Viola Llewellyn – Learn to Embrace Failure

Viola Llewellyn is the co-founder and president of Ovamba Solutions, Inc. She oversees innovation, strategic implementation, investor communications, and business development. digital undivided included her as one of only 34 black women in the US to have raised more than US$1 million for a technology company. She is a TED speaker and has been lauded as a Global Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Recently she was listed in LATTICE80’s Top 100 Women in Fintech 2019. Her family is from the Central African republic of Cameroon.  She was born and educated in the UK and lives between Africa and the US.    “Oh, this is a great idea. (At least) 1.1 billion human beings on the African continent, you guys are rushing in and are doing something that’s not charitable; it’s going to be fantastic. What could possibly go wrong?” Viola Llewellyn, quoting friends, family and supporters Worst investment ever  Idea to fill African SME funding niche between microfinance and banks   Back in 2013, Viola and her business partner Marvin Cole decided they wanted to create a business that would help African business, that is, SMEs, to get access to capital, so that they could grow. Everyone knows that small businesses need capital to sustain themselves. Africa has microfinance institutions and banks. But the whole new era of peer-to-peer, marketplace lending was just beginning, and the partners hit on the idea to be first movers in the African market to do this. Viola points out that when people start a new venture, no one thinks about failure. The partners also hadn’t seen any models that they could emulate the good and improve on the bad. All they knew was that we were going to create technology, be innovative, find business partners, raise capital, and help these businesses to grow. And they would be the heroes of the continent.   Partners revel in broad support for their finance revolution   To kick things off in 2013, they did a successful friends-and-family raising and spoke to everyone they knew all of them knew that, “Oh, this is a great idea. 1.1 billion human beings on the African continent, you guys are rushing in are doing something that’s not charitable, it’s going to be fantastic. What could possibly go wrong?” At first, not a lot went wrong at all. It was almost 2014 and there was a new association that was formed to bring all the peer-to-peer platforms together, which was what the partners thought they were. Viola points out that is not what Ovamba does today at all. It is now a marketplace maker that funds businesses that are in the trade sector. It creates and innovates technology to do all of that. So the failure she shared with Andrew was what led to the hugely successful innovation that emerged at end of her tale.   Dynamic duo draws strength from their diverse perspectives   In April 2014, Viola’s business partner (who she says is a great deal more cautious and sensible than she is) says they were going to a big association conference. She recalled her youth here and considers herself very lucky. Viola was unable to attend university because she made what she called one of worst mistakes a young woman can make: getting pregnant while not being married. At the time, her life was derailed but that upheaval put her on her own path to understanding the world from a very different perspective compared that of her business partner, who has an MBA. And because she went into sales and marketing, she loves to jump feet first into anything and figure it out later. She does not believe you need to go systematically from A to Z, as long as you can see the Z.   Marketing activities net big-fish investor at conference  So ahead of the conference, Viola started creating templates and presentations and sent them out to everyone who might be attending. She had a lot of promising responses and apparently everyone was interested to know what the partners were doing.   “A factor about the beginning of either a bubble or a new industry or a new asset class is that everyone jumps in the pool. There are sharks, piranhas, dolphins, and mermaids in the water. They’re all there. Everybody’s trying to find anything to jump onto.”  That includes the start–up community, which is how they were involved. One company was most aggressive and ended up being signed as their first institutional investor. Viola described it has the most beautiful courtship: trips to London, meetings, and all the while, other businesses were also trying to figure out deals.   Failure to ask right questions should have been first alarm  The day came when they started to negotiate the transaction and that was when the first red flag went up. The partners thought they were being clever smart by asking: “Who else has done business with you and how did it go?” And everybody said: “It went fantastically.” But Viola and her partner had failed to ask: “Who went through a cycle of misunderstandings or violations of contract and how was it resolved?” All they could see was the shining end of the journey, so they signed the contract, received an equity investment and were told that they were going to get a large amount of capital to fund all of the businesses on their platform.   All set to reel in US$12m funding for clients and nothing happens  When it was time to get the US$12 million – to fund all of the businesses that they had invested marketing and time in, while promising them and underwriting these transactions, they now had have a pipeline of close to $60-70 million that they were going to fund, all the while expecting returns that were going to skyrocket them all to success – there was silence. The expected funding seemed to evaporate. They would ask the investors: “Hey, where’s that money?” and would get the answer: “Oh, we’re trying to work some things out.” Again: “Hey, where’s that money?” Then they started to see a) individuals leaving the investment company, b) a slowdown in documentation, c) changes in the interest rates that were previously agreed upon, them, d) new clauses that we’re going to put ceilings on the outlays. Suffice to say, after all the demand they had rounded up, and there was literally no money to fund it.   Venture stranded in Africa as it is penniless and unable to keep promises to clients   They were in the middle of Africa. They had billboards up in the streets. They had done a massive amount of press and marketing, putting themselves out there as some kind of new heroes of the fourth industrial revolution. And now they were unable to give out any of the promised funds. The partners were left to scramble, explain, create new reasons, new excuses, and redo their risk parameters. It was an absolute disaster in which they missed their growth window, and instead, had to retract and almost start the company all over again. They had to terminate partnerships and relationships, consolidate situations with the clients they knew were not going to default. It really put a dent in the relationship with their group of clients.   “We’re in the middle of Africa. We’ve got billboards up in the streets. We’ve done all this press and marketing, hailing ourselves as the new heroes of the fourth industrial revolution. And now we can’t give any of that money (to the SMEs we’d promised to allocate it to).”  Personal cost includes great angst and husband’s pension fund  Personally, Viola’s stomach was in knots every night, her pride reduced to near zero. Meanwhile, her husband, who had such great faith in her future success and who had invested from his pension fund to help her build the company, now had to work extra to ensure that as a family, they were not going to end up hungry. Viola is also grateful that she and her business partner were able to maintain a good relationship throughout the crisis.   Immense challenge to face all the let-down people   But she and her business partner had to find new ways socially to deal with the people who had relied on them; hundreds of businesses, connected to as many families, many who had complained that microfinance would not work for them. They also had to face the people who had written articles hailing the venture and its leaders as “the brand new thing”. All of that came to a crashing end. They also had to negotiate a much wider narrative that says African businesses are failures, that black people cannot manage businesses. They had to go back and face everyone and explain what was going on.   Government, big-four accounting firm, gender prejudice throw up extra obstacles  Adding more strife to injury, their asset class was completely new, and the government of the country was unable to understand what they were trying to do and thus went to war with their already embattled business. They...