Idowu Akinde

I am a Startup Coach. I help founding teams across the globe acquire the DNA of an enduring startup, thereby becoming attractive for investment.

Having offered coaching, mentoring, or advisory to no less than 400 innovation teams since 2017 (some of whom are startups while others are corporate innovation teams (intrapreneurs) within and outside forums such as the Founder Institute, Impact Hub, GIZ / GOPA, Bridge For Billions, ISN Hubs, GetFundedAfrica, VC4Africa, etc) and across Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Kenya, Tunisia, Egypt, UK, USA, Canada and Singapore, I have become increasingly convinced that all of my varied (business, product and technical) career experiences over the course of two decades have prepared me perfectly for this moment in time: to help nurture the next generation of global (especially African) entrepreneurs as they create startups today that will grow into unicorns (and perhaps decacorns) through and beyond the next decade. Being an active founder myself (I’m currently running my third startup), I derive great personal fulfilment from this and have received a few positive reviews from some of those communities.

Boolean Labs (www.booleanlabs.io) is a full-cycle digital co-creation launchpad that helps founding teams (across and beyond Africa) build enduring ventures and launch exciting products.

My areas of specific expertise include Product Development, Scaling (Go-To-Market, Growth Hacking, etc.) and Equity / Funding. My background spans various roles in the digital product development space, ranging from analysis, design, architecture, engineering, post-engineering review, integration, deployment, support (technical as well as non-technical), management, leadership and coaching of various digital product teams (spanning in commercial value from $10,000 products to $5m products).

Now, let’s make magic, shall we?

I’ve observed that a large proportion of the founders who are launching startups nowadays are missing out on some basic startup-building concepts that, if understood prior, would raise the bar on the general quality of ideas being put forward and eliminate the need to ask certain questions in the first place.

My over-arching goal is to raise the bar on the minimum cognitive sophistication of the average person who desires to launch a startup in Africa. I’d be the happiest man alive if, from 01 January 2023 (a year from now), I start to observe in our private 1-on-1 coaching sessions that the majority of founders no longer ask questions that reveal an insufficient understanding of these basic startup-building concepts.

– More context available from my Medium article at https://medium.com/@idowuakinde/the-surgeons-knives-47071b4d599c