Mr. Obaro is no stranger to Mr. Aboyeji.

We also have other notable tech professionals here tonight. Please permit me to acknowledge their presence as well.

In this series, we have talked about technology, the dynamics of change in our environment, and the importance of values as a part of sustainability. Strategy is also a crucial part of this, which is what Iyinoluwa Aboyeji will be speaking about.

Introducing the Speaker: Iyinoluwa Aboyeji

Before he begins to unpack his message for us, I'd like to tell you a bit about who he is. Iyinoluwa Aboyeji is a General Partner and co-founder of Future Africa. What is Future Africa? It is a platform that provides capital, coaching, and a community for mission-driven innovators building an African future where purpose and prosperity are within everyone's reach.

Proud to have co-founded Future Africa, he previously served as the Deputy Director-General for Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili's 2019 presidential campaign. So you see, his work is not all about technology; he is also involved in civic affairs. The Greeks believed that citizens were people who were involved. I think they divided people in society into three categories, though I can't remember the third one. I do, however, remember the "idiots"—the people who would do nothing about anything. Iyinoluwa is not one of them. I think it was Plato who said, "If you don't get involved in politics, then you should not complain when you are being ruled by fools." I'm sure you and I know whether the people ruling us are wise men and women or not. I won't call any names.

He also helped build Andela and Flutterwave, two of Africa's largest and fastest-growing technology companies, backed by global investors. For those who know, I believe it was the Zuckerberg Foundation, or perhaps Mark Zuckerberg himself, who invested in Andela. He can tell us more about that if we have time for questions.

He is more popularly known as "E." He holds a bachelor's degree in Legal Studies from the University of Waterloo and is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. He also sits on the boards of a number of corporate and non-profit organizations and advises several national governments across Africa on how to support high-growth, innovation-driven enterprises in their domains.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my privilege as the host of TOUCHSTONE BSS to welcome Iyinoluwa Aboyeji. He will be speaking on the subject of "The Mission-Driven Business." Let's give a warm welcome to our next speaker. Thank you.

The Talk: Building a Mission-Driven Business

Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate that very warm welcome. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to many of my elders in this room; I do not take this privilege lightly. I think it was mentioned earlier that Mr. Obaro was here, and I just wanted to pay my respects. He is one of the fathers in our industry who laid the foundation for the work we do today. I am sending my regards.

Today, I'm going to talk about building a mission-driven business and why it's necessary as part of this series. This isn't a very straightforward topic because one might imagine that the purpose of business is simply to make money. I hear this a lot, especially from people of an older generation: "Don't be so emotional. The reason we build a business is to make money."

However, I come from a slightly different school of thought. My belief is that business is a tool of societal change. What do I mean by that? A lot of people rightfully see business as just a way of making money. The idea is you have a skill, you build an organization, you provide your services to whoever pays for it, they pay you, and that's the end of the story.

But when you truly look at the evolution of capitalism and the development of some of the world's capitalist centers, like the United States or England, you quickly learn that business is a tool of societal change. People envision a better world, and they understand that this world can only be brought about through the exchange of demand and supply that happens in business. They then establish new norms based on this vision. This has been the historical record of how successful businesses are made.

Particularly at this time in our country's history, you can look around and easily find a million reasons why now is not a good time to build a business. In fact, smart people might tell you that if they had a choice, they would sell their business and just hold cash because it's a very tough time for business. However, I beg to differ. Now is the time for people who have a vision for what the world needs to look like to push forward their philosophies and processes in business.

I'm going to talk briefly about three biblical principles for building a mission-driven business. I know this is not a religious gathering, but you'll have to forgive me for the religious references, as I was raised by a pastor. I might not necessarily reference specific Bible verses, but I will make regular references to them. This is just my warning upfront. I want to talk about these three principles because I believe they set the tone for how we, as business people, need to think differently about business sustainability, especially in the context of Nigeria and, on a broader scale, Africa and the world at large.

Principle 1: The Why

The first principle is the purpose of business. Before we can establish that, we need to consider the purpose for which we were all put on Earth. For Christians, the general idea is to bring glory to God. But if you think about Jesus' parable of the talents, which I consider the most straightforward investor story, you start to understand that the purpose of business is more than just making money.

In that story, three men were given different amounts of talents. Their master went on a journey and, upon his return, the first man tripled his yield, the second doubled his, and the last one hid his talent in a hole. He believed there was no point in putting it to productive use since he wasn't going to get a direct benefit from it. Unfortunately, while many of us believe we are like the first or second men—productive vessels for the greatest capital God gives us, which is life—the reality is we often think like the last man. We tend to believe the purpose of business is just to make money.

Our economy and the world don't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes it's difficult for people to understand this. One of the reasons our country is the way it is is because somehow we have managed to separate the principles of business from physical realities. We have a country where the economy is growing slowly, yet banks are making record profits. I'm not saying this to criticize banks, but to illustrate a point.

Ultimately, one of the things we will learn as a nation during this period is that the hallmark of productivity is a product. As entrepreneurs, we are playing a missionary role in the development of our country because we are making things or creating services. Jobs don't just drop from the sky, nor are they always created by the government. Jobs are the result of productive activity in the economy that creates a need for labor. The same goes for financial activity. You can't just manufacture it out of thin air; it is a function of us making things. When we make things, it becomes possible to create value.

The core message here is that we all need to come to an understanding, as business people, that beyond profits, we must ask ourselves, "What are we actually doing this for?" I'll use my business as an example. When we started Andela, we weren't the first company of its kind. What Andela did was identify talented young people, train them to become software engineers, and place them with companies around the world.

Today, Andela is a big company with over 2,000 staff. Unfortunately, we are no longer in management control; we are shareholders. But during the time it was an active part of our portfolio, we trained over 106,000 young Nigerians and placed about 2,000 of them in jobs with over 200 companies. The company makes a profit; it's a good business. But the reason we started it was because we said to ourselves, "Nigeria has an unemployment problem. There are many young people who don't have jobs. How can we use the skills we have to build a business that provides skills and jobs to these young people?" That's what led us to match the skills and manpower that existed to the global demand for software and technology skills. We made money doing that. Notice that the first question was not "How can we make money?" The first question was, "Here is a problem; how do we solve it?" And then, "By solving that problem, how do we make money from it?" This approach has stayed with us to this day. The bulk of my work now is identifying challenges and then figuring out ways to turn those challenges into opportunities and then monetizing from them.

The reality is, if we don't do that, we can't move forward. So the first key principle is that you have to be very clear about the "why" behind your business. It cannot just be about money.

Principle 2: The Secret

The second principle is about understanding your "secret." There is an important business philosopher, René Girard, who talks about things hidden since the foundation of the world. One of his core philosophies is the concept of "mimetic desire," the idea that people tend to do and strive for the same things. We borrow our desires from others; they aren't always original. Because others want to make big profits, we want to make big profits.

Where am I going with this? One of the key things he talks about is that good businesses are born out of secrets—a distinct way of looking at the world. One of the benefits of building a mission-driven business is that you quickly identify what your secret is. That secret is what distinguishes your business and service from everyone else's.

I'm sure we've all had an experience with a business where we felt, "This business is different." They may be doing the same thing as everyone else, but the way they treat me or the way they do things is different. When I first moved back to Nigeria, I felt that way about a business like GTBank. I felt like it was different because there was a specific focus on customer excellence that was very difficult to find in other financial services companies at the time. This is what I mean by a mission-driven business. I believe the founders of GTBank took the customer element very seriously and built their "secret" around it, which led to their success.

When you're a mission-driven business, you distinguish yourself in crowded marketplaces. It becomes easy to understand why a specific kind of person gravitates toward you. It is that difference that gives you the power and success. I know some of us who are more spiritual might attribute this to the Holy Spirit, but I feel very strongly that when a business has a value for which it is willing to sacrifice the aimless pursuit of profits, it ultimately becomes more profitable.

Let me use a more recent example. Facebook is a troubled company. Many of us who have followed the business from the beginning can point to times when they've made the wrong decisions. But very recently, Mark Zuckerberg decided to take a stand on the principle of free speech. He said, "I am not interested in policing people's speech on my platform." For right or wrong, that was his stance. A lot of big advertisers pulled out, and he lost about 25% of his advertiser base, which is how he makes money. Yet he stood on that principle. That is what we mean by a secret. He figured out that, for right or wrong, this is the principle on which his business stands, regardless of how much money he might lose. He was ready to lose all the money for that principle. That is a distinguishing characteristic of a mission-driven business—it is very clear about what it stands for.

Principle 3: Multiplication

The third principle is multiplication. Many of us have very talented people within our organizations, and the truth is that in this day and age, business is all about talent. We love them so much, and at some point, when they decide to move on and venture into a new world, we become hesitant about letting them go. For good reason—we've taught them and invested a lot into them, and our principle might be that loyalty requires them to stay by our side forever.

But the mission-driven business is like an evangelical mission. The concept of "mission" is, in fact, drawn from the evangelical fervor to go and preach the gospel. The hallmark of a successful mission-driven business is its ability to grow seeds and plant those seeds to grow on their own.

One of the traditions in Silicon Valley, where I learned a lot about the technology industry, is this willingness to let a groomed seed grow on its own, even within their own business structure. In fact, they encourage it. This is a very important lesson I've pulled from their business playbook that has driven a lot of the mission-driven businesses I've been involved in.

It is this principle of multiplication. You can call it "church planting" or "business planting"—seeding mission-driven talent within your organizations to go out and spread the gospel. This is a critical element of being a mission-driven organization, and a lot of people miss it. They insist on hoarding talent. But this principle is very, very important for helping a lot of people, and the idea is that your business culture is strong enough to grow and scale beyond yourself. It's the legacy-inducing part of doing business.

In Silicon Valley, they use a term called a "mafia." One of the most popular is the "PayPal Mafia," a group of people who worked at PayPal with a gentleman named Peter Thiel and went on to build other companies that became the foundation of Web 2.0. These people have now funded other companies, and so on. You have powerful dynasties that have emerged from that group. Companies like YouTube, Facebook, and Google all have ties to the PayPal Mafia. So many interesting businesses emerged from this group and are now solid foundations of Silicon Valley today.

This principle is so important. In my experience, with our program at Andela, we called them "fellows." We had our fellows for four years, and at the end of four years, the goal was to push them out into the world to spread our principles and evangelism. It was more important to us that the principles of the kind of business we were running became widespread than it was that we were a dominant player in the industry. Incidentally, it made us an even more dominant player because so many people came to us, and one of the things I noticed about great mission-driven businesses is that so many people can trace their beginnings to that company because the history and influences are so strong.

In the technology industry, one of those businesses is SystemSpecs. I've talked to a lot of older people in the industry, and they'll say, "Oh, I started at SystemSpecs." That principle of multiplication is critical. How can you reproduce yourself as a mission-driven business?

A Call to Action for Nigeria

So, to wrap up before we go into questions, here are the three very important principles of mission-driven businesses that we must hold dear, especially if we are concerned about sustainability, not just profits.

1. What is the "why" behind your business? Why does it exist beyond making a profit? What need in the universe does it serve? Because that is the reason we are on Earth—to serve the needs of others.

2. What is the "secret" or principle on which your business stands? What is that distinguishing factor that you are willing to stand on, even if it means losing money?

3. How do you "multiply" your business culture and philosophy? How do you seed your missionary talent by helping them set up their own ventures? How do you not act as a hindrance to them but rather support them in their efforts?

I'll end with this thought: our country needs this mission-driven mindset maybe even more than it needs money.

You see, a lot of people, when the COVID pandemic hit, were wondering what would happen. I went back and looked at history, specifically at the Spanish Flu of 1918. I'll tell you this: everything that happened in 1918 is happening now. There was a first wave of infection, people broke quarantine and celebrated the end of World War I, and then they went into a second wave where even more people died. God forbid that happens, but that's what happened in 1918.

But the part of the story that nobody talks about is what happened in the 1920s, which we famously call the "Roaring Twenties." This was a period of unprecedented industrial advancement in America. In many ways, the 1920s were the decade that made America what it is today. People like Henry Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie emerged in the 1920s as the innovators that America depended on.

They emerged because they started to build these mission-driven businesses that were primarily predicated on the idea that they needed to rebuild and connect America. Through their innovations, we got flights, mechanized automobiles, and so many other things that have come to define our world. These men, after a world war and a pandemic that had killed millions, figured out that this was the time for them to build businesses that were not just about making money but about rebuilding America.

Today, we celebrate these men and the 1920s as a decade where America saw incredible technological and industrial progress. My feeling is that the same thing is about to happen again. But what God will require of all of us are mission-driven businesspeople. I don't think he's going to hand this opportunity to mere traders who are only after profits.

For us to be prepared to operate in that realm, we have to understand these principles and ask ourselves those critical questions:

• What is the "why" behind my business?

• Is this just about making money and feeding my family?

• How will this transform our country and the continent?

• What is the "secret" behind my business?

• What is the principle behind my business that I am willing to stand on, no matter what?

• How can I take my business philosophy and spread the seeds by having my mission-driven talent eventually leave and set up their own ventures? How do I not act as a hindrance but rather support them in that effort?

Thank you very much. I'll hand over to Pastor Tunde now.

Q&A Session

Thank you very much. What a wonderful and exciting time. Three key principles. Before we look at these more closely, please permit me to appreciate the presence of my own senior pastor as well as the dean of the Abuja branch, whose name, when I mention it, you will see the relationship between Iyin and himself. Please join me in welcoming my general overseer, Reverend Sam Aboyeji. That's the general overseer of the Four Square Gospel Church in Nigeria. You're very welcome, sir. I am so honored that he is here. He's been here a couple of times—a forward-looking man of God who is shepherding us in the right direction. Thank you very much.

I'd also like to acknowledge so many others, like my brother and friend, Mr. Femi Tunde, and many other great people who are here. We're going to spend a lot of time on this. Please forgive me if I don't mention you all.

Iyinoluwa has already summarized his presentation for us, and I'm beginning to feel that those of us who are thinking about the Nigeria of tomorrow and whether we have a future should know that we do. We have a future when you hear someone like him speak. Our future is not going to be defined by the "Hushpuppies" of this world but by solid entrepreneurs like him.

We have this opportunity now to interact. Incidentally, I haven't seen a single question in the chat room. I'm surprised because in the past we've had quite a lot of comments. You've succeeded in mesmerizing us and giving a spellbinding presentation.

Okay, so we are open for questions. You can indicate that you want to ask a question, and then you will be unmuted to ask.

While people are thinking, I have a couple of comments. First, you have impressed me because you are a millennial, not like someone like me, who was born before the computer. You are a tech entrepreneur, but you are talking about history. Millennials are not known to look into history, but to look into the future. You can imagine how excited I was because what I propose is a "real school," a blend of the old school and the new school.

If you don't know history, it's very unlikely that you know where you're going. You've not only talked about those who have benefited from technology, but also those who are making waves today. They are people who have learned from the past, are innovating on what people have done, and are moving into the future. I must commend you for that.

My first question is, why are you, as someone interested in innovation and the future, so interested in the past? You've given us a roadmap, a playbook, on how the pandemic will play out simply by looking into the past. What's the difference? Why are you different from what experts say about millennials not being interested in intellectual work?

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji: Well, I don't know if I'm much different. I'll be honest, I think part of the grace that I have is that I've had the benefit of working with a lot of older people who are more advanced in age than I am. This has made me very respectful of experience, especially because I still don't believe I have enough of it.

I think what I've learned is, just like it says in Ecclesiastes, "There is nothing new under the sun." Most things have been tried before. However, the key thing is just being able to understand the patterns of the past and then leveraging that understanding to be able to provide a roadmap that gets you to your destination sooner or faster. That has been very key to being able to do the things that I've done in the period of time that I've been able to do it.

So I am very respectful of history. You could call that my "secret." I always look at things from a historical perspective and try to understand, "What did those people do? What was tried at that time? What has changed?" In every business I do, I look at what has changed and what is now true that makes this business possible. These are the critical elements that help you build a true picture of where you're going. You might not get everything right, but it reduces the chances that you will make very outrageous errors.