There are only a handful of acceptable career paths for an African millennial. You’re either a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. Occasionally, you would be forgiven for becoming a pharmacist but that’s as far as you can go.
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie alludes to this in a 2017 interview.
"Nobody just leaves medical school, especially given it's fiercely competitive to get in. But I had a sister who was a doctor, another who was a pharmacist, a brother who was an engineer. So my parents already had sensible children who would be able to make an actual living, and I think they felt comfortable sacrificing their one strange child," she said.
Unlike Adichie, who abandoned medical school due to a lack of passion for the field, Kristin Wilson, Chief Strategy Officer at Spurt, dropped out for a different reason — she couldn't envision a future where she'd live permanently in the United States.
Her moment of epiphany happened while observing a laparoscopic surgery, when the surgeon casually remarked on the exorbitant cost of the equipment.
"I just kept thinking, ‘This equipment is really expensive. How long will it take for hospitals everywhere in the capital cities that I grew up in on the other side of the world to be able to afford them?’ And it just seemed like my life was going to be lived in the West, and I couldn't imagine it."
Helping entrepreneurs get the best out of their teams
With medical school effectively ruled out, she went ahead to complete a bachelor's degree in comparative literature, East Asian studies, and neuroscience at Princeton University. After graduation, she had brief spells at She Leads Africa and Big Cabal Media as programme manager and head of business development, respectively.
In 2019, she joined Double Feather Partners as its vice president, focusing on Africa. By this time, she had been working with and investing in startup founders for a few years. Although capital to founders kept growing, not much investment was going into the talent that these startups would ultimately need to grow. In 2021, she co-founded Spurt! to help entrepreneurs improve team performance.
"One of the things that investors often talk about, particularly early-stage investors, is that when you're backing an early-stage venture, you're really backing the team. And so for us, it was about building that support for entrepreneurs to say, 'How do I help you build the best version of your team?'"
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Through a plethora of tools and capacity-building training, Spurt! provides vital support to startups and SMEs.
Its suite of tools includes Spot, a talent management tool; Spur, a performance management tool; Spark, for motivating employees; and Sync!, to enhance collaboration and teamwork.
"These tools that we created were essentially designed to ensure that right from the beginning of the value chain, which is when you find that talent, to when you're working day to day, you have resources that enable you to allow that to be data-driven."
Biggest mistakes co-founders make
In addition to her role at Spurt!, Wilson is an active angel investor, a venture partner at Oui Capital and recently launched Innovate Africa, a $2.5 million fund to support early-stage African founders.
"The philosophy of the fund is that we want people to tackle wicked problems because Africa is afflicted with wicked problems. I like that Samsung has come out with a new ring so that we can track our fitness better, but those are not our problems," she notes.
The timing of the launch of Innovate Africa comes at an intriguing time given funding for early-stage startups is dwindling, but Wilson maintains that this is an opportune time to be investing in early-stage startups.
According to startup funding data by Intelpoint, startups with more than one founder were more likely to get funded in H1 2024, emphasising how important having a partner on the journey can be.
But while this has its benefits, it also has its drawbacks, with conflict between co-founders ranking high on the list of reasons for startup failure. Wilson points out that many of the problems co-founders have stem from a lack of transparency and accountability.
"Sometimes, in the interest of not rocking the boat, things don't get said early enough. And so, by the time things do get said, they're shouted or they're yelled or they leak as passive aggression, and that creates all kinds of issues."
The lack of accountability and transparency is not unusual considering many co-founders start out as friends or relatives before starting a business. However, she maintains that co-founders should build transparency and accountability into their relationship from the get-go as leaving it for much later is almost guaranteed to cause conflict.
She would know, having started Spurt! with a friend. However, while that partnership ended a year later, she maintains that building a startup with friends or family could still be rewarding, adding that mutual respect often serves to save the relationship and, by extension, the startup.
According to Wilson, a common pitfall for founders when building teams is attempting to alter an employee's performance without identifying the underlying organisational framework that could be responsible for their performance.
"Organisations that don't have the right structure are going to struggle with meeting their goals and hitting the scale."
As the African venture capital landscape continues to evolve, the focus on exits has become increasingly prominent.
However, for Wilson, the true measure of success lies not only in delivering substantial returns but also in backing companies that drive meaningful impact.
