Three months that decide the next decade

A three-month program for ambitious founders, followed by a relationship that lasts years. Three months is long enough to see how a founder thinks and builds under sustained pressure, and short enough that it does not swallow the year he needs to spend on his company.

Two things happen at once. You read, you write, and you defend what you think in front of people who have read the same books and will take your position apart. The point is to understand how the world actually works, build your market intelligence, and sharpen your strategic acumen. The reading ranges across history, philosophy, political theory, sociology, psychology, economics, science, innovation, entrepreneurship, biographies of exceptional builders, the history of civilization, and the philosophy of heroism. The reading is part of the work, and not some academic exercise: you write and talk about what you read, defend your conclusions, apply the ideas to real problems you are facing, and refine your thinking through rigorous discussion, criticism, and interaction with reality.

At the same time, you build. We drill, pressure-test, and work on whatever is breaking that week, whether that is product, hiring, sales, fundraising, or the thing standing in the way this month.

By the end, you should develop a definite view of the future you can defend, a company thesis that follows from it, an accurate model of how the world works, a habit of thinking in systems and across long horizon, and the disposition to act without waiting for permission.

After the three-month engagement, we back the teams that prove themselves. To back a founder is to put our judgment, network, and reputation behind him. Capital raising is one consequence of that backing, not its definition. We help backed founders raise capital, make introductions, continue working with them, and take equity in the company.

At the core of our philosophy is a conviction: great work requires a heroic mind, and a founder should also be a thinker. The greatest founders in history have always had a deep, comprehensive understanding of how the world works.

That depth matters more here than it does anywhere else.

A founder in a functional market can get a long way through execution alone. The system supplies much of what he needs: the rules hold, the power stays on, the courts function, the supply chain exists, the talent is there.

Much less can be assumed here, in Africa. A founder working in a fragile system has to reason his way toward what is missing before he can build on top of it. The intellectual demand on him is higher than on his counterpart in a mature economy, not lower.

The founders who did this before us formed themselves.

None of them waited for a school or a society to tell him what he needed to know. Each went looking on his own, usually long before anyone could see the use of it. Most people with the same appetite never end up like them.

Notice what most of them also lacked.

• Jobs had run nothing before Apple.
• Zuckerberg had run nothing before Facebook.
• Musk had run nothing before Zip2.

Ford, Gates, and Bezos pioneered industries without the long apprenticeship the conventional account treats as a precondition for building one. Experience was never the scarce input. What was scarce was the combination of an unusual mind, an unusual appetite, and the willingness to learn faster than the missing years mattered.

That matters here more than anywhere. A continent short of seasoned operators is told it must wait a generation for them to accumulate. It does not have to. Comprehension can be built explicitly and quickly in the right person. Character cannot be built at all. So we look for the second and build the first. No institution can give you the compulsion to build. What we can give you, and quickly, is the understanding that compulsion needs in order to become something real.

That habit of self-formation is part of what we want to cultivate.

None of these people had a program telling them what to read or why it would matter. We are building one on purpose: the ideas, the argument, the writing, the correction that comes from testing a thought against something real, brought together and pointed at a specific end. The aim is to hand a founder the tools and the pressure years earlier than he would otherwise find them, and to keep his thinking and his building in contact with each other.

One question decides whether a company interests us:

• Will your company permanently increase Africa's productive capability?
• Will it enlarge what Africa can make, know, build, do, move, finance, or organize?

We are a business, not a grantmaker. We work only with companies capable of becoming exceptional businesses. Among those businesses, we are drawn to companies that leave Africa more capable than they found it.

Plenty of good companies serve demand that is already there, and serve it better than anyone before them. Nothing is wrong with that, and some of them become great. What we are after is the company that leaves behind something others build on for decades.

A company can work inside a capability without enlarging it. That is still a business worth running. We are more interested when a company's success opens something for everyone who comes after it: a way to produce, to know, to organize, to trade.

M-Pesa was consumer software, yet it created payment infrastructure upon which an entire generation of African businesses was built. A lending application is also consumer software, and it competes inside a market that already exists. Same category. Different contribution.

The question is what Africa can do after your company succeeds that it could not do before.

Applied across the continent, that question most often leads us toward companies building in:

These are not the only sectors we back. They are where the question most often points. Being in one of these sectors does not make a company interesting to us; the productive-capability test still applies.

If you are building outside these areas but can show us how your company permanently expands Africa's productive capability, and can become an exceptional business while doing so, you are making precisely the argument we want to hear.

We engage founders through their companies.

The engagement runs for three months. We meet in person once a week in Enugu. Office hours are available as often as you want them, with one condition: you must have enough time left to build the product and talk to your users. The reading, written work, and discussions happen wherever you are.

We intend to widen this as we build the capacity to accommodate founders in Enugu and to run parts of the engagement remotely without losing what makes it work.

You will also meet other founders we work with, and we bring in advisors and people who have built before.

The program is compatible with a job or an existing company, provided the other commitment does not interfere with your execution or engagement with us.

Before the engagement begins, founders enter an engagement agreement with TSF setting out the terms of the relationship, including what is expected of both sides and the arrangements that apply if either side decides to end the engagement.

At the end of the three months, we make a backing decision. We are deliberately selective and will back only a small proportion of the companies we engage. Admission to the program does not mean that we will ultimately back you.

Backing means that we are prepared to put our judgment, network, and reputation behind you and commit to a long-term relationship with the company. If we back you, we take equity in the company because we have chosen to back you, not because we have successfully raised capital for you. The equity terms are set by TSF's backing terms and are agreed as part of the backing arrangement. We also receive pro-rata rights on future rounds, on the terms set out in the backing arrangement.

We help backed founders raise capital, make introductions to angels, venture funds, institutions, and operators, and continue working with them after the engagement. Capital raising is one consequence of our backing, not a condition of it. Investors invest directly into the companies we back; TSF does not currently invest through a fund or other vehicle. When the time is right, we intend to establish a vehicle through which we can invest alongside our investors. Our backing does not guarantee an allocation, a term sheet, or an investment from any particular investor. Investors make their own decisions. What we bring them is a founder we have worked with closely for three months rather than interviewed for an hour.

For companies we back, the relationship is intended to last for years. We continue working with them as much as is needed and as logistics permit. We expect backed founders to remain engaged with us, to tell us when things are going wrong, and to maintain the standard of thinking and execution that earned our backing.

We expect the same candor from ourselves.

Founders we do not back still leave with the formation, the network, the relationships built over three months, and an open door to apply again.

This is not charity.

Working closely with founders is how we learn to recognize the exceptional ones early. Every engagement gives us more people to watch, more decisions to study, and more chances to find out where our own judgment was wrong. That is worth something to us long before any money comes back.

We take equity in the companies we back and pro-rata rights on their future rounds. Entering the program costs nothing, and no equity changes hands unless we back you.

We also want to be around people seriously trying to build things that matter. They bring questions we would not have thought to ask. Some of what we end up believing about Africa will come out of those arguments.

We are not standing outside the work explaining it to you.

Founders already building, or close to it. Who read seriously. Who are drawn to hard and consequential problems. Who have the appetite to build at civilizational scale.