Who we are
n+1 = the number of profitable companies South Africa needs*,
where n is the current number.
*The same applies to empowered, thriving employed humans.
n plus 1 is born from the belief that South Africa needs and deserves a better ecosystem of support for starting businesses.
We live in the world's most economically unequal country, which despite its obvious hurdles is still full of people working hard, trying to make things happen, learning, innovating, and trying to build better lives for their families and futures.
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We've all seen the first page of most business management text books that shows the business lifecycle, and tells the would be founder that the first capital comes from "savings" or "friends and family". And (most of us) acknowledge that South Africa's wealth gap is gargantuan, with roughly 90% of the population not having any economic wealth (assets that generate income or could be collateral).
So by going the traditional route we very rapidly have come to dead-end for creating new enterprises that allow for more generation of wealth, more job creation, more skills development, and general economic growth.
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We believe that the structures around how and by whom South African enterprises can start, grow, and thrive, can and should be improved to fit our unique needs and opportunities.
The Founding Team
Mitch and Matt share near unbound optimism in the human capital in South Africa, along with the belief that enabling economic inclusion is necessary for the future of our nation. Similarly, both firmly believe that capitalist structures will most effectively enable growth, making the building of new ventures from grass roots based on human upskilling and empowerment, a commercially sound place for investment of time and money.
These shared ideas lead to the question and strategy development that starts with a simple challenge and mission: What is the best way to tackle the gap in support and capital, to enable us to start 100 businesses?
The Kindred Spirits & Partners
Venture Building Ethos
Our intents, culture, ethos
Founders First
The company that we’re partnering to build (the PlusCo) is our customer and our
product. Everything we do must be lead by the drive to make these companies
better, more sustainable, more valuable to founder and their families, n plus 1,
remote partners, and investors.
Nobody has all the experience and skills
We don’t expect founders, our partners, or ourselves to be experts at every facet of
venture building. This is why we need to support founders with these skills, ensure
they’re good at what they do, and empowered to do it really well.
High touch
The biggest factor of success or failure will be high touch, quick adjustment and
implementation from our full ecosystem of skills and services. We believe that
having enterprise level expertise applied to Year 1 – SMEs can radically mitigate the
risk of seed investment, and fuel massive fires of growth that exist in driven
founders.
Thrive not survive
Small businesses and their owners are often constantly in survival mode –
wondering how to make payroll and how to put food on their own tables. This
generally removes the possibility of great long term strategy and decision making,
and makes exiting to take mid-level, zero-growth employment often more
attractive, or the only way to provide for families.
We believe that both the humans and the business itself must have basic needs met
to grow from a solid foundation with clear direction.
Build!
We as the venture partner are trying to pioneer something of a new category. We
know there’ll be errors and failures along the way, but we, our service partners, and
our PlusCos are all here to create better ways, build better processes, tools and
relationships. As we practice this daily, we’ll all be pleasantly surprised at how the
room for new challenges, pitfalls or business failures will diminish.
Leverage
Put the big work in early, create foundations and future-proofing at a level higher
than what you expect is needed. These foundations are what create exponential
growth later.
Our Why (and a bit more what and how)
We know that aiming to make money, create impact, and grow a platform starting with pre-seed businesses at investments of R300 000 and up is pretty far from the tried and tested norm.
Much of what we do with our founder-partner is about sharing tons of hard-earned experience in building business, but what we’re trying to do in unlocking attractive capital investments into the gaping wealth gap or the “missing middle” is contrarian as hell.
So why are we on that mission, why don’t we make our lives easier, what’s our own reward, and what do we need solving for?
Why are we on this mission?
Our purpose from day 1 has been around starting new businesses. When we embarked on the
journey we believed this was about the funding gap, but going into research, experience, modelling,
and founder conversations – we quickly adjust to the firm understanding that better business
systems and foundations are needed more than funding. Funding is just one (equally integral) part of starting business.
Its commonly spoken about, but seldom truly grasped that South Africa has the widest income gap in the world. Possibly more important, our wealth gap is even wider than the income gap [How many people hold productive assets that generate income, as opposed to how much the top end of income vs the other end of the spectrum takes home monthly.
Depending on which set of stats you believe – 93% of South Africa’s wealth is held by 10% of the
population. Yet every business textbook out there starts off explaining the “business lifecycle” in
which the founder “raises money from friends & family” to cover seed costs and some product development. Nobody needs a degree in stats or economics to figure out that we’ve basically
excluded 55 million people from the ability to take their trade, or a market opportunity, need, or
dream into becoming a new business that serves their community and hires more people.
Hence the question being “How can we bring the necessary capital and skills in early, to start new
business, not just to grow existing ones”?
Why don’t we make our lives easier with tested businesses and second time founders?
On the same thread as the why above – it is very easily (and very often) raised that risking our efforts at a later stage would yield easier results, and be able to attract capital and partners more easily.
This is exactly why we have a lot of venture capital available at similar stages and sizes in the market. [We’re not against this at all, it serves a great place in expanding business]. We believe the
the biggest impact comes from adding more businesses to the economy, each with its own engines and momentum, each able to serve different needs and hire different people, and notably each creating a wider distribution of new equity and wealth.
WHY MORE DISTINCT BUSINESSES OVER SCALING EXISTING BUSINESSES?
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Scale Existing Businesses
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Minimal wealth redistribution
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More black ownership, not more people involved in ownership
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Concentrated on urban tech
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Concentration of efforts
Starting New Businesses
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More distributed wealth & growth
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More New Black Economic
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Participation
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More impact on forgotten regions and
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people
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More shots at changing the world
What’s our reward?
We’re of the belief that incentivized business growth creates more widespread and long term
change and impact than charity can. We believe that exponential growth can only come where
entities are strongly commercially sustainable.
We also believe that your earnings in life are pretty directly correlated to the size of the problem you
solve.
So we’re unabashedly out to build earnings and wealth for ourselves and our families futures hand-
in-hand with those of our founder partners.
We take founding equity (generally around 26% as a baseline) and show up hard for our PlusCos, in
the firm rooted understanding that great structures and big effort early on creates space for
excellent returns later.
As it happens – the stimulation of dealing with different businesses, networks and strategy every day
is very engaging work. Oh, walking the coaching journey to see founders grow their ability, earnings,
healthy lifestyles and own wealth is super rewarding too ��
How do we assess founders and businesses?
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Kindred spirits
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Core skills that can be demonstrated and add value
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Predictable, short term simple businesses (we’re here to start companies and change lives,not to challenge Tesla… yet)
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Coachable, engaging humans that we like.
How do we measure our own outputs?
Our Impact Scorecard is the headline of our roadmap.
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Did a business start of become sustainable where it wasn’t?
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Are more people living well?
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Are more people skilled in some way?
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Are the more people who own any small part of a profitable business?
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Did the GDP increase by any number of rands?
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Are we making our own platform attractive to more investment based on support and early intervention?
If those things are happening we’re on the right track, at any level.