The Funding Gap in Start-up Investing | Temie Giwa-Tubosun | TED

30,561 views ・ 2022-05-25

TED


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00:04
If I asked you to guess which country in the world
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has the highest number of female entrepreneurs,
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which country would you guess?
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Don't worry. I'll tell you.
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(Laughter)
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Uganda, yup, in Africa.
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39.6 of all Ugandans
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who start, own and operate their own businesses are women.
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Ugandan women are clearly formidable, but they are not alone.
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The second and third country
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on that list of world female entrepreneurs,
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according to MasterCard, were Botswana and Ghana.
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Yup, Africa.
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(Applause)
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So what's keeping these amazing businesses from dominating global stock exchange?
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Why are you not seeing people like me, yours truly,
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listing our companies every day,
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dominating Nasdaq and London Stock Exchange?
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Let me tell you what I think.
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I love the hero's journey.
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I can often be found on Reddit late into the night,
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after I've put the children to bed,
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arguing about many fantastical worlds.
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And I'm always secretly delighted
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that the people on the other side of the screen
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could never guess that the fierce figure arguing about Middle Earth canon
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and the ways of the Basilisk Isles in Sothoryos
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is an African mom of two
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who runs a startup out of Lagos, Nigeria.
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I was born in a small town in Nigeria.
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In 2001, my parents moved to the United States,
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where I grew up, got educated, got married and decided to start a family.
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It was the difficult birth of my son that started me on my own hero's journey.
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You see, while I was on bed rest,
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I found out that 556 women
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bleed to death every single day across sub-Saharan Africa.
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And to my astonishment, if you could just move blood to these hospitals,
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you could save four out of five women.
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I decided as a woman who had sat on that hospital bed seven years ago,
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wondering whether she was going to survive childbirth,
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that I had a duty to do something about this.
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I moved back home to Nigeria and started my own company.
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You see, Africa has the resources.
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We have the blood, the oxygen, the PPE that we need to save lives.
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But we don't always have it at the right place, at the right time.
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So that's what we decided to solve.
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We built technology with over 200,000 lines of code
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that matches supply to demand,
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and we closed the loop by delivering it to the last mile.
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In 2016, when this company started,
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we had one single desk at a coworking space.
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And now, as I speak, we operate across Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia.
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We can deliver as far as Maiduguri, Borno State, home to the Chibok girls.
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But no part of this journey was easy.
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In fact, it almost did not start.
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Because while I recognized the size of the problem,
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I knew people like me did not start big businesses.
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There was no playbook.
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There was no model for me to follow.
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And I knew that to solve this problem,
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we would need access to a significant amount of resources,
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from venture capital, from philanthropy and other critical points of growth.
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But there was no model
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because people like me had not received the critical resources they needed
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to grow and scale their own enterprise.
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So does this mean women cannot be heroes?
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Does it mean that we cannot be heroes of our own journey?
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No, in fact, women like me routinely start their own companies.
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In Nigeria, we have [Abimbola Adebakin]
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who is building the supply chain to get medicine to the last mile.
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We have Bilikiss Abiola, who is protecting the natural world
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by turning trash to cash.
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And in Peru, Sully Siucho Diaz is building wealth for families
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by helping them make better mortgage decisions.
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Yet we're not seen as founders that can scale and build large businesses.
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A few years ago, we needed resources at LifeBank,
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and I went to pitch LifeBank to an investor.
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I was very excited,
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and I told him about all the amazing things we would do.
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And he said to me, "I just can't see you building something that scales."
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To my face.
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(Laughter)
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Like any normal person, I was taken aback by his lack of faith,
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but I didn't let that stop me.
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I felt like I was duty bound to build the change,
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the innovation that I wanted to see in the world.
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And although he was right,
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I don’t look like the classic hero.
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But, like Frodo, the journey chose me.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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So I didn't let that stop me.
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I went out there and built a great business.
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And here are a few points.
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Since inception, we've doubled revenue year on year.
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(Applause)
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We’ve built technology that can predict oxygen demand,
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and we use blockchain to track our blood system.
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These innovations are novel even by global standards.
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We have rescued over 40,000 people.
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Our journey is by no means complete.
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But watch us pull it off.
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Truth is, heroes are often not guys in a cape.
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And my story suggests that we must look to the unexpected places
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when we are looking for entrepreneurs and leaders.
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Data suggests that if you hold any kind of bias against a group,
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you're most likely to discriminate
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against the people who most need to be heard.
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And it is these people who often have the solution
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to the world's most pressing challenges.
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It is critical that we do the work to listen to every voice
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and to break down the silos that keep most of us back
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and keep us from starting.
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It is time to close the funding gap between female-led startup,
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Black female-led startup world over.
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(Applause)
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Because while you may not see us, we are here, and there are millions of us.
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So if you are an investor,
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I want to invite you to join your peers,
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and when you are looking for founders to back,
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look to the unexpected.
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And if you are in this room,
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and you think you may want to go on your own hero's quest,
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I'm here to tell you to do it.
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And if they don't believe you, show them!
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The world needs the most unique voice.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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