In recent years, the tech startup space has dominated in terms of investments and funding, and one of the people championing startup investment is Kola Aina, a man who simply describes himself as a tech entrepreneur.
He has experience across several sectors including venture capital, technology, media, agriculture, infrastructure, publishing and real estate. But what you may find very interesting is the story of how he moved from a “toilet-sized” office space, to the point of investing millions of dollars in the tech space. He is the focus of this week’s founder’s profile.
Kola Aina is the first son of Chief Oludaisi and Omotayo Aina from Boluwaduro Local Government Area, Osun State. He attended Savannah State University where he bagged a BSc degree in Electronics Engineering Technology in 2004. Even while he was in school, he was boisterous, full of life and energy, and involved in a lot of activities. He was a Tiger Scholar, while also being a member of the Volunteer-Upward Bound Tutoring program, and Beta Gamma Sigma International Honor Society, as well as the President- African Students Association.
What he wanted versus what his father wanted…
However, there was a twist—the young man had no interest in engineering, but only did it to satisfy his father. His true interest was business and all through engineering school, he spent as much time reading books on finance and business for personal development, as he did on his engineering books.
“I hated engineering school. So I found a way to rush the 4-year degree into 3 years; I just wanted to be done with it. After I completed the degree, I faxed the certificate to my father saying, ‘I’ve done what you wanted so have it.’ Then I went on to pursue what I really wanted,” he recalled.
To make his transition over to business and corporate finance a smooth one, he went to the Bowling Green State University for his MBA, and was again the President of MBA Students Association, a member of Beta Gamma Sigma International Honor Society, and Golden Key International Honor Society.
Between 2009 and 2010, he attended a Senior Management Program at the Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos Business School, Nigeria. Aina attended a Senior Executive Program – Africa at the Harvard Business School in 2016, and also recently completed a PhD in Strategy & Innovation, from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford in 2021.
He no doubt takes learning seriously and has continued to equip himself with the competitive advantage that places him ahead of the pack of senior executives. At some point, he secured admission to do a PhD, with the intention of pursuing a career in academics, but dropped out at the sight of a higher calling—the passion for “customised and home-bred tech solutions to African problems,” and this was what led him to found Emerging Platforms.
From career to business
After his MBA, Aina started out his career as a financial analyst at Fifth Third Bank in Ohio, USA in August 2005 and worked there for about a year and four months. In December 2006, he joined Regent Group as a Corporate Strategy Manager. The Regent Group was a leading brand across the West African publishing landscape, and offered a suite of print and publishing capabilities, from design to distribution. Aina worked for a year in this capacity, before he was made the Senior Manager, Finance & Strategy for another couple of years. He also served as the Acting CEO when the CEO transited into retirement.
In 2010, the entrepreneurial bug resurfaced. Kola Aina looked for a tech expert and together, they co-founded a Technology consulting company, Emerging Platforms Limited, a software company which would offer a suite of specialised technology solutions. They started with an idea of building a mobile app for elections, but their first real project was a security project—a whistle-blowing platform that enabled people report incidences in a confidential way.
To raise funds for Emerging Platforms Limited, Aina and his partner sent out several applications, but were repeatedly met with rejections and unreplied messages.
“We wrote a letter to every bank in Nigeria, got introductions but everyone said no. So, we went back to the drawing board and bootstrapped the business,” Aina stated.
They took the self-funding route and successfully bootstrapped the business to success. Luckily, they had early customers who were willing to pay for their product. His partner served as the Chief Technology Officer, while Kola assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer. Even in a competitive space like tech, the team was able to carve out their space by paying more attention to details and ensuring customer satisfaction.
As Aina recalled in an interview, they started by renting a small part of a friend’s office.
“I had a secondary friend who had settled back much earlier than I did in Nigeria. We were able to rent part of their office. In fact, the space we rented was like the size of a toilet. It was very small.
But going by my personal philosophy of excellence, when you came into the space, you’d think you were in a one million-dollar office. We had wallpaper, lamps, it was very nice but it was small. It could only fit two small tables. In 6 months we were able to take up our own space.”
A jack of all trades and skills
In the early days of bootstrapping, Aina took on as many roles as he could—business analyst, software tester, HR manager, and accountant—up until the business stabilised. He admitted later that his knowledge from business school, and engineering came in handy as he was a lot more analytical.
Mulling over his unsuccessful fundraising experience, Aina decided to do something to ease how entrepreneurs and founders got access to capital in Africa. He also believed in the place of support and mentorship in business successes, as he had personally invested in a few that did not do well.
“As an organisation, Emerging Platforms decided around 2015 that we wanted to formalise the way we support the next wave of innovation in Africa. We discussed it with the board and they endorsed it. For us, it was a long term plan; something we actually planned to materialise in 2017. However, late 2016, a few things happened and it appeared that we needed to fast-track it,” he recalled.
Ventures Platform was launched in late 2016, as an early-stage pan-African VC firm.
“I was just always fascinated by the power of capital. I was attracted to the notion of giving people money and seeing them build something meaningful with it. I always wanted to end up being an investor, even when it wasn’t popular,” Aina stated in an interview.
For him, startup funding was a good way to find and fund young people using technology to solve society’s problems. He wanted to model it after the Silicon valley system, and in the first year, he got entrepreneurs from across Africa to fly into a campus in Abuja for a 16-week acceleration program. They were paired with investors, team members, capital, and mentors. This was going to be a challenging model, and everyone warned Aina against it from the outset but he was ready to make his own mistakes. He practically emptied his family savings to run the first acceleratory program.
After evaluating the accelerator program from the first year, Aina and his team decided to adopt an early-stage fund model. Since its launch in 2016, Ventures Platform has backed almost 100 startups including Seamless HR, PiggyVest, Mono, and Paystack—which Stripe acquired in October 2020 for over $200m. Aina also got to invest in startups like Paystack, Kudi, Kangbe (now Reliance HMO), Printivo and Tizeti.
From the beginning, Ventures Platform offered what many considered to be among the fairest investment deals, with very transparent terms which made for easy flow. “$20,000 for 10% equity was one of the fairer deals out there at that time,” Aina recounted.
The clarity of vision attracted others like Kayode Oyewole, and Fola Olatunji-David, who joined him to drive towards the goal. Ventures Platform did over a million dollars in investments in the early days, and this helped to build a track record with its portfolio of companies. This would later help when the team started raising external capital.
By late 2017, Ventures Platform started raising external capital: syndicate funds. This happened because people who were impressed with the performance of the firm’s portfolio of companies wanted to invest in Ventures Platform.
Courtesy of his diversified investments and wealth of experience, Aina finds himself juggling responsibilities across several boards he sits on. He sits on and serves as advisory member on the boards of ARM Financial Advisers Limited, Reliance HMO, Yemisi Shyllon Art Museum (Chairman), Trove Technologies, Inc., Acumen, CrowdForce, MDaaS Global and Edu Platforms where he was Chairman from 2014 to 2020. He also served as Non Executive Director with Paradigm Diversified Capital Ltd from 2010 to 2016.
Kola Aina is the Chairman & Founder of The Ventures Park a co-working space and community for entrepreneurs, and the Ventures Platform Foundation. On October 1, 2021, the Lagos Angel Network (LAN) appointed a new Board of Governors (BoG) led by Kola Aina to oversee its affairs. Aina is Chair of the Advisory Group on Technology and Creativity to the President of Nigeria and Co-Chair of the Committee on Job Creation & Youth Employment to the President of Nigeria.
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