African Business Stories
African Business Stories is the go-to podcast for insights into the women shaping Africa’s business landscape. Africa is one of the world’s most promising frontiers for growth and innovation—and women are at the heart of this transformation.
Hosted by Akaego Okoye, this podcast spotlights female entrepreneurs who are breaking barriers, scaling businesses, and driving economic development across the continent. Through bold conversations, we explore funding, scaling strategies, digital transformation, and industry innovations—equipping you with insights, practical tools, and inspiration to navigate your own entrepreneurial journey.
When women win, economies thrive. These stories amplify success, challenge narratives, and create a blueprint for the next generation of female leaders in Africa and beyond.
Subscribe now and be part of the movement to champion women in business!
African Business Stories
Sarah Dusek: Co-Founder & MP, Enygma Ventures - Scaling Visions: From Startups to Venture Capital
Sarah Dusek's entrepreneurial journey reads like an adventure novel – from studying law in the UK to selling her glamping company for over $100 million and then dedicating herself to funding female entrepreneurs across Africa. Her story proves that business can be the most powerful vehicle for driving meaningful change in the world.
After a heartfelt connection with Zimbabwe during her nonprofit days addressing the AIDS crisis, Sarah experienced a profound sense of belonging that would later draw her back to the continent. When her nonprofit work felt incomplete, she made a pivotal realization: perhaps business, rather than charity, could create more sustainable impact.
This mindset shift led her through several entrepreneurial ventures, including the devastating failure of her first business during the 2008 financial crisis. Rather than surrender to conventional employment, Sarah and her husband relocated to Montana and bootstrapped what would become Under Canvas – luxury safari-inspired accommodations near America's national parks. The business struggled initially until Sarah made the crucial decision to pursue venture capital rather than continue growing slowly.
"I realized I couldn't play small," Sarah explains. "If this business was going to last and build something of value, significance, and impact, we had to go big or go home." This perspective shift catapulted Under Canvas to a successful exit, but the fundraising journey exposed Sarah to the challenges female founders face in accessing capital.
True to a promise she made herself during those difficult fundraising days, Sarah created Enygma Ventures after her exit – a fund exclusively backing female entrepreneurs across Africa. Her investment philosophy prioritizes determined founders who demonstrate exceptional execution abilities above revolutionary ideas.
Today, Sarah continues building with Few and Far, a regenerative travel company developing eco-lodges in South African wilderness areas. Her message to female entrepreneurs remains consistent: think bigger, don't let anyone tell you no, and remember that when women create and distribute wealth, only good things happen.
Subscribe for more conversations with the pioneering entrepreneurs reshaping Africa's business landscape and driving continental transformation through bold, innovative ventures.
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With more female entrepreneurs than any other region in the world. Women are at the heart of Africa's transformation. Welcome to African Business Stories, the show that amplifies the voices of female entrepreneurs shaping Africa's business landscape. I'm your host, ekego Koye. Here we explore bold ideas, strategies for scaling and the realities of building businesses that drive economic development. These stories will provide insights into Africa's business landscape, practical tools for growth and the inspiration to navigate your own entrepreneurial journey. Be sure to subscribe, rate and share. Neuro journey Be sure to subscribe, rate and share On the show.
Speaker 1:Today I chat with Sarah Dusik, serial entrepreneur, investor and author of Thinking Bigger, a pitch deck formula for women who want to change the world. After building and selling her second company under Canvas for over $100 million, sarah launched Enigma Ventures, a VC fund investing exclusively in female entrepreneurs across Africa. We talk about her journey from studying law in the UK to working in nonprofits across Zimbabwe and Asia, how failure and resilience shaped her path to entrepreneurship and what it took to scale and exit a successful business. Sarah shares why she believes business can be a force for good, what she looks for when investing in African founders, and how her new venture, few and Far, is redefining travel and climate action in Africa. It's a conversation about courage, capital and creating lasting impact. Let's get into it. Hi Sarah, welcome to African Business Stories. Hello, nice to see you. I'm so glad that we get to have this conversation. It was lovely to meet you in person in September, I think it was in New York. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was really nice. September, I think it was in New York. Yes, yeah, yeah, that was really nice. Just starting way, way back, I know you were born in England, in Gloucestershire, and I wonder what that experience was like for you and if there are any fun memories you'd like to share with us today.
Speaker 2:I grew up in a small town in Gloucestershire in the UK, lived a fairly average, fairly normal middle class life in the UK. I would never have considered myself an outdoors person or someone who liked really hardcore outdoor pursuits. Yet I have spent the last 15 years of my life building outdoor travel companies, which feels a little ironic. The closest I ever got to camping as a child was my parents had a caravan that we would perilously drive down to Cornwall in the south of the country every year and camp in the caravan, usually in the rain in England for a couple of weeks in the summer every year, and that was as close to camping camping as I ever got. So it was quite a strange thing later in life to build a glamping company. That's maybe not surprising, given that I'd never really been a camper. But yeah.
Speaker 1:So how did you come to choose law as a degree? I read that you studied law at university. I did.
Speaker 2:And I have reflected on that a lot over the last 30 years since studying law. Because I never practiced law, I did not go on to become a lawyer, but I distinctly remember the instinct of wanting to fight the bad guys and take on injustices in the world. I was an avid watcher of LA law in the 80s and of course the British legal system is absolutely nothing like the US legal system whatsoever. But I got enamored with this idea of these powerful people waltzing into courtrooms and fighting for justice and fighting crime and taking on big cases with lots of things at stake. And I think there was something about my justice gene was awakened by watching American legal dramas. I had this crazy idea that I should become a lawyer and so hence I had decided to study law at university.
Speaker 1:So what did you do after university?
Speaker 2:I did the most obvious thing you could possibly do. After graduating with a law degree from university in England, I decided I would go work for a non-profit organization in Africa, which was, of course, a very natural progression. And of course, my parents were very happy about that, because they had just spent all this money putting me through university and trying to get me into a great university and get a great degree. And of course I'm saying I want to go work for a non-profit organization, I'm going to volunteer, I'm not even going to have a job, I'm going to work for free and I'm going to go live in Africa. Wow, which did not go down.
Speaker 2:I can imagine my mother was terrified. We talk about having terrible stereotypes. She said you could go anywhere and do anything. Why do you have to go to Africa? And my answer at the time was I just have this strong sense of calling, I just want to go. I want to go and I want to do things that are meaningful and impactful. And I definitely had a savior mentality going on in my head and sometimes I still do which I have to keep in check, but the idea of wanting to be able to make a difference and solve big world problems and I arrived on the continent to work in Zimbabwe for an organization that was doing HIV and AIDS education across the country and I wanted to help solve the AIDS crisis of the 90s, which, of course, was probably at its peak at that time, was one of the world's biggest pressing problems and I wanted to get stuck in and make a difference.
Speaker 1:So how long were you in Zimbabwe?
Speaker 2:for I was there for two years and I actually was planning on spending many more years there because I absolutely fell in love. I fell in love with Africa, I fell in love with Zimbabwe, I fell in love with the people, I fell in love with my life living in Zimbabwe and it was a very strange phenomenon actually, because for the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere. First time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere. Wow, very strange thing to say as a person coming from another country who really doesn't belong there. It wasn't my home country, it wasn't where I was from and certainly racially I was obviously in the minority, but it felt like a place that was where my soul was and I felt at home. I felt like I belonged, I felt like I was doing work that I cared about and was meaningful and I loved my life. So it was heartbreaking. Zimbabwe started to fall apart in my second year due to complicated political issues.
Speaker 2:And the organization I worked for decided that all foreign workers had to leave because it was too dangerous for us to stay and too complicated for the organization to keep us. When, when it was difficult and trying times, and so I was heartbreaking I just had my heart set on staying forever, and it wasn't to be.
Speaker 1:Wow, that must have been quite an experience forever and it wasn't to be.
Speaker 2:Wow. That must have been quite an experience. It was I learned. This is my claim to fame. I learned, living in zimbabwe how to siphons fuel out of my car which is really quite challenging actually, and if you do it wrong, you get a mouthful of fuel I know, I know I've done it.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly if you're african, you know what I'm talking about. I do know how to do these things. You know how to do these things, um yeah, so that's. Yeah, I had a full round education in zimbabwe. Let's put it that way, that's incredible.
Speaker 1:So you leave and you go on to do some other amazing things. You live in different parts of the world, you get married so exciting and then you start your foray into entrepreneurship. I'm itching to talk about Under Canvas, but I know that you did some business before that and I want you to talk to us a bit about the business you had in England and how you then came to move to the US.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I spent about eight years in total working for NGOs around the world, as I said, first in Zimbabwe and then in the Far East, and after about eight years I realized we weren't solving the root cause of any of the problems we were trying to address through the agencies that I worked for, and I really felt I was burned out. I was tired, was exhausted and frustrated that I personally wasn't making as much difference as I wanted to and I wasn't feeling like we were driving change in the way that I wanted to, which took me on a bit of a journey to explore new pathways. And I remember distinctly thinking at the time maybe the vehicle that I'm in is not the right vehicle which started me thinking about what would be the right vehicle for driving change and making a difference. If it's not this, what is it? And that started me on my path towards exploring social entrepreneurship and the idea of businesses being a vehicle for doing good and driving change. I knew nothing about running a business. I knew nothing about you know other than you were supposed to sell something and you were supposed to be able to make that thing cost less than you could sell it for and make some profit. That was as rudimentary as it was for me, because I had come from the nonprofit world, so making money had not been really on my radar at all and I even thought that making money was, was a dark side, it's evil and everything that was wrong with the world was about when it was at the fault of capitalism. And so it was quite a sort of a mind shift for me to start thinking about. Could business actually be a vehicle that does good? Could it help solve some of our big world problems? So I went and got a master's degree. I ended up writing a thesis on that very question could business be used as a vehicle for good? And yes, was my resounding answer.
Speaker 2:This was before the time of impact investing. It was before many of the things that are commonplace today in the way that we would think and talk about business did not. That language didn't exist then. But I remember thinking, if I do think this now, then we I probably should learn. We should learn how to go into business. I probably should try and figure out actually running a business and making things happen. So that sort of impetus. I had gone back to the UK, where I am from. I married my amazing American husband and we set out to try our hand at creating a social business, which was a fantastic little business and was going great guns until the great financial crash of 2007 and 8 rolled around and pretty much wiped out.
Speaker 2:So we had our first business adventure and we had our first business failure, all within a couple of years.
Speaker 1:Wow, so that business fails, and is that the reason why you moved to the US?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was the impetus actually where he lost everything. We had our first child. Well, actually I was expecting our first child and realized the business that we're doing now needs to fall again and off. We trotted to the US, my husband's from Montana. We moved to Montana and started over and started thinking, OK, what are we going to do now? And do we want to pursue another business? How are we going to move forward?
Speaker 1:So Sarah, just going back a little, what was it like? What do you feel like losing that business and what gives you the courage to try again?
Speaker 2:Maybe I'll answer the last question first, because I don't know that I would have called it courage at the time. I would have called it necessity. And so we had this dream of being able to do something meaningful in the world and be able to contribute to being pioneers and dream makers and making things happen, and at the same time, desperately needed to earn a living Right. And neither of us I had just had a baby and so we had a small child, and it just didn't feel right to think about OK, let's just go get a job. That felt almost worse than losing our business and losing what we've been doing. It felt like if we'd have said OK, now I've got to go get a job over, it's really over. Like the dream is over. Not just the business is over, but the dream is also over.
Speaker 2:I think in some ways the dream gave us courage, the necessity gave us courage, the dream gave us courage, the necessity gave us courage, and I have learned over my life that failure is not the end. Failure is often just the beginning of a new chapter and a new, and it very much depending on how you reframe it and depending on how you think about it, it can be a beautiful new beginning and every failure is learning right. We learned so much from that first business and so much about what works, what doesn't work, what works for us personally in figuring out our own roles, with working with each other, and it was a very painful and very expensive learning curve, but it was that it was a learning curve and at the time didn't feel like we had much choice other than to pick ourselves up. We had a new baby, so we got to get on and make something of ourselves here and make our lives work. That's what we did Wow.
Speaker 1:So you moved to Montana, and what was this next business idea?
Speaker 2:Yeah. My husband said, okay, that's, my parents have a farm and ranch in Montana. Let's go camp out with them and figure out how to earn a living off the land without farming. His parents were still farming and he just had this idea that there was some other way that we could earn a living from the land without doing what they were doing and could we take what we had left and what we had available to us, which, in our case, was family. So we had a roof over our heads and we had this land that they I had discovered in Africa, which was falling in love with these extraordinary big skies, huge wild empty spaces, lots of incredible wildlife and really extraordinary scenery. Is there something a synergy between these two places? And that I could connect the dots? And, of course, the safari experience was what helped could connect the dots and, of course, the safari experience was what helped me connect the dots and it sparked an idea which was could we recreate the safari experience like in Africa and bring something like that to the United States?
Speaker 2:So that sort of helped us initiate thinking about this, the idea of glamping and utilizing the farm and seeing if we could bring people out to stay there.
Speaker 1:I know that the business went through many iterations before it became what is today known as under canvas. So can you talk us through some of those iterations and how you had to pivot to finally become under canvas?
Speaker 2:Yes, we were, of course course, hoping that right out of the gate, our next business idea would be a slam dunk and that it would work really well and that we'd be able to earn a living and all would be well above the world. And nothing was farther from the truth, because we came up for the idea of recreating the safari experience and we created a very small camp on my husband's farm, family farm, hoped and prayed for the phone to ring, built great site, took great photos, waited for the people to come, and small amounts of people came, but not people in their droves. It was really difficult to make the business work with just not as much sort of traffic and as momentum as we were getting, and so we realized we were going to have to, we have to do something. It wasn't quite working like we were hoping, so pivot number one was transitioning to becoming event rental company.
Speaker 2:So we had amazing tents. Could we then take them around the country for people's weddings and family reunions and all those kind of things? So we took what we had built and said, okay, can we do something different with this? And then eventually, of course, said something different again and said, okay, now we've got this and can we do something different with this. So we ended up pivoting about three times before Under Canvas finally became the business model that ultimately we were able to scale and grow. So I think that means I think I had at least four failed businesses before under Canvas.
Speaker 1:Some people say pivoting is another word for failing forward. I've heard that expression.
Speaker 2:It is, but every time you pivot you make adjustments, and every time you make an adjustment it brings you, hopefully, closer to something that sticks and something that works, and this model that is going to take off.
Speaker 1:So tell us about Under Canvas. So what was this final winning idea?
Speaker 2:So we ended up creating tented hotels outside of national parks across America. Wow, and that's what Under Canvas is doing today. And so we started our first national park camp down in Yellowstone in Montana and created a very temporary, very small tented hotel and we hoped and prayed that people would. We had no idea whether people would pay to stay in a tent like they would to stay in a hotel and a regular hotel with regular walls and air conditioning and heating and all these good things. So it was a complete experiment, but it was one that captured the hearts of the American people and off we were to the races.
Speaker 1:So what was it like scaling and growing that business? Oh, it was exceptionally easy. What was it like scaling and growing that business?
Speaker 2:Oh, it was exceptionally easy. No, it was fraught. It was fraught with difficulty from beginning to end, because it's easy to imagine when you think, okay, I've finally done it, I finally found a business model that I think is the one that's going to work. I'm now on to something. I've thrown something at the wall and it's sticking.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, no business is profitable overnight and every business needs some form of capital injection to enable it to grow. You have to be able to put money into something to be able to make more money. That's a very sad reality, but it's true and we knew from our first season in yallastown. We put up 35 tents our first season in yallastown and we I we could have sold so much more. There was a lot of demand, so it was chaotic and the tents weren't engineered well enough to stand up through inclement weather and the business was very rudimentary, like light years away from where the company is today.
Speaker 2:But we just knew that we were onto something and we knew that we had a good idea and we knew that there was possibility here. There were, there was possibility here, and so the hard part then was like figuring out okay, how are we? How are we gonna? How are we gonna grow this? How are we gonna perfect this? How are we gonna make this business work? And for the longest time we bootstrapped the business. We plowed every bit, of every cent that we made in the business. We plowed it back into the business and we got several bank loans, which really helped us get going. But it meant we were living on a shoestring and it meant that we were very close to the wire a lot of the time, which was exceptionally stressful.
Speaker 1:So at what stage did you then become profitable?
Speaker 2:That first year, after putting 35 tents up and running the camp for the year I would define profitable, loosely but we ended that summer with about fifty thousand dollars in the bank.
Speaker 2:And so now I've got to get with fifty thousand dollars in the bank, I've got to get with $50,000 in the bank. I've got to get through from September all the way through till May the next year, and ideally we've got to pay people and we've got to pay for someone to live personally and we've got to grow, professionalize the business, grow the business. Technically, we had money at the end of that first year, but it certainly was not really enough to get us through to that next year. It was a challenging, it was a very challenging time, for sure. So what did scale then look like? Yeah, that's a great question, because it's easy to think when we think about scale and I have this conversation with entrepreneurs all the time it's easy to think okay, when I've got something, I have to perfect it and make it perfect and then scale it. And I did not do that. We immediately thought, oh, we're onto something, we should do more of this. And yes, we should put more tents up in Yellowstone and, yes, we should perfect the product in Yellowstone. But something in me I don't know whether it was just an instinct or feeling like gosh, we're onto something and if we don't do it, other people are going to do it. We started immediately thinking about how could we be in other locations, how could we do more sites. So we started looking for our second and third sites and thinking about where we might put another under campus.
Speaker 2:Next, which was crazy, because that first year there were six people employed in the business and my husband and I were two of them, which meant there were four of the seasonal people in the business with us. It wasn't a lot. And I remember saying to one of my staff members at the end of that first season he said to me are you going to do this again? Are you going to put these tents up again next year? And I said yeah, I am, and I'm going to do more.
Speaker 2:And he said more, more, like how many more? Thinking I was going to put 10 more tents up. And I said I think I'm going to do at least 50 more and I'm going to open another site. And he looked at me like I was absolutely crazy and he had no idea how I was going to pull that off. And I had no idea how I was going to pull that off, but I just had a sense of if we're going to do this, we've got to do this and we've got to be all in and we've got to think big and we've got to go for broke. So that's what.
Speaker 1:So how many years did you run under Canvas? Almost a decade, a full decade. So you then came to a point where you exited the business. Yes, talk to us about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we launched in 2009 and we sold the business at the very end of 2018. And I stayed on as CEO for one more year after that. So we spent the decade growing and scaling and professionalizing the business, and when we sold, I wasn't planning on selling. We were actually raising more capital to try and grow and continue to scale the business. An investment firm came along and said they would like to buy the business.
Speaker 1:So that's what happened. Did I read that there was someone else who tried to buy the business before that?
Speaker 2:You might have read that someone else had my idea for my business and they were out trying to raise funding for their business idea, which ultimately was the prompt that I needed to help me think about going out for venture capital.
Speaker 1:I see.
Speaker 2:And I don't know if that hadn't have happened, I don't know if we'd have built the company that we built. So a competitor coming into our space effectively was a catalyst for thinking about okay, we've got to go raise some money because otherwise we're going to get outspent and we're not going to be able to grow as fast. And I'm going to need to really think about how do I build a big business here?
Speaker 1:That's interesting because a lot of times especially, we're going to come to your Africa work but you now deal with women who are building businesses and a lot of times women are very reluctant to take in VC funding. So it's interesting that you found yourself in a similar place, but the thought of competition and what it could do to this big idea you had gave you the impetus to go for it.
Speaker 2:It did, because I realized I'm going to get left in the dust Like I've got a great idea, I'm already making it work, we're already doing several million dollars of revenue. But if someone comes along who's much better funded and takes my idea and can just do it a little bit better than me because they got more money than me, then my I'm going to go out of business. So it felt like an impetus to like no go, you've got to go big or go home and you can't afford I can't afford to play at this. That was really the instinct I had is I got to play with big boys.
Speaker 2:If I'm going to do this and if this business is going to last and we're going to build something of value and of significance and of impact, then we can't play it small and we can't think okay, I'll just keep going at the rate that my funds will allow me to grow. Because that was the critical thing I realized really was that I couldn't grow fast enough with just using the debt that I was able to raise and the profits that we were able to generate. We couldn't do enough quick enough. We couldn't grow fast enough. So that became a very significant catalyst for me thinking about. We've got to put money into this business and if I don't put money in, I might lose this business because I might get overtaken by a competitor.
Speaker 1:It's very interesting. So, sarah, after you sold Under Canvas, you made a major shift into VC, into the venture capital world. I thought it was interesting that, off the bat, you were specifically focused on female entrepreneurs in Africa. So what inspired this transition? I think two things.
Speaker 2:One was my experience of raising funding as a female founder was very difficult. I remember thinking at the time that I was maybe the only woman in the world that didn't know what range capital was and didn't know all the rules about how it all works and all the terms and all the sort of terminology, and I also remember feeling like it felt very hard for me as it felt like I didn't belong.
Speaker 2:I said at the beginning of this interview that when I first went to Zimbabwe I just felt like I utterly felt like I was didn't belong.
Speaker 2:I said at the beginning of this interview that when I first went to Zimbabwe I just felt like I utterly belonged and I was where I was supposed to be. And it felt like being a female founder trying to raise money in a man's world felt like I didn't belong and I felt like I wasn't speaking the right language, wasn't using the right words, I didn't really know how to play the game and there was a definite game being played and I just felt like I was an outsider. And so I had a sort of fairly harrowing journey over a couple of year period of trying to raise money and struggling to do that and then, when I was in the midst of doing it, discovered I was having to deal with people and their values and ways of doing business that I didn't like and did not sit well with me. I remember thinking to myself if I ever build something of value, if I ever managed to do anything of any significance with this business, invest in female entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:I'm going to be the investor that that I was looking for yeah and that I need, I wanted and I hoped that I was going to find so.
Speaker 2:When we ultimately did sell the business, we made good on that promise with the sense of we're going to invest in female entrepreneurs, and my sole home has always felt like it's been on the African continent.
Speaker 2:So when we looked at the venture space globally and even in the US, venture funds for women were few and far between. So we knew we wanted to do that, but we also knew that we thought we could make more of a difference. We felt like we could contribute. We felt like we could input into a community in a way that could be meaningful. And when we looked at how much venture capital was being deployed on the continent compared with what was being deployed in the US, we just felt every dollar we could contribute here could go so much further. So we decided we would make our way back to the continent as a family, no longer by myself, but come back to the continent that had inspired our business idea and I had fallen in love with 25 years earlier, and come back and build a life here for our own family and see if we could contribute in a meaningful way, this time through a for-profit vehicle rather than a non-profit vehicle.
Speaker 1:That's an incredible story. So what was it like transitioning the family to? So you're in South Africa now? Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2:It was more difficult than I'd anticipated and easier in some ways. Of course, we arrived just before the pandemic, just a few months before the pandemic.
Speaker 2:So the whole world went into complete shutdown. It wasn't necessarily a very easy transition, but I remember stepping off the plane and it was raining the night that we arrived and for those of you who know and love the continent, you'll know what I mean when I say. I stepped out of the airport and I could smell the rain. Of rain on rain on African soil for some reason just smells different here than it does anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 2:It does, it really does, and I don't know why that is, but I knew when I got here and I just could smell the rain that I was home. And we've been on the continent now for the last six years doing work here for the last six years.
Speaker 1:That's incredible. Just talking about choosing to invest on the continent, a lot of it was wanting to have impact, like you said, and having your impact go further. But a lot of times, foreign investors look at the continent as a high risk market and I just wonder you know, you've been there for quite a few years now how do you approach risk when it comes to deciding what companies to invest in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting because obviously every country on the continent has effectively a different risk profile. Its currencies behave differently, its economics behave differently. Easy to assume the continent is one country when it's not. Yes, or with very different economies and very different systems and governance and many things.
Speaker 2:And I think for me what I hadn't necessarily understood then but do understand now is africa is a bit like silicon valley, like the early days of Silicon Valley, like 50 years ago in the 80s and 90s, before the precom era, and the ecosystem is just young, and part of the risk of the continent is there's not enough capital in the system yet and we actually I think we actually de-risk the continent by pouring more money into the continent, by more money coming into the ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Part of what makes the US venture capital scene so valuable and so successful is just the sheer amount of money in the ecosystem that can allow for loss and can allow for big wins, and that's the venture model anyway. The venture model is you expect one in 10 to be doing fantastically well and the rest to do average and a handful to do to be nothing, and so you don't expect every business to be a win. You expect many to fail, but like one in 10 seeds to succeed, and the same is true. It's happening here on the continent. You know none of that is any different, but for some reason we just think the risk is so much greater here. Risk for venture is the risk for venture, and actually the more money and the more resources there are in the ecosystem, the more likely we are to see great success stories and the more likely we are to see great things happen on the continent.
Speaker 1:So you sell your company, you take part of that money to start this fund. Yes, so how do you close the knowledge gap as a fund manager? Because one thing to have the money is another thing to know how to properly execute and run the fund. So how did you close your knowledge gap?
Speaker 2:I closed my knowledge gap. The way I always close my knowledge gap, which is by doing I love it I do. You don't know how to run a business, right, so you just get on and do it and you make mistakes along the way, but you figure it out. It's not really any different than getting a very expensive Ivy League education right. You just you learn faster because you learn the hard way, and I seem to have a propensity to wanting to do everything the hard way. That's how I do that. We learn, we fail, we get back up again, we figure out. Oh no, we shouldn't have done it quite like that. Let's adjust and just like with growing under canvas. We've been very blessed by working with some very amazing, gracious founders who have helped us learn as much through on our journey as I hope we've been able to help them on theirs.
Speaker 1:So how many companies are in your portfolio today?
Speaker 2:We have invested in 14, 14 companies and what's the mix?
Speaker 1:I know that a lot of investments go into tech.
Speaker 2:Yeah we've definitely got a lot of tech too. We've got some consumer goods. We've got some e-commerce platforms. We've got some. Ai We've got some ed tech, okay, yeah, and fintech a whole mixture of things but the core thesis of our fund is that we have always backed female entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1:What industries do you think have the? I don't know if it's a fair question to ask, but I'll ask it anyway. Which industries do you think have the most potential? That's an easy question to answer. Okay, go on.
Speaker 2:There is potential in any direction that you look, because there's such a huge opportunity. There is such a funding gap and there is so much leapfrogging to be done on this continent in almost every direction. Obviously, historically there have been what is considered to be a hot investment and that's always true in venture, wherever you are. We go through fintech phases, and then we go through AI phases, and then health tech's really hot, and then something else is cryptos in or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:But my perspective, what's really fantastic for the continent is business solutions that solve big problems that affect millions of people. So if you have a business that is solving the problem that affects millions of people every single day, you've got something. And if you can build that solution so that you can easily reach millions of people every single day, marvelous, fantastic.
Speaker 1:So what criteria do you look at when you're deciding which business to back?
Speaker 2:We spend a lot of time developing our criteria in the early days, but one of the things I have quickly learned is that actually, the entrepreneur is infinitely more important than the business idea.
Speaker 2:So obviously, the business idea, as I just said, needs to be big enough, needs to have significant impact enough, but I would rather take an average idea that has scope, that could affect a lot of people, that's being executed by an outstanding entrepreneur, than a never-been-done-before, never-been-seen-before, never-created wild and wonderful idea by an average human, an outstanding entrepreneur, and never been done before, never been seen before, never created wild and wonderful idea by an average human.
Speaker 2:And so I am looking for spark, I'm looking for drivenness, I'm looking for, like obsession with solving a problem and a demonstration of ability to execute that you were convincing me through your past or through what you're doing right now, that you are the one. You are the one, you are the one to solve this particular small little problem over here that potentially affects millions of people, and that you are going to execute and make it happen. Because, at the end of the day, businesses are only as good as the people who execute them and make them happen. Because, at the end of the day, businesses are only as good as the people who execute them and make them happen. So that's the real nugget of goal for me is looking for great executors and hungry, determined people who aren't going to give up very easily because the entrepreneurial journey is very hard, but people who will find a way to keep getting back up even after they get knocked down.
Speaker 1:I wanted to ask you about advice for women who are trying to raise money, but I think that's a great place to bring in your book, because I think that's what it's all about. So you wrote this book Thinking Bigger a pitch deck formula for women who want to change the world. Let's start by what inspired you to write this book.
Speaker 2:It came about because of having spent so much time working with so many female entrepreneurs, and the more work I did and the more time I spent with female entrepreneurs, the more I realized the things I didn't know as a founder.
Speaker 2:most women don't know, and the rules of the game were not only not clear to me, they're not clear to most women, and I found myself constantly hearing pitches of women who were either thinking too small or too slow or not understanding what was going to be most important to me, to impress me as an investor. And I realized, gosh, I could put all this information down in one place and I tell my own story and my own struggle and my own learnings at the same time and hopefully simplify simplify all the core ideas through the pitch deck. A pitch deck is typically 10 pages of how you introduce your business to potential investors and how you tell us your story and how you hopefully attract people to invest in you. And that sparked an idea for me, which was could I help other women tell their stories? Could I help them understand what's not only supposed to be on that page?
Speaker 1:Could I help them understand what's not only supposed to be on that page, but how to think about building and scaling a business that could actually be investable? And that sparked the idea for telling the story and for trying to create language for what many of us are trying to do but don't necessarily know how to do it. There's a quote in your book it's earlier on where you say women need to not only be among those building wealth, but also become the ones distributing it. I had a conversation with another fund manager who has the same kind of thinking and I wonder are there mindset shifts that you feel women should have when it comes to pitching for funding?
Speaker 2:I often think there are so many, and I have tried to weave through the book as many mindsets as I possibly can for helping women understand hey, here's a paradigm shift that you might want to think about. But I think, going back to your earlier point, I think one of the most critical things for me was recognizing that it's just as I struggled with this that making money is a good thing for women to do, it's not a bad thing. And you don't like women. No bad thing happens when women have more money. Only bad thing happens when women have more money. Only good things happen when women have more money. And it's really important that we sit at table and have a voice and have influence. And how do you do that? Well, you typically have to have some economic gravitas to have a seat at the table right.
Speaker 2:So it's really important that women think about building wealth and being distributors of wealth and, of course, historically women have been good charitable givers. They've been historically less so at being wealth creators, and I want to see more women become wealth creators and wealth distributors, because I think when women sit at the table, we drive different outcomes. We drive different results and we are infinitely more likely to enable the change that many of us want to see.
Speaker 1:I like that. So what are two or three of the biggest takeaways you hope readers will gain from thinking bigger?
Speaker 2:I hope women will feel encouraged that they can. I hope they will not only just feel encouraged, but feel like they have the tools to show them, enable them to do it. I hope women will come away feeling more confident, believing in themselves and believing that if I can, they can too.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, but there's no rest, for Sarah is there Because you started a new venture. You started a new venture called Few and Far, and I saw it described as a net positive travel company. What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Yes, so we are building a new travel company because I really do love travel and trying to build this time a regenerative company so a company that's very existent is about creating impact and about trying to move the world forward. So we are developing large scale wilderness areas to restore them and rewild them, to sequest more carbon from them and create extraordinary eco lodging resorts to enable folks to have incredible experiences in the world.
Speaker 1:Where is this located, so?
Speaker 2:our first lodge is in a part of South Africa that is pretty much off the beaten map but is an extraordinary area of biodiversity and very critical habitat on so many levels, and it's in Limpopo in South Africa, in what we call the Forgotten Mountains, and we just opened, just before Christmas.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So what excites you most about this new chapter of your journey?
Speaker 2:I definitely love being in the ring. I definitely love the challenge and the adrenaline that it is to solve problems every day and try and make things happen. And I love the idea of being on a mission again to see if we can build a big business, see if we can do some good, see if we can drive some change and create a brand that will be here for many years to come.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I heard you say first lodge, so sounds like you're going to multiply this. Of course we're going to try. Yes, indeed, we certainly are Awesome. This has been so great. I wish you all the best, with few and far, and I hope that I can visit one day as well. We're looking forward to having you. That would be great. That would be great. So, in wrapping up, sarah, I normally ask my guests to do two things One is reflection and one is advice things One is reflection and one is advice. So, in terms of reflecting, this is an opportunity for you to pat yourself on the back. Just looking back at all that you've built over the last couple of years, what would you say is one, or maybe even two, of your proudest moments?
Speaker 2:I definitely think writing a book was something I had dreamed about since my early 20s and finally getting to see that come to life last year was really rewarding and really special. That is definitely right up there.
Speaker 1:In terms of advice. What advice would you give to other women who are building businesses or trying to scale businesses in Africa? I would definitely say think bigger.
Speaker 2:Don't be afraid to have crazy, wild dreams. Don't let anyone tell you, no, that you can't, because if you can dream it, you can build it. Dream big, think big. Don't let your own ceiling hold you back.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Sarah. So where can our listeners find your book and how can they connect with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, my book is on Amazon around the world. You can. The best way to connect with me is through my own website, sarahhdusickcom. There's an email on there, info at sarahhdusickcom, and you can reach out to me that way. That's probably the best.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thank you so much, sarah. This has been a great conversation. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much for listening. If you're not already subscribed, please do so on Apple, spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and don't forget to leave us a review so we know how we're doing. I'm Akego Okoye and you have been listening to African Business Stories.