Before we dive in, welcome to Venture in Motion, a new blog/newsletter from the team at Resilience17. R17 is a venture studio and fund, on a mission to accelerate African prosperity through technology entrepreneurship.
"If our goal in life is to remain content, no ambition is sensible.”
- from the remarkable essay: Ambition & Poetry by Donald Hall.
“Startups are so hard that you can't be pointed off to the side and hope to succeed. You have to know that growth is what you're after. The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.”
From the seminal essay Startup = Growth, by Y-Combinator Co-founder Paul Graham
Ambition is not limited to becoming the biggest company, or the most famous poet, it’s a very significant, very difficult to achieve milestone that, by design, in all likelihood will never be attained. If achieved, even to a degree, the world takes notice. Growth is progress in guiding in the right direction, along the journey of ambition.
Ambition and growth are the engines powering the founders and company forward towards their unique goals. Right behind growth and ambition is simple hard work. Without it, you will fail to achieve your ambition. R17 operates like a startup, we hire for the same set of values and traits that we look for in founders when investing.
The challenges of entrepreneurship are well documented, most everyone agrees that startups are difficult pursuits. What’s less well known is how much fun and rewarding it is to work with a chosen group of people to solve an important problem. It’s a life changing adventure, and a unique privilege to be able to work on something you care about, and potentially make a lot of money for building something people want.
Ambitious people push themselves to gain specific knowledge and leverage their knowledge into unique insights for how the world should be. Hard work is constant, challenges are constant, and growth is a singular guiding goal to keep companies on track.
We believe that startups in Africa require a different level of support to grow and thrive. We believe that the time to act is now.
Founders bring ambition and specific knowledge, and together through hard work we’ll continuously aim to blast past the next growth milestone.
We welcome you to leverage R17, our capital, conviction and code to break through barriers and forge a path of innovation and prosperity.
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