How Base10 Investor Ade Ajao Embraced Outsider Status To Deliver Outsized Returns ForbesMidas by alexrkonrad
Adeyemi “Ade” Ajao sold his human resources startup to Workday in 2014, he didn’t expect to stick around. Launched just over two years before, Identified was already the entrepreneur’s second exit. Since the first — a Spanish Facebook challenger bought by Teléfonica for $100 million — he’d shown up at Stanford’s business school with some cash to invest in classmates, and made 30 or so bets. A career at a prominent venture capital firm beckoned.
With fewer first-timers on Midas than in past years, Ajao is a notable exception. There’s Base10, the firm he launched with Nahigian in 2017, already the first Black-led VC firm tounder management. Then there’s Ajao’s unique approach to profit-sharing, which includes historically overlooked universities in his venture gains, and which will generate hundreds of scholarships on behalf of the companies that take Base10’s checks.
A gifted student, Ajao and several high school friends began to set up websites and build simple video game modifications, fancying themselves “The Triple Alliance,” a sort-of hacking group. Ajao dreamed of moving to the U.S.
Tuenti’s founders were inexperienced, but they quickly built a working mobile app. That was enough to hold off a challenge by fellow Spaniards studying at Stanford who started a Facebook competitor for their country around the same time; over the next five years, Ajao held his own against Facebook itself, too, signing up half of Spain’s computer owners and, according to him, generating more web traffic in Spain than the U.S.-based social network and Google combined.
Another differentiator for the multilingual Ajao: an eye for applying his firm’s theses to emerging markets like Latin America. The region was historically challenging for venture capital firms looking for reliable returns, Ajao says; while still fundraising, some advisers even warned Base10’s partners to downplay their interest there. Doing so would’ve meant missing out on companies like Nubank and Nowports, which surpassed a $1 billion valuation last year.
“It’s rare to get valuable product advice from VCs,” says Iman Abuzeid, cofounder and CEO of Incredible Health, who turned to Base10 and the Advancement fund to lead her Series B last year. Ajao has helped Incredible Health secure an investment from healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente; he’s also met recently with its CTO and head of product on ways to take advantage of new AI tools. “He intimately understands, because he was in my seat before.
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