Ep #01: Bridging U.S. Capital and African Entrepreneurship
Have you ever wondered about the potential of startup investing in emerging markets? In the inaugural episode of Next Frontier, we invite listeners on a journey into this vibrant and challenging field, and set the stage for a series that promises to delve deep into the nuances of venture capital and startup ecosystems across different geographies.
Listen in as we dive into the unique challenges and opportunities that arise when connecting U.S. capital with African entrepreneurship, sharing our personal experiences and insights. You’ll learn about the critical role of understanding diverse market dynamics, as well as the importance of effective funding mechanisms in nurturing the entrepreneurial spirit in Africa. Don’t miss discovering the untapped potential of this vibrant continent.
Listen to the Full Episode:
What You'll Learn In Today's Episode:
Insights into effective startup strategies.
The journey into venture capitalism and the startup world.
Why it’s crucial to understand the challenges in emerging markets.
The role of funding in nurturing talent.
Why we must adapt to market needs.
The value of learning from both successes and failures in the entrepreneurial journey.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
"It's not about the talent or people in Africa; it's about funding." - Brian Kearney
"Understanding your market is crucial before starting a business." - Brian Kearney
"Learning from failures is a huge part of being successful." - Brian Kearney
Resources In Today's Episode:
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Episode Transcript
Brian Kearney: But I remember him talking about meeting with a VC in Silicon Valley and the VC blatantly actually said, “Well, I don't think there's enough people who can actually do AI in Africa. Why would I invest?” And I'm just like, it just blew my mind. I'm like, wait a second, that is so ignorant and it shows a lack of any experience really ‘cause the problem isn't talent or people at all, it's funding.
Nicole Dunn: Welcome to the Next Frontier. I'm Nicole Dunn, co-founder and COO at a venture-backed African startup. I'm a VC investor turned startup operator, passionate about unlocking untapped entrepreneurial potential in Africa.
Brian Kearney: And I am Brian Kearney, a three-time entrepreneur, nonprofit founder, and angel investor based in the U.S. I am excited about connecting capital to entrepreneurs solving the world's toughest problems.
Nicole Dunn: Join us as we change the narrative on startup investing in emerging markets and help bring the yearly African VC inflows to 20 billion dollars. So to kick off this podcast series, I'm going to be interviewing co-founder and co-host at Next Frontier, Brian Kearney. Brian's an account executive at Koyfin, an investment platform for financial data and analytics, co-founder at Podcasting Pro, father of two, one very recent, and has a fascinating career history that ranges from cyber at the Air National Guard to building a primary school in Uganda. Brian, it's great to have you on the show.
Brian Kearney: Hey, great to be on the show, and great to kind of kick off building this company and this podcast with you. I'm excited to dive in.
Nicole Dunn: Yeah, likewise. I remember when we first met, I said it wasn't obvious from your LinkedIn profile that you were so actively involved in the VC and startup ecosystem. But as it turns out, you've got a really long history of starting and building businesses. So what was the first business that you ever built?
Brian Kearney: Yeah. So the first actual business is a little bit different than my first side hustle if that makes sense. So my first side hustle when I started learning sales and bringing in money, all of that was actually when I was really little, and I only found out about this later. My parents had a picture that they showed me, but our town had garage sale days when I was five. And there's a picture of me holding a little sign that says “Toys, Toys, Toys”. And then I'm selling all my toys to anyone who wants to buy them so I can make some extra money.
So that was when I started to learn that you could actually make money on your own. But my first business, like proper business, was actually a rosary manufacturing company. Rosary is like a Catholic prayer item. I found out that my parents wouldn't really be able to help a whole lot financially for college, and I didn't know exactly what to do, but I knew I wouldn't be able to pay for a good university working 8 dollars and 75 cents an hour here in the U.S. minimum wage. It just wasn't going to happen. So I dove into rosary making, which is kind of weird and unique, but it worked out. I had pretty high margins, was able to pay my way through college, sold that after college, and have been obsessed with building businesses ever since.
Nicole Dunn: That's super interesting. So it sounds like your first foray into entrepreneurship is more motivated by need. Maybe there's this aspiration to go to college. It's not something that you can immediately afford by virtue of a trust fund or your parents' savings. So was it more, you know, there's this problem I've got to figure out and you kind of stumble into entrepreneurship as your kind of career pattern, or is it obvious to you quite early in your life that entrepreneurship is something that you see being your career going forward?
Brian Kearney: No, that's a great question. I definitely stumbled into entrepreneurship. I would say, based on the need. Yeah, both of my parents hadn't gone to college. There wasn't a whole lot of money to go around. I was the last of seven. I actually went to school and went to college planning on going to law school.
And then when I was in like the pre-law club, I started looking up what most lawyers actually made here in the States. I'm like, “Wait a minute so I won't make much more than I would make right out of college anyways, but I have to pay another 120 grand for school? And I don't even really like school. This isn't going to work.”
So then I went into finance and then entrepreneurship. So even then it’s kind of pushing back against being an entrepreneur in a way. I wanted to work at a Fortune 500 financial services company. So yeah, I guess I did kind of fall into it. That's a great question.
Nicole Dunn: Okay. So you build a company, you go to college, you dabble with the idea of law school, you end up going into finance. What was your thinking at the time? And were you a good employee?
Brian Kearney: I don't know that I had much thinking at the time besides I knew I could get paid pretty well. That was pretty much it. I had a drive and desire to really be able to financially provide for my family where we had a comfortable life in the future.
Was I a good employee? No, I was a horrible employee. Within three months, I was pretty much jaded with the organization. It's in finance, so I was a financial advisor. I was managing money for people's retirement and the company has a small investment banking division. Most of it was not investment banking, but I was able to find a local school that was trying to raise bonds for building a new school.
And here in the States, like now, our overall national credit rating has been downgraded past few months, but back then the state I'm in has a really low credit, like really, it's really bad. Like we're barely above junk bond status actually. And I was able to find like AAA school bonds and I'm like, “Hey, look, they want 7 million dollars of bonds. Let's do this.” And they're like, “No, no, no. We don't do that.” It's free money. Why don't we do that? Like that makes no sense to me. And I couldn't mesh with large organizations where if there's a way that you can provide a really good service to your clientele and you make really good money, why would you not do it? It just made no sense to me. And there was another time when–it was when Amazon Echo was just coming out and I'm like, “Hey, we should do some Echo alerts. Be the first financial services company doing alerts for stock prices. We say sponsored by–” And they're like, “No, no, no. We don't do that.”
Oops. I probably shouldn't have said their name, now that I think about it. We might need to bleep that out, but like, again, “Why don't we do this?” It's the perfect, really cheap marketing channel. We don't even have to really pay for it. We just have to get it produced. So yeah, all that to save long answer to no, I'm a terrible employee.
Nicole Dunn: It's a common story, isn't it? Where someone's got this kind of entrepreneurial intent and they're working inside a larger, more established organization and they're coming up against this abrasion of red tape or that's not how we do things here. I mean, do you think that is a sign to someone that they're an entrepreneur? Are all entrepreneurs, bad employees?
Brian Kearney: I think most of them probably are. I think that is a pretty good sign. If you're butting up against the red tape and the bureaucracy in the company you're in, and you have a drive to build something and serve clients, and you just can't understand what bureaucracy would get in the way of serving clients, you would probably be either a good founder or a good early stage employee.
So I found it really early-stage companies, I'm a great employee because I don't ask permission, I just kind of do it. And typically the founders want early employees like that ‘cause they don't have time to manage everything. They're like, “Hey, I hired you just take care of it.” And that works really well in small firms, does not work well in large firms. So yeah, I would say that's pretty good sign that you should be in the startup world in some way.
Nicole Dunn: Yeah. Great piece of advice there. I think for people who are finding themselves constantly frustrated with the environment around them. So you're at this firm, you're butting heads with people, you're getting frustrated, what's that moment when you go, “Okay, enough. I'm going to go back into the startup scene.”
Brian Kearney: I think that that bond situation was the moment where I'm like, I can't do this anymore. I have to find a company that will allow me to be creative in how we're doing things. I started looking at local venture capitalists in my area, and I thought, you know, if they're a local VC firm, I probably have a better chance of getting a job at their company.
So I'll look at their portfolio companies, see if any of them are hiring. And I reached out to one. They weren't really hiring, but I got in contact with the founder. And we hit it off, just kind of chatted for a while, and then eventually he did bring me into the company as the outside salesperson. And it was like a farmland leasing company is the best way to put it.
And that was awesome. I had like my first taste of the venture-backed startup world, which is different than bootstrap startups and they both have their pros and cons, sure, but the venture-backed world, there's just so much adrenaline and camaraderie with building something that might crumble in 6 to 9 months that it's just, it's fun. It's not for everyone, but it's a lot of fun. And that's kind of what really got me started on the path.
Nicole Dunn: For sure, and that kicks off then a whole series of entrepreneurial endeavors, but I'm curious, what were some of those early failures or lessons from either building the business, the rosary business before college, or this first venture-backed startup experience that really shaped your approach to building businesses today?
Brian Kearney: Yeah, I would say I had two early lessons that really helped. The one in my rosary company was actually not understanding how big the market was, which sounds weird because you wouldn't, again, you wouldn't think it's a big market for handmade rosaries, but I just never really reinvested into the company.
I just kind of took out the profit and I built it to pay for college so I kind of needed to in a way, but I kind of sold my company for scraps and a competitor that started a little bit after me and like took all of my ideas is now worth like millions of dollars, which still kind of blows my mind. I'm still not quite sure how they are.
I would say that was my first lesson is to make sure you're reinvesting and that you actually understand your market. If you don't understand your market, you probably shouldn't start that business. And then the second one is funding is really important. The first company I was in had a kind of mass layoff when COVID hit, and I was one of the people laid off. It worked out. The founder was great. He had a soft landing for me in a really lucrative position somewhere else that actually didn't take, but we're still on good terms, but I learned a lot from ensuring that funding is good and that you're taking money from the right people.
And this is not from the founder, if any of the VCs that invested in that company listen, but the VCs pushed when they shouldn't have and it kind of tanked that company. It really did destroy that business. Now they've pivoted. They're doing something different software that's awesome. They're doing well, but their original idea still needs to be done, but the VCs had them pushed too early and the market just despised the company. And once we didn't have money coming in, we crumbled within weeks. So I would say that that was something I learned that I'm going to be very careful of in the future for any startups that I do work in or build.
Nicole Dunn: I think that's super interesting. And I'd love to come back to that, this kind of tension that exists between VCs and founders. And it's, you know, this necessary evil that exists, but it was really difficult to navigate kind of in any market and in any stage. But I want to just quickly give some airtime to something that happens at the same time in this kind of chapter of your life, which is you co-found an NPO focused on education services in Uganda. That feels like a material departure from U.S. finance funds. How does that happen?
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that's a great question. So I actually spent, when I was 17, about two months teaching in Uganda on my own. I didn't go with a group or a foundation. I just went to teach at a school, which was really formative. It was pretty, pretty far from the capitol, about nine-hour drive, pretty deep in the bush, so it was a good experience, but what I saw when I was there really honestly kind of pissed me off that the, particularly here in the U.S., we're a very generous country. We give a lot of money more than–well, part of it's we have more money than any country in history, but more than any country in history and a percentage way more, but it's so ineffective. When I was there, I saw like used shoes that cost more than new shoes in the U.S. It blows my mind. So I knew that there had to be–I knew that something was broken in the system, but I didn't really know what it was.
But when I was teaching at that school and I saw the lack of resources they had and the drive that the teachers had to still be able to provide the best education they could, I knew when I came back I had to do something. And when I came back, we did some small fundraisings. This is also when I was like 17, 18, but I got a few people to volunteer their time to like incorporate like a lawyer from a local insurance company filed all the paperwork for us, an accountant from that insurance company was the treasurer. And then we really invested in building a top-tier primary school with things like busing so that students didn't have to walk six miles to a class, with highly-paid teachers, with good food because I saw that as the best way that people here could be donating. Education is something that can't really be misused. If you're investing in education that's just going to help people better themselves rather than kind of coming in and saying like, “We're going to better you.” So, yeah, that's kind of why I started that.
Nicole Dunn: Amazing. And how does that experience kind of shift your priorities going forward, if at all?
Brian Kearney: Well, when I was there, I knew that I was going to be doing more in Africa in the future. I had no idea what it would be. When I got into this venture capital world and the startup world, I thought like, hey, I had a podcast before where I interviewed a few founders and I remember it was just very clearly when I realized that I had to kind of take a step back and I had to pivot and build something different than what I was thinking.
And it was a founder who's awesome. He's building a really cool AI company that basically he's having people across Africa train the LLMs with pretty good paying jobs in areas where they might not be able to have it. It's super cool. But I remember him talking about meeting with a VC in Silicon Valley and the VC blatantly actually said, “Well, I don't think there's enough people who can actually do AI in Africa. Why would I invest?” And I'm just like, it just blew my mind. I'm like, “Wait a second. That is so ignorant and it shows a lack of any experience really ‘cause the problem isn't talent or people at all, it's funding.” So I knew I needed to find some way to help in the funding sphere to shine more light on that so some of these bigger firms see, I don't know if that exactly answers your question, but that's kind of where my train of thought went.
Nicole Dunn: No, it's a great segue to why are we sitting here today. Why start Next Frontier? Why go on this journey together?
Brian Kearney: Yeah, well, I can't take any credit for the name. That was all you. So that's why we have the Next Frontier name. My idea with it was that I think it is vital that a company like this and a podcast like this has people both in the U.S. and based in Africa. It's not going to work well without it. The U.S. venture industry is just so well established and set up that it's important to have some people from that industry involved, but it won't work if I'm just doing it on my own was kind of why I took that step back when I had that first podcast, and I had my first kid, so I didn't have a lot of time, but I realized that I needed someone that knew more about the industry ‘cause I didn't know what I didn't know. When he said that I was blown away. I'm like, well, I just, I don't even, I guess I quite understand what the relationship looks like between U.S. VC and African startups and founders and I needed a partner who did.
The reason I thought you might be a good partner for that is I saw when you moved from being in VC to working in a startup and that doesn't happen. No one does that ever because VC isn't easier, but it's very prestigious and you get more kind of pitches, you get more times at bat to use an American baseball metaphor, and it's really lucrative so people don't really leave. And when I talked to you kind of about why you left, you said, “I just didn't feel like I knew enough to help my founders as much as I would like to, like I was beneficial, but I need the experience,” that was something, again, that's pretty unique and that's something that I think a company like this needs. So that's kind of how that develops.
Nicole Dunn: Yeah, well, we're talking way too much about me, which is a spoiler for the next episode, but I think it's amazing. And I think what we're trying to achieve here in bridging that gap between, as you say, well-established U.S. venture ecosystem where for the foreseeable future, capital is going to reside with this really frontier kind of market in Africa, where there's immense talent and opportunity, as you say, but there's just such a chasm in the information and understanding on both sides. And if we can find a way to better educate on the market on behalf of founders because that takes up an incredible amount of time as an African entrepreneur, but also helping to better understand how VCs view the world, operate, why they ask the questions they ask, the kind of risks that they're perceiving, and helping to shine a light on that. Hopefully, that can catalyze more capital towards an ecosystem that really needs and deserves it, as you say. I'm really curious as something I've been meaning to ask you for a while, you have this amazing talent where you never seem to be working on one thing. So you now have a podcasting company, you're starting this project with me, you have a full-time job at a startup in sales, which is very high pressure, high pace. How do you manage your time and energy between all these different things?
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's that the things that I'm doing on the side give me energy. They don't drain my energy. So I try to focus on just the parts that are, yeah, I guess that's the best way to put energizing to me.
And it doesn't mean you don't have to do the parts that kind of drain you like in my day job. There's a lot of spreadsheet, work and spreadsheets just drain my energy. I'd rather just be talking to people and kind of working on sales copy and things like that gives me energy, but it's also just being really structured.
So I get up early, I wake up at five. I have my very set morning routine. I get to work by seven. I usually work ‘til five then I might do some work again later in the night after my kids go to bed. So it's just very structured. And then I have like my bullet journal here. So I track out every 30 minutes. Oops. I have a tracker of long-term goals. I'm trying to do like growth. I kind of break it down between three things: growth, which is, you know, like health, fitness, mental health, that type. My day job, and then my second like projects, which is the podcasting company and now this, so that's how I break it down.
So I'm doing something every day for each of them. And then they're all moving forward even if I'm only spending 45 minutes on my side hustles, that's still 45 minutes every single day, which adds up much more than doing five hours here and then nothing and then two hours and then nothing.
Yeah, I think I learned that from sales because sales, like you said, is kind of high pressure, and if you don't only focus on what you can do, then it's going to drive you insane. Like you can't force the person to say yes, you can't force them to purchase your product. You can only do what you can do so you can do all the actions that will put them in the right place and then it's up to them. So yeah, that's how I manage my time and caffeine, lots of caffeine, an energy drink.
Nicole Dunn: I love that. And I think it's this kind of idea that just like money in your bank compounds with compound interest, these kinds of small investments of time have the same effect and it's not this Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000-hour undertaking like actually to move things forward and to get to a point where things are pretty good, doesn't take huge investments of time and lowing that kind of barrier to entry might mean that a whole lot more people started things that are really valuable and that they're super passionate about.
Brian Kearney: That's an awesome way to put it. That's very true. It's just like investing actually. You're right. It's investing in your skills and your time. That's a great way to put it.
Nicole Dunn: Something that I've heard\ recently in VC is this kind of paradigm of VC is about being both contrarian and right. I'm curious, are there certain beliefs that you have that are top of mind where you think these are both contrarian and right that you would want to share?
Brian Kearney: Yes. My biggest belief in the startup world is that, well, I have a lot of contrarian views, but the biggest one is that sales and marketing should not be separate or like separate departments. I think it's so dumb that they are separate departments because they traditionally fight a lot. Salespeople will say like, “Oh, we don't need marketing” and marketing will be like, “Oh, we don't need salespeople. They're just convincing people after we've already convinced them,” and sales is like, “What does marketing actually do? They work 10 hours a week,” and neither is true. Both are pushing towards building the product.
Both have to have both skills, if that makes sense. So you have to have salespeople who understand marketing and marketers who understand sales. And I almost think, and this kind of flies in the face of how Salesforce built their company, which is just an incredible company, how HubSpot built their company, but I think that there shouldn't be separate roles for sales and marketing.
I think the salespeople should also be doing all of the email marketing because it's right in their wheelhouse, pay-per-click, that's a little different. They probably should never touch that to be honest, but marketing as well should be jumping on sales calls because they don't always actually have face time with the customers, the salespeople have the most face time and they need to be part of crafting that sales copy.
I've never seen a company where that's really the case, except actually the one I'm working at now. They pretty much have that, which is kind of cool. But that I would say is pretty contrarian that you shouldn't have marketing people. You shouldn't have SDRs. You should just pretty much have like revenue generators and it's sales and marketing altogether. I do think it's right though, because so much sales time is wasted on people who aren't going to stay with the company and so much marketing time is wasted on getting the wrong people in the funnel that even if you have fewer people doing the work and maybe fewer efforts in marketing and sales, I think you'll have much better return, and that's what I've seen.
Nicole Dunn: It’s super interesting. And it kind of makes me think that we have perhaps a limited view of what sales and marketing entails, where kind of the traditional view is marketing is very much front of the funnel with very little incentive or constraint around the kind of leads that you're bringing in, and then sales is kind of catching that and getting it across the line. But something we've been talking about a lot recently at Revio is how do you use different forms of marketing outputs like content or interactive workflows, like a benchmarking tool that clients can interact with across the end-to-end conversion journey that ultimately helps to get them across the line, and combining that with then very strong sales people who are doing more of the direct sales if we have to use the traditional language and the commercial negotiations. I like the idea that those working kind of hands and gloves, not on different parts of the funnel, but almost different forms within the function can be really powerful to ultimately unlock more revenue for a company. I think more should try your strategy. I think we'd see some interesting results.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, I think so. And then I'll give one other one really quick. Sorry, but this one, I always, I get a lot of pushback for this one too, but I don't actually think that you should hire someone who isn't a reader. And I don't necessarily mean just reading like paper books, if they're listening to podcasts or they're listening to audio books, or they like take courses, that I would say kind of qualifies, but if they're not learning and you ask what they do in their free time, and they're like, “Oh, you know, I just go golf or I go out with friends,” right? You know, “Play video games,” It's like, well, you could do well in a large corporation like I was talking about before, but in the startup world, you are not going to succeed. If you aren't really liking reading and I would almost say you kind of have to read, podcasts and all that might be too low of a bar. And I get a lot of pushback for that but I think it says a lot about someone's hunger for knowledge and to learn and to better themselves, and that's something you have to have into the startup world.
Nicole Dunn: Something I often reflect on in this world where there's kind of this always-on mentality and there's just so much information. I mean, we were talking about you log on to Twitter and it's hard not to have a panic attack or now X or whatever it's called and books, books are interesting because there's always a lag between when that knowledge is discovered and where it is therefore published and consumed. And one might say, “Well, by the time you're reading a book, it's irrelevant,” but I think there's this really interesting, again, very different functions that's something like a book versus a podcast or social media can play where that can give you kind of the sentiment of the trend at a very point in time, real-time kind of basis. But to actually formulate that into a book requires this kind of deep thinking and nuance that personally I feel often gets lost in the alternative mediums we have available today. As you say, there's such precious knowledge easily accessible to anywhere in the world just waiting to kind of be consumed. So I actually really agree with you there.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, absolutely, especially like biographies. I mean, you are getting in, let's say it's a really long biography and it takes 15 hours to read it, but you're getting someone who is really successful, otherwise, there wouldn't have been a biography about them.
You're getting all of their life lessons and journeys that took them 70 years in 15 hours. Like that's just talking about like compounding skills. That's like the best way to compound skills ever really. So yeah, that's—maybe it's not as contrary as I think.
Nicole Dunn: You have a goal around reading, though, don't you? For yourself.
Brian Kearney: I do. Yep. I forced myself to read at least a hundred books every year and they're not all like those intense biographies. A lot of them are just fun, like novels. Some of them are audio books too, but I try to read at least one, like pretty dense, thick biography every couple weeks just to kind of keep those skills compounding. It kind of expands your knowledge and brain on what is possible is why I have that goal.
Nicole Dunn: What's your favorite biography you've read recently?
Brian Kearney: Walt Disney by Neal Gabler. It was fascinating, just his drive to create something that made people happy was awesome.
It was also really helpful for founders because he really struggled financially at first a lot and most founders struggle financially when they start their company. And they're like, “Oh, this is the hardest time,” but I mean, Disney went bankrupt. That's pretty insane when you think what he's created now, and there are good things and bad things about the Disney corporation today, but he was the best storyteller probably of the past few hundred years. He was just such a good storyteller. So that's the one I liked the most recently. My favorite overall is a much shorter one, but it's a lot of fun. It's The Fish that Ate the Whale, and it's about a guy who created a banana company and he was a immigrant from Eastern Europe who came to New York and he saw a market for bananas that were just about to go bad, and most of the banana companies would just pitch those bananas. He's like, “No, wait, I'll buy them at like 75, 80 percent off.” And then he sold them like on the train out of a box and built the largest fruit company in the world from that kind of humble origins.
And it's kind of a fun read. It has a lot of things to make you take pause as you start to become successful because he made a lot of really horrible decisions, like overthrowing governments level horrible, like insanely horrible. And it's a good ode to like pushing and working hard, but it also gives you that little bit of like, you also have to make sure you keep your head about you and you don't start to become so arrogant that you think you're smarter than your government, other governments, not to say that people aren't always–’cause governments make wrong decisions, but once you start going into that, yeah, all that to say, not a perfect book, not a perfect human, but it was a fascinating story. It read kind of like a spy thriller, but it was also a business book. It was cool.
Nicole Dunn: I'll definitely have to check that one out. I'm very curious how in building a fruit company, someone attempts a government coup so.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, it's unique.
Nicole Dunn: I mean, I'm hoping I never have the audacity to try and overthrow a government, but maybe that's needed, I don’t know.
Brian Kearney: I think most people don't have that audacity and yeah, maybe in some cases, it's definitely needed throughout history. In this case, it was not. He just wanted more money. Yeah, it was interesting.
Nicole Dunn: One more question and we can edit it out if it's too personal, but I'm really curious, do you think that having been a founder and having been an entrepreneur will shape at all the way that you raise your children?
Brian Kearney: Yeah, no, that's not too personal at all that we definitely won't cut it out. I do very much so for a couple reasons. The one is already my kids are much more like financially privileged than I was growing up already, even though I'm very young, so I know that that's going to be something that will be very hard to make sure they are decent humans, ‘cause that doesn't often happen. When people are financially successful with their kids, typically they become really entitled and they don't have a drive and I want to make sure I don't do that. So that is how I do that. That's going to be hard. I'm gonna have to try to figure it out as I go. I think a lot of it will be not just giving them whatever they want because that's not good for anyone.
And the other thing I want to do is kind of embrace their individual passions and almost be excited about their failures, if that makes sense, because that's such a huge part of being able to build a company or just being successful or honestly having mental health is knowing that you're going to screw up a lot and it doesn't mean you're a screw up. It just means that you made a mistake and you learned from it. And I was really, really lucky to have that at home. My parents were, they were pretty open to me, you know, making mistakes. They didn't really care about my grades too much. Maybe they should have cared a little more, honestly, because I should have had better grades, but maybe they knew me well enough that that wouldn't have worked.
That's possible. I've seen people where that's not the case and their parents push them for perfection and it is pretty toxic. They have to be able to push themselves for perfection, if that makes sense. So yeah, I would say those are the two big things, making sure my kids are good humans and trying to help them know that they can fail.
And what will be hard is not pushing them into business and startups. They have to choose that. If they don't want to, and they just want to be a teacher, that's great. I need to be able to be happy about that, but I would probably like for them to eventually take over a business I start, but if they don't, I have to be okay with that.
Nicole Dunn: Yeah. It sounds like you're being very thoughtful and intentional about it. I've seen friends try very different approaches where very hands off others, you know, instead of giving pocket money, they kind of give capital investments to their kids from a very young age. So I'll invest in your venture and kind of teach them the value, that lesson you had very early on from “Toys, Toys, Toys”—that it's kind of fun to earn your own money.
Brian Kearney: No, that's interesting ‘cause I actually just read a book too about a–it was a fantastic book. It's called How To Invest by David Rubenstein. He created the Carlyle Group, which is probably the most successful, largest private equity firm in the world.
Maybe not the largest, definitely the most successful. And he's one of the people in there. Can't remember their name, but they eventually went into value investing and hedge funds. And they said their dad for Christmas and birthday gifts would buy them a share of a stock and then would give them information about the company so they could read about it and see it in their everyday life. And he said that really just made him realize that–man, what was that guy's name?–It was really cool, but it made him realize that he just had a passion for the business behind the stocks. So yeah, that's true. Maybe I need to think of more things like that. Definitely not pocket money that I think could be dangerous.
Nicole Dunn: I feel like being a parent is similar to entrepreneurship in a couple of like really key ways in that you can't relate to it until you've actually done it. And the second is that there's just no right way to do anything, right? So you're just constantly experimenting and getting real time feedback and seeing what works better, but with kids, the payback period and the feedback loop is quite a bit longer, which is–
Brian Kearney: Maybe more like venture capital in a way.
Nicole Dunn: Maybe.
Brian Kearney: I don't know, which I guess are very similar
Nicole Dunn: Develop their purpose on this throughout the series.
Brian Kearney: I agree.
Nicole Dunn: We're wrapping up. So like with everything, it's been a super great conversation, really enjoyed getting to know you a bit better. Is there any kind of last lessons or if you could go back, what would you tell your younger entrepreneur self around things to look out for on the journey ahead?
Brian Kearney: I would say that I would tell my younger self to maybe focus a little bit more because I do, kind of like what we spoke about in the beginning, I tend to have a lot of projects. In the past, I was very bad at having too many projects and then floundering and kind of drowning. I've gotten better at that and I've kind of learned, you know, a main project, kind of second project that kind of runs on its own, and then a really creative projects are that's kind of what I need. But at the beginning I might have like seven things running at the same time, and I just couldn't keep up. So I would say to find a way to temper that, I think a lot of founders have that tendency where we see things we want to fix everywhere, but to kind of give yourself the leeway to pursue your passions and knowledge, but not every passion you pursue has to become a business, I guess, is a good way to put it. It can just be a hobby and just for fun.
Nicole Dunn: That's awesome. Well, thanks so much, Brian. It's been great to chat and we'll see you on the next show.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, thank you.
That's it for today. Do you want to learn more about investment opportunities in Africa? Go to nextfrontierpod.com for more episodes, new insights, and the latest trends in the African startup world.