Top Gun, African style: A chat with Don Gooding
FILE PHOTO / Tim Greenway
Don Gooding, former executive director of the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development, has been busy since resigning from the nonprofit last March. One of his ventures is using elements of MCED's Top Gun program in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Don Gooding has been anything but idle since he left the helm of the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development last March.
Known for his work at the private nonprofit for Maine’s entrepreneurs and as a former vice chair for Maine Angels, Gooding also is a long-time crooner, including with Yale University’s famousWhiffenpoofs. He now works with Greenlight Maine, House of Genius and has his own consulting company, Gooding Growth LLC, in Portland.
Mainebiz caught up with Gooding over the holidays at Beth’s Kitchen Cafe in Bridgton to hear about one of his latest ventures, which will use elements of MCED’s Top Gun entrepreneurship acceleration program in Sub-Saharan Africa in countries including South Africa, Ghana, Kenya and Senegal.
The project, called “XL Africa,” is in its infancy, said Gooding. He describes it as an accelerator for later stage companies that have traction in their home market and are trying to figure out how to grow in new markets. They might be partly funded by equity, he added.
“Not all companies will choose equity funding,” he said. “I’m also a big proponent of bootstrapping.” Another possibility is a revenue-sharing model such as software-for-service companies.
However, Gooding readily acknowledges he has a lot to learn about doing business in Africa, where there are multiple religions, some of which do not allow interest on loans, and almost a dozen official languages. “I know enough to be dangerous,” he said.
He said he will be a consultant and teacher on the project, not an investor.
Gooding is collaborating with Stephen Koltai, a Lincolnville- and Washington, D.C.-based consultant on entrepreneurship program development who also works with the World Bank to tap money for the projects.
“Stephen is a subcontractor to a London-based consultancy,” Gooding said. “He assembles a team to deliver [a project].”
Koltai called Gooding in mid-October, and Gooding spent a day in Cape Town, South Africa, meeting with the World Bank and the primary contractor.
Leveraging experience
“The project will leverage some of my experience in getting companies ready for equity investments,” Gooding said.
He sees his role as helping African entrepreneurs, who are not too familiar with venture investing.
“Equity investing in Africa is a new thing,” Gooding said. “It exists, but it’s typically based on acquisitions. And in Africa, the acquisition market is in the early stages.”
“There’s a small equity investment market in Africa,” he said. “In 2015, 125 tech companies received equity, including institutional and angel funding.”
The biggest investment areas are mobile, financial technology and e-commerce.
“A lot is applied technology to solve problems associated with the lack of infrastructure,” he said.
“This is an interesting opportunity to apply what I’ve learned before and during Maine,” he said. One goal is to match investors and make companies more attractive to them. I’m transferring the Top Gun curriculum, notably the ‘equity path series’ that is modeled after the ‘Capital Network’ in Massachusetts to help companies get ready for investment.” This includes creating a capitalization table, teaching what due diligence is, how to track the cost of customer acquisition.
“There are idiosyncrasies in each African market that pose a challenge to growth, but there’s lots of opportunity if you solve them,” he said.
“And there are similarities with Maine in that the way for Africa to move forward is with mobile technology and how they achieve scalability,” he said. “And both are off the beaten path for investment.”
“You don’t have to give up your values to change,” he said. “The world is changing faster than it did before. You can either be part of that change or be run over by it.”
Gooding said the XL Africa project will start from March and run through August.
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments