Kanu Nwankwo was an emerging legend. As a village football fanatic listening on radio during the golden days of Rangers, El Kanemi Warriors, Stationery Stores, IICC, Sharks, etc in a very dynamic Nigerian football league, one thing I did when I came from the village to Owerri to attend FUTO was to visit the stadium to watch them live.

Kanu was still playing for Iwuanyanwu Nationale but he did not play that day. But I was lucky: Papilo came to the stadium and I saw him. Like Philip Osondu, boys have made songs after them: Zanza bu onye isi game, buru ba nye (Zanza is the leader of the game, he dribbles and scores).

Why this? The fact is this: for all that Kanu accomplished in football, he is becoming one of the most pioneering heart intervention entrepreneurs in Africa. He had a challenging experience as he moved from Ajax to Inter Milan. They fixed the issue – and he has made helping on heart disease a personal call.

He scored goals – and inspired many. But the goals he is scoring in operating rooms now are indeed higher goals. I want to wish Papilo and his partners a great future on this mission: healthcare goals are the most critical because they build nations. Congrats Team Papilo for the new Cathlab in Port Harcourt.

For this photo, I was in Microsoft office in Silicon Valley’s NASA Ames Research Center. On that day, we discussed technologies. I made it back again and again. In the same park, you have Singularity University; I made the recommendations for the first batch of African students when they started. I like conversations on business and how to find opportunities in markets. So, in Tekedia Institute, we’ve unveiled a new program – Business Growth Playbooks with Ndubuisi Ekekwe.

It is a live Zoom program which will focus exclusively on growth strategies, mechanisms, models, frameworks, etc which businesses can deploy to win new markets and territories. In other words, the program objective is to master how companies can grow, biased for the African markets.

Program will run for 8 weeks, every Saturday at 4.30pm – 6.00pm WAT. We will record all in case your time is tight. This program will run from Sept 4 to Oct 23, 2021.

Cost is $60 or N20,000 naira. Register here and let us have a growth conversation.

Reddit, announced on Thursday it is now valued at more than $10 billion after raising an additional $410 million in funding, with the final round expected to grow to up to $700 million.

The round was led by Fidelity Investments to push the valuation of the self-proclaimed ‘front page of the internet’ up.

The company has continued to build and sanitize its business, removing racist, misogynist, and otherwise controversial communities, as it prepares to go public at some point in the future.

“We are still planning on going public, but we don’t have a firm timeline there yet,” Reddit’s co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times in an interview. “All good companies should go public when they can.”

The company previously raised $250 million in funding earlier this year for a valuation of $6 billion. But Huffman told the Times the company was approached with this recent financing round by Fidelity Investments and were made “an offer that we couldn’t refuse.”

Reddit makes most its money from advertising on the site, and although it’s a minnow compared to the likes of Facebook and Google, it’s growing its business quickly. The company says it made $100 million in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2021, up 192 percent compared to the same period last year. Though for context, Google made $61.9 billion in this year’s second quarter, mostly from YouTube and Search advertising.

However, Huffman said the social media platform has come a long way.

“We’ve grown up in the shadow of Facebook and Google, and pretty much every dollar we make we’ve had to fight for,” he said.

Reddit now has roughly 52 million daily users (compared to 1.85 billion daily Facebook users) and more than 100,000 active sub-reddits. Earlier this year, the company said it planned to double its staff count by the end of 2021 to around 1,400 employees.

Huffman told the Times that the new funding would be used to improve product features, focusing on how to make the site easier for first-time users and help its communities expand internationally. He said Reddit is working to enhance its video products to expand its advertising revenue, part of it is its self-service advertising system targeting small and medium-size business marketers.

“The first priority on the product is just making Reddit awesome,” he told Times. “We want to build what is best for new users, because over time it will be best for everyone.”

Part of the plan is expanding internationally. Huffman said the platform has been US-focused and he intends to change that.

The One Oasis Strategy is the proposition that if the best product drives key investments in a firm, it has the capacity to help other products in the business. Other products would feed from the best product, and overall, the company would flourish. Your best product is your one oasis; your business draws life from it, just as the oasis supports the inhabitants in a desert.

As you anchor critical investments to make the one oasis the best in the industry category, you need to have a double or multiple strategy to capture value out of it. It is symphonic like a great orchestra: the one oasis could be the known brand, but capturing value in the business could come from other areas.

In other words, most times, the brands which make companies popular are not where they generate most financial value. Amazon is known for ecommerce, but the bulk of its profits come from AWS. But without the ecommerce, AWS would not have been built. AWS is the play on Amazon’s one oasis which is the ecommerce!

What is your one oasis? What are your plays to capture value from it? I wrote in Harvard how this strategy shapes my investment calls.

Comment on LinkedIn Feed

Question: A member asked for the difference between One Oasis and Cash Cow?

Response by E.A.: “The concept is a bit different. Cash cow is a product or service that gives a lot of profit. One oasis may be a product or service that does not generate any profit but very vital to enable other products and services the company provides to make a lot of profit. Example Alibaba offers logistics at a loss to help Alipay grow. Amazon runs e-commerce at a loss because AWS is the goose that lays the golden eggs. This is possible because loss making e-commerce and logistics provides the critical number of people and data needed to drive other more profitable businesses.”