Venture Capital needs companies. Today Nigeria has a massively underdeveloped and thus undervalued internet ecosystem. Since launching Spark, I have read thousands of emails and met hundreds of people who are actively participating in the system today. Some quietly, some loudly. Most, passionately. Some folk charge me with the notion

This is first in a 3 part series I am writing about funding in Nigeria. As CEO of a VC backed company, I field so many inbound inquiries and thus end up speaking to many investors. These are very well known investors in Africa, Europe and the Americas and there

If you drive around Lagos on any given day you will see people gathered, at the centre there will be shouting and arguing, usually because of some minor traffic incident or indiscretion, it doesn’t matter. They just are shouting. This isn’t something I routinely see in any of the other

Cut down the iroko [tree] when it is small, by the time it is too large it will be too late and you will be bringing it sacrifices — an old Yoruba saying. There is always a new shiny thing out to usurp iROKOtv as the number 1 distributor of Nollywood movies

Meet Noah Glass. The first CEO and the person who came up with the name, Twitter. I’ve been in Accra for the festive period, chilling out with my wife and son. And reading. I love reading. I try to read at least a book a week. I have read a

It’s politics season in Nigeria. Folk are literally going nuts positioning themselves for the bounty of the nation’s cake. With alarming regularity people ask me whether I am attempting or interested in running for office. A political position in Nigeria. Me? NEVER National cake eating aside, this is something I

At 23:59 on the 31st December 2009, a few months into investigating another little project I was thinking of starting (iROKO), I was sitting at home, alone, staring at my computers and playing with WordPress plug ins and HTML. Unsuccessful and dead broke (as usual) so nothing really awesome to

So we announced a new chunk of money. Cause for celebration you would think? Yes and No. What has surprised me the most about our recent fund raise is people’s surprise locally (read Nigeria) at our health and apparent ability to actually raise money. It appears most people suspected iROKO

Bastian and I announced earlier today that iROKO, our little company which we co-founded back in 2010 raised another $8Mn in venture capital from our existing investors Tiger Global, Kinnevik and new participant, Rise Capital. That brings our total raised over the last 2 years to $21Mn (we quietly raised

Above is the picture of the movies released in 2013 into the Alaba wholesale distribution system; a system which unpins the financial strength of Nollywood. ~90% of the annual economic value (approx $300–500Mn) of Nollywood. No one really knows how many titles are pushed into this system but I have