At Tekedia Live, the live session of Tekedia Mini-MBA, I will discuss “Building Great Companies and Brands”. My cases will be Indomie Noodles and Apple corporation.  I will explain four characteristics I have seen in great brands and companies, connecting them to the Grand Playbook of Business lecture. 

To become an enduring category-king in your business sector, you must possess these characteristics. With them, the firms build moats to protect their castles.

• Perceptively innovative: you are always innovating. You never rest, always pushing for better products, services and experiences. You outperform competitors with new solutions for unmet needs.
• Evidently inspired: you inspire your users. You are modern, trustworthy and inspirational, you have a larger purpose, helping people live out their own values and beliefs.
• Ruthlessly pragmatic: your customers depend on you and you have their backs, making life easier by delivering consistent experiences. You make good on your promises.
• Customer obsessed: customers cannot imagine living without you. You know what matters to customers, finding new ways to meet their most important. needs.

Time is 7pm WAT; Zoom link in the Board.

Good People, its economic anointing is something else: the most catalytic and impactful company in the world right now, when it comes to building digital technology companies, is an American company named Y Combinator. I have never seen anything like that. A startup looks for $200k on Monday but on Tuesday, YC accepts it, and magically, everyone wants to give it money to the extent that the problem becomes how to politely decline these investors.

A pure inverse system: the investors you have been writing with no-show and interest now become the ones asking for your bank accounts. Yes, they begin to beg you. Why? Some men in America have chosen to give you $125k in return for 7% of your company!

My question today is this: how can someone create something as powerful as YC for Africa? I am not talking of cloning YC website or its business model; I am talking of asymmetric impacts when someone endorses a startup. 

And if you look at the whole thing: the easiest way to become a paper $millionaire in Africa is to be accepted into YC. Of course, after the acceptance, you still have to compete and win in markets. But one thing is evident – there is a massive herding in the world of startups, and America has created a supreme club, and the impacts are everywhere from Nairobi to Lagos and beyond.

Some of the great technology companies in Nigeria like Flutterwave and Paystack graduated from YC. So, the results speak for this company.

So excited to share that I will be speaking in AXA Mansard’s Out of the Box 2021 event. It comes up next month, and it would be an amazing one for the category-king  in Nigeria’s insurance sector. Thank you for extending the invitation and thank you for the partnership and the support you have given us in Tekedia Institute Mini-MBA.  We appreciate Axa Mansard – you will find new markets and win more territories.

The fintech boom has been accelerating innovation for payments and cross-border transactions. Banks and non-banking firms alike are adding a touch of fintech to their services. To this end, Unit, a fintech startup that creates enabling tools for companies to create fintech services, has gained more funding to expand its mission.

Unit announced it has raised $51 million in Series B round led by Accel. Existing investors Better Tomorrow Ventures, Aleph, Flourish Ventures, and TLV Partners also joined the round.

The company was designed to be the simple and robust platform to empower the next generation of fintech builders, and has grown fast since launching out of stealth last year. This means, companies can build banking products in minutes using Unit tools.

Having raised $18 million in December, the Series B round brought Unit’s total fund to nearly $70 million.

“The new round will help us expand into more financial products, more integrations and a richer feature set, including SDKs and front-end components. All of our initiatives, from new product features to content, are designed to make it even easier for companies to launch new banking products,” the company said in a statement.

To that end, Unit announced the launch of Unit Go, the first-in-market solution that will allow companies to create live bank accounts and issue physical and virtual cards in minutes. Founders and developers will now have the ability to sign up for a free account, build in Unit’s live environment, and instantly test their products using real funds. Unit Go is currently in beta and will be publicly available in the fall of 2021.

The company said it has seen deposit volume grow by over 300%, and banked end-customers by 600% in the last three months. The goal is to capitalize on this progress and expand its services to a wider pool of users, even amidst competition with other players, like Railbank, Treasury Prime and Stripe, in the booming fintech field.

“We continue to be inspired by what both young and established companies have built on Unit, and we plan to continue sharing their stories with the world,” it said.

Unit said its interaction with hundreds of builders has cemented its belief that the next decade in fintech will be defined by tech companies using their unfair advantage — the flywheel of distribution, trust, software, and data — to launch massively successful fintech products in their verticals. That thus sets the company on a mission to help these companies bring those products to life, unlock value, and expand financial access for all.

Unit was founded by Itai Damti and Doron Somech, who are using their tech development ideas from the previous startup they founded, to accelerate Unit’s growth. The duo previously co-founded — and bootstrapped — Leverate, a Tel Aviv-based B2B trading tech provider. Unit has dual headquarters in Tel Aviv and New York City.

For now, only about 20% of Unit’s customers are what might be considered true fintechs. The remaining 80% are companies that are not but rather want to embed banking as a service into their offering, Damti said.

He added that the company takes what was once “a very expensive and complex process of 18 months” that includes finding and managing a bank relationship, building a compliance team and building a tech stack “that gets you to a competitive banking offering, and turns it into one API and one dashboard that helps companies launch accounts cards, payments and lending within five weeks.”

“We are acting as a company that connects banks to the tech ecosystem and banks are critical vendors and partners to us, but we see them as a built-in element within Unit, because we believe that the most excellent experience in this ecosystem can only come from software companies,” Damti told TechCrunch.

He explained that Unit is technically distinct in that it is actually building a ledger, which he describes as “the most critical and sensitive part of the ecosystem.”

By owning the ledger and not delegating, he said, Unit is “able to offer a radically better experience.”

“As far as the transaction environment, the cleanliness of the data that we provide and the fees that our customers are able to control and tweak, owning that ledger piece is super critical for the experience,” Damti said.

With Unit rolling out the tools, making financial services easier, many companies are expected to get into the fintech business before 2022.