THREAD: Early stage investors: I talk to many African tech founders on the continent. One common pattern I found was some of the investors in these businesses need a lot more empathy to be good investors. (1/8)

Founders go through a lot, no founder wants their business to fail. In fact, they tend to sacrifice and put their business ahead of most things in their life, including their own family. They don’t need any more anxiety and stress. (2/8)

When a founder gets on a phone call or texts with an investor who just demands for things and adds to the stress; this doesn’t help anyone and hurts the business even more. The founder, because of the stress might end up making poorer decisions. (3/8)

I saw this pattern happen more with a certain type of persona more often than others: a wealthy families son/daughter who has never built or worked in an early stage tech company but wants to invest their family wealth and claims they have all the “connections” to help. (4/8)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all personas like these are the same, it’s just a pattern I’ve observed from talking to other tech founders across Africa. This is extremely dangerous and I can’t tell how much stress it bears on the founder. (5/8)

These things also need to be called out more often. Unfortunately, because of a power (and wealth) dynamic. Founders tend to keep these things to themselves in order to keep the business alive for their dreams. (6/8)

Other founders (even those reading this right now) are too scared to honestly share about these truths and challenges because of the consequences they may face from the investor(s) so it leads to a dangerous cycle that doesn’t help the business. (7/8)

This needs to change. If you are a tech investor, please show empathy to founders, hear them out, empathize with their challenges, help them think through issues and win. That is all. Ok. Bye. (8/8)