Preneur Today: Recent Episodes
Preneur Today
Rebecca Ume Crook is Co-founder and Executive Director at Metis
Her life's aim is to connect people to their power, purpose, and joy! She began her career as a bilingual teacher and has since designed curriculum, schools, and programs to equip diverse leaders to innovate and collaborate for systems-level change across #Africa.
Rebecca co-founded Metis in 2017 and loves supporting their collective of #leaders to transform themselves and their communities for a world where all can thrive.
Metis is achieving this by building a new model for #investing in education reform across Africa where systems change is happening too slowly and no significant improvement has emerged in children's learning outcomes over the past five years. Metis tackles the root cause of this problem by supporting a movement of African leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors to build higher quality education initiatives and accelerate the pace of education innovation.
She is a proud alum of the Fulbright Program, Teach for America, SPARK Schools, and Dignitas, and currently serves as a Teach for All Network Connector.
In November 2022, Rebecca launched 'Planting Possibility' ~ a weekly newsletter & community for people nurturing new worlds. In it, she shares tools, resources, reflections, and interviews with changemakers and creatives to support people working towards a more joyful and just world. Subscribe to it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/rebeccaumecrook/p/planting-possibility?r=49vhf&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
She also loves photography, hosting storytelling nights, bodabodas, running, and rock climbing.
Having worked with Microsoft, Google, Safaricom and other large corporations and development organizations, Dr. Shikoh Gitau has had a front-row seat to what tech and digital can do for the world and more importantly Africa's future.
She then founded Qhala in 2020, right as the Covid pandemic was gripping the world. What initially felt like a setback, quickly morphed into an opportunity for Shikoh and her team to set about catalyzing Africa's digital transformation by building tech that addressed the immediate needs.
In this episode, Shikoh zeroes in on Qhala Labs; a Human Capital Seed Fund. In place of writing dollar checks, Q-Lab invests human capital into the best startups in Africa, massively de-risking early stage venture capital on the continent. In her words, "Q-Lab, is a marriage between Y-C and Google X". The team works with subject matter experts to build for the most persistent challenges in Africa at scale.
Shikoh and her co-founders are bringing together the best of African talent with the best ideas, innovators and investors. "We have an amazing cohort of ventures that we believe are going to change the world," she quips. Their goal is to work with at least 100 African businesses. Q-lab has a strong bias toward African, women founders and subject matter experts like medical doctors solving challenges that are persistent on the continent whose digital solutions have a potential systemic impact and can be scaled globally, and in 10 years create 100,000 jobs directly.
In the 4th episode of Preneur Today, I speak to Isis Nyong'o - who is involved in various initiatives to increase gender equality in the workplace including co-founding WomenWork; a 5,000+ member-strong peer-to-peer digital network of entrepreneurial women that support each other to grow.
Here, Isis shares anecdotes from her 15 year journey in shaping Africa’s digital economy, giving us a peek into her experience scaling companies across the continent. The conversation spans from her early life; to graduating at Stanford University & Harvard Business School; and further down intoher roles at MTV Africa, Google, InMobi, and on-wards to founding Mums Village and WomenWork!
Listen in as we chat about how the impact that a platform of ambitious and supportive women, plays in changing the culture of business in Africa.
In this 3rd episode of Preneur Today, I speak to Kathleen Vaughan - a top leadership and executive coach working with startup founders in their journeys to becoming top global CEOs. Through her company, KMV Consulting, Kathleen supports these business leaders in team leadership & effectiveness, driving strategy through leadership development, and fostering innovation and creativity during transition and in dynamic environments.
In this episode, Kathleen shares about her own journey from running a mediating center in NYC to building a coaching consultancy firm in Kenya. She walks us through the common challenges she has spotted in startups' growth, the value of having a coach as a founder, the difference between coaching, mentorship & therapy - and shares many more insights!!
In this second episode of Preneur Today, I speak to Martha Mbugua - Founder at Law3Sixty about her transition from being a Partner at one of Africa's largest legal firms to establishing a boutique commercial law firm in Kenya in 2018.
Martha has been ranked as a rising star in her area of practice by IFLR 1000 (an internationally recognized legal directory) in the years 2016 and 2017 and was recognized by the Legal 500 2018 publication as a recommended lawyer in the Kenyan market. She was also ranked by the Business Daily newspaper as one of the Top 40 under 40 Women for the year 2017 where she was noted as one of the youngest female partners specializing in private equity/mergers and acquisitions.
In this first episode of Preneur Today, I speak to Diana Gichaga - Founder & Managing Partner at Private Equity Support. She walks us through her diverse experiences leading up to her current role as a private capital professional providing enterprise advisory services that focus on deal origination, investor readiness, capital raising, investor relations and portfolio company support to businesses across Africa.
Learn more about PES at: https://www.privateequity-support.com/
Preneur Today is launching soon!
For more than a decade, I have had the privilege to meet, interact and build relationships with brilliant women building incredible enterprises. What continues to stand out to me, is the dearth of business insights on media, from women-led companies in Africa.... and I want to change this!
This podcast is simple ... every week I'm going to unpack the journeys of female founders with different backgrounds, experiences and learnings on entrepreneurship, leadership, business models, strategy, fundraising, failures - you name it!
Ultimately Preneur Today's mission is defined by these 3 words: Elevate, Engage & Emulate
The first season is dedicated specifically to female founders whose work it is to build or support other founders in the various stages of their companies.