EASY: Helping Founders Succeed

Successful startups develop new solutions to tomorrow's problems. In the process, they improve processes and create new jobs, infrastructure & supply-chains. This is highly desirable for both the Kenyan and Tanzanian economy. However, bringing a startup to maturity is difficult and more than 70% of startups fail in Kenya within the first 3 years. For a large part, those failures could be prevented. With over 15 years of experience in setting up, growing & advising startups, the TES Ventures team has helped many companies succeed. But we see a big difference between Europe and East Africa. We are keen to explore those differences further with a group of successful operators from East Africa. That's why we set up EASY: the East African Startup Operator Initiative.

In East Africa, our experience has been that startup founders need support with operations, rather than strategy. For startup founders, control is difficult. Internal and external volatility lead to a day-to-day focus, rather than a long-term horizon. This requires higher founders being involved in operations longer. Founders having less time for - and trust in - planning for the long-term; e.g. organizational design, operational excellence (repeatability, reliability, quality). With TES we support organizations to move towards more predictable, repeatable & reliable operations to support the pathway to sustainable growth.

This process involved three key aspects;

Operational Excellence

Adaptive strategy frameworks, supported by diligent standard operating procedures and digital feedback structure partnerships would help.

Value-Chain Approach

Strong partnerships support an operational excellent supply-chain. Often, there is high resistance to change. Stakeholders indicate that a low-trust environment due to negative, previous experiences are the main reason to refrain from actively pursuing partnerships. Over the years, TES has successfully created ecosystems through a thorough understanding of aligning incentives. Through collaboration across the quadruple-helix, we accelerate markets.

Sustainable Growth

TES believes impact investment should focus less on pushing for a few unicorns. Whether the journey towards a unicorn is successful or not, they always create inequality and are highly destructive to their environment. Rather, impact investment and DFIs should support a large number of mature companies focused on sustainable growth. Here, it is critical to involve stakeholders with a long-term commitment to the triple bottom line. Some call such startups Camels, Zebra or, Turtoise.

Firstly, being a founder or working in a startup is not very visible. Promotion of successful operators and a support network would help facilitate the next generation of founders. Secondly, growing a startup is a process. Access to this playbook and easy to use templates which are adapted to East African (prospected) founders is a major enabler for success.

As TES, we aim to leverage our experience and our network with East African operators. People who have built and grown a company with a stable, repeatable org design/culture. We will create an East African Operator Playbook, together with a podcast series, to promote & facilitate founders across East Africa. In addition, we are preparing to publish open-source legal documents, such as SHA, ESOP, NDAs etc

Keen to follow our progress? Get in touch via EASY: East African Startup Operator Initiative

Playbook

The content of the playbook is developed by TES Network, supported by experts. The set-up of the playbook would be similar to 'Scaling Up' by Verne Harnish, with pragmatic templates across each phase. TES identified that startups go through the S-curve cycle, in four phases. The tooling developed will be aligned with these phases across four aspects; strategy, execution, people & cash. The four phases are shown in the figure above; start, first uptake, operational excellence & recalibration.

Podcast

A podcast series with a weekly episode, covering the aspects developed in the playbook and vice versa. The Podcast Series is set up as a fuzzy front end exploration, a low barrier of entry access point to the startup operator content. Additionally, the podcast series will be a platform for successful stakeholders in the ecosystem to talk about their lessons learned. The podcast series celebrates entrepreneurs, to demonstrate how entrepreneurship can transform industries and contribute to the development of East Africa.

Public Library

To help founders by taking away some of the procedural burden on their journey. We will draft the top 10 most commonly used legal contracts for Kenya and East African startup founders, including; shareholder agreements, NDAs, MoU, employment contract, management agreements, hold-co structure.

Especially important is also the Employee Stock Option Plan. For founders to have their critical staff participate in the company and - upon exit - share in the economic success of the company. We have studied several options and aim to provide the legal templates for this to founders for them to leverage this tool in engaging, retaining & rewarding talent to the startup ecosystem.

Link to Public Library