The Underestimated - Issue 04
The Diversity X newsletter showcasing the underestimated founders making a positive impact in the world and keeping you up to date on the Diversity X journey.
What’s is coming up in this (bumper) issue?
📖 I Can’t Hear You
📚 The Meaning Behind Founder Flow™
💥 Big News
👏🏾 Introducing the team
📰 Monthly update on what has been going on with Diversity X
🤝 Partnership Announcement and focus
🔦Spotlight on 3 Diversity X Founders Community members (two startups)
📆Upcoming events and plans
I Can’t Hear You…..
Most funds are at an IRR of less than 15% when places like Kapor Capital have shown that they can get an IRR of up to 29% by making investments in a more diverse set of founders. So why isn’t everybody following suit? Why are people are choosing not to take that course of action, instead preferring to stick to the status quo of who gets funded, and then replicating that status quo in terms of the rate of failure and impact? These are some of the questions that were raised in this interesting interview. Take a read - but the crux of the issue that there are solutions to problems that are being ignored because the problems are just not going to be experienced by the current investor class.
The Meaning Behind Founder Flow™
In the last issue, I alluded to the term “founder flow”. So what does this mean?
Everyone talks about deal flow. Do you have deal flow? Where will you find your deal flow? The simple answer is that we do not have “deal” flow. We have Founder Flow™.
As we work towards building a fund, our focus is on underEstimated Founders and their great ideas that will have a positive impact on the world. With that in mind, we will be backing people, and not, “deals”. Our growing community has plenty of investable founders. So why dehumanise them by referring to them a “deals”. We will not as it is the the Diversity X way.
Big News
We did not want this to get lost in the monthly news roundup as this isa significant step forward in the Diversity X journey.
On 27th May, we announced that we have acquired and merged with SuperPitch. This is a win-win-win situation for Diversity X, SuperPitch, and our combined community of founders. With aligned purposes and the combination of Diversity X’s drive to deliver more and more founder education and support, and now being able to utilise the SuperPitch platform, community, and investor network, we believe this is a tie up will benefit our combined communities of underestimated founders and investors alike. Our mission is to build the world’s biggest active community of underestimated founders, and create opportunities to access capital (which we know is not there in any real level of sufficiency).
I’d like to take this opportunity to again thank Joyeeta Das, co-founder of SuperPitch for entrusting the continuation of her mission to Diversity X. We fully intend to deliver of her vision and the hard work of the entire SuperPitch team and supporters.
Introducing the Team
We have our first employee! I am pleased, honoured, and excited to share that Ilaria Vilkelis agreed to join Diversity X as a Partner with a primary focus on founder support and development. Please join me in welcoming Ilaria to the Diversity X family and wishing her the success.
But the fun does not stop there….we also have formally confirmed that Joyeeta Das will be our first Advisor on the Advisory Board we are building. Joyeeta brings a wealth of experience from the ecosystem (both operator and investor side) and I feel this is a major coup to have her advising me and Diversity X. Thank you for your faith in us and our mission.
News from the Diversity X journey
Highlights over the last month
💥 Our Founder’s Community is growing - 93 (at last newsletter issue date) → 157 today! This will continue to rise, both from the onboarding from SuperPitch and organically.
💥Spoke 29 new founders
💥 Diversity X 100 Second Pitch Event - we had a well attended first virtual pitch event where 9 founders from Cohort 1 of the Pitch Dojo pitched their startups to investors. We had two judges in Joyeeta Das and Gautam Kumar who provided valuable feedback and interesting questions. Well done to all nine.
💥We have been given to opportunity to have a pod in Elevating Founders at London Tech Week (see events).
💥 304 views of the issue 3 of this newsletter (down by 53 from issue 2) and 150 subscribers (to date).
💥Working on the Diversity X Advisory Board. If you are interested in playing a real part in the Diversity X journey, email kevin@diversityx.vc.
💥Organised (thank Karishma Gupta) our first in-person social event - takes place in London on 15th June.
💥 In preliminary talks with a top UK university about how Diversity X can support the founders in their programs.
💥 Thank you to everyone who has supported the journey so far.
Partnership Announcement
Meet ClearCo
Kevin is now a Venture Scout for ClearCo.
ClearCo is on a mission to level the playing field of investing by empowering you to multiply your impact by identifying and funding under-represented founders in the communities that matter most to you.
If you are in eCom or D2C - and in need of funding - let's talk, click this link: https://clear.co/scouts/Kevin-Withane/
Meet the Underestimated
Rachael Twumasi-Corson - Afrocenchix
The Founder:
At 19 Rachael co-founded Afrocenchix. She’s spoken at hundreds of community organisations, schools and universities, as well as global organisations including: Google; Facebook; UCL; Brunel; the University of Birmingham; and Jamelia's Table; and appeared on London Live & the BBC. As a public speaker, Rachael is best known for her winning pitch to celebrity judges including P. Diddy, Gary Vee, Vanessa Kingori (publishing director at British Vogue) and Ashton Kutcher at the WeWork Creator awards, two days before giving birth.
After a successful Pre Seed Round in 2019, Afrocenchix was backed by Google in a $1.2m seed round and named one of the "hottest Black-led startups in Europe,”. They’ve also attracted the investment of angels (including WeTransfer founder, Nalden) and VCs (including Backed VC, Cornerstone Partners and lead investors, Impact X) to their safe, effective, ethical solutions.
The Startup:
Afrocenchix is a multi award-winning, ethical and sustainable hair care company. They blend premium quality organic and fairtrade ingredients into safe, effective, vegan products for afro and curly hair. Afrocenchix is backed by Google, and they were the first brand of their kind to be stocked in Superdrug, Whole Foods UK and Holland & Barrett. They’re loved by tens of thousands of customers worldwide, and the Afrocenchix blog is read by over a million visitors each year.
How can you help Afrocenchix? They are currently raising a round via Seedrs - so go check them out and support.
Ayo Diso and Kunle Campbell- Octillion Capital Partners
The Founders:
Ayo Diso
Ayo is recognised as an emerging leader in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Through his affiliate alumni membership at the Centre for Innovation Management Research UK, Ayo’s work contributes to research and teaching at The Birkbeck Centre for Innovation Management.
Ayo successes range from working on the investment team at a $200M private equity fund where he was exposed to buy-side processes and covered sectors such as FMCG, TMT, and financial services to process codification and leading digital transformation change for the non-profit arm of a $500M family office.
In his capacity as co-founder of Octillion, Ayo serves through a determined concentration on a clear acquisition process, inclusive governance, improving processes, and steering the growth of all areas of the business.
He is considered a servant leader who keeps people at the heart of the organisation and believes that diverse people and products are key drivers of business performance.
Kunle
Kunle is an eCommerce Growth Expert and one of the rising marketing and operational talents in eCommerce. He is incredibly passionate about all thing’s eCommerce and brand growth. For over a decade, Kunle has been showing businesses how to surf the tides of commercial trends and create opportunities for scale.
Having worked with global businesses such as Alibaba.com, Mastercard, BigCommerce and many more, he is deeply inspired by entrepreneurship and how eCommerce can add value to the world.
As host of the popular eCommerce podcast: 2X eCommerce, Kunle has gained and shared insights on the macro trends of markets since 2014 and has reached thousands of listeners over 300 episodes on his show.
In his capacity as co-founder of Octillion, Kunle is considered an ethical visionary, sharply focused on driving business innovation and brand growth that is specially engineered to scale businesses as sustainably as possible.
The Startup:
Octillion is a value driven digital native brand platform and holding company, acquiring, operating, and growing an ecosystem of inclusive and sustainable brands in the health, beauty, food, and beverage industries.
In the life of the business, Octillion are on a mission to acquire 20-25 already profitable diamond in the rough’ commerce brands in the health, beauty, food and beverage verticals from minority and non-minority commerce founders with a view of transforming and improving their operational efficiencies with a sustainable, inclusive, and omni-channel expansion approach that will ultimately turn our brands into profitable, culture defining and multi-cultural brands.
💥What can you do to support this startup? They are looking for immediate funding with the option of also supporting on their initial acquisition as a proof of concept.
They are under a 40-day LOI for an acquisition of a sustainable UK based consumer brand in the food and beverage space (clean coffee and food supplement).
This brand currently sells primarily on Amazon UK, with a strong 35% retention rate and 55% EBIDTA growth rate.
For more info please email kevin@diversityx.vc.
Upcoming Events
London Tech Week - 13th June - 17th June 2022. We will have a pod in the Elevating Founders area on 13th and 14th June. Please stop by for a chat to learn more about our community and how we intend to increase opportunities to access capital. We’d love to meet as many underestimated founders and investors as we possibly can.
What’s more - we wanted to use this opportunity to showcase some of the wonderful and talented founders and their startups in the community. So we will be hosting the Diversity X Founders’ Pod Takeover.
London social - 15th June.
And that’s a wrap for this month….
Reach out with any questions to kevin@diversityx.vc
INVESTORS - let’s chat.
Underestimated Founders - come join a community that is welcoming and a safe space.
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