Joyce-Ann Wainaina

Fund: Chui Ventures 

Thesis: Investing in African entrepreneurs solving mass-market problems with a gender equity lens

Fund size: $16 million

Companies funded to date: 16

How she’s making the world a better place: Believing in the best founders in her home continent and making sure female founders get 50% of the opportunities to build companies as the men. 

On paper, there was nothing wrong with Joyce-Ann Wainaina’s life. 

She was living in her native Nairobi, Kenya, with a rewarding, successful career as an investment banker. She’d been educated in the United States and had the pride of returning home to make a difference across her home continent. She’d raised two beautiful, successful daughters: one a lawyer and one also in banking at JP Morgan in New York. 

She golfed on the weekends, like so many bankers anywhere in the world. And in her spare time, she invested even more in the future of Africa, backing entrepreneurs as an angel investor for over seven years, half of them women. 

That should have been enough.

But over time, things started to get emotionally lopsided for her. 

This angel investing thing, which started out of “maybe guilt?” she says, began to consume more and more of her interest, attention, and passion. And banking lost more and more of it. 

She saw these entrepreneurs as the future of her home continent, and a bank couldn’t– and shouldn’t, because of the risk– serve them. That was the job of venture capital. And she wasn’t a VC. 

She didn’t want to be one. 

Did she?

She was on a sabbatical when her daughters came to her and said, “What you’re doing with all of this angel investing is really important. Why don’t you consider putting a structure together, and we’ll help?”

Before that, it had never once occurred to Wainaina to become a VC.

Soon after that, one of them forwarded her an email that mentioned Decile Group’s VC Lab accelerator. And it just so happened, she was coming to America to be a guest teacher at Yale during the fall semester, and the timing overlapped perfectly with the upcoming cohort. She applied and got in. 

She started a strange few months as a teacher at Yale and a student in VC Lab. She taught on Mondays and held office hours for her students. And on Wednesdays, she was a student in the accelerator and went to the accelerator’s office hours. 

“You know what they say, ‘When a student is ready, a teacher appears’,” she says. “I didn’t hear about VC Lab from anyone. I didn’t know about it from anyone at the time. I just happened to get a link to it in an email. The cohort was starting at the exact same time, and I was like: ‘Something wants me to do this.’”

The result was Chui Ventures, a pan-African seed-stage fund with a gender-equity focus, backing startups that build mass-market companies. These were the same kinds of businesses she had backed successfully for seven years as an angel investor, too. 50% of her investments go to female founders; 100% go to African founders. 

She originally capped her fundsize at $10 million, and it was hard going at first. The biggest “a ha!” moment from the VC Lab program was the encouragement to tap her own network, and to tap them early on, before there was a clear ask for money. To ask their feedback on the thesis and to involve them in the process. 

“I probably wouldn’t have gone to people I knew initially,” she says. “But soon I was looking up old university friends from the US and African business contacts and saying, ‘This is what I’m building, how does this sound to you?’ I was able to do our first close, and out of the high net worth individuals 60% of them were African women. Several of them were my golf buddies. I’m a lousy golfer, but it really works for business.”

Wainaina had a unique disadvantage to her mostly Western cohort: Most of her African network wasn’t investing in venture capital funds already. So it wasn’t as simple as just having a great thesis and a deck. She had to educate people on the asset class itself as well. 

Three months in, she met with the MasterCard Foundation. They were starting a fund of funds for African emerging managers, focusing on supporting entrepreneurs with a gender balanced focus. Wainaina’s jaw could have hit the floor when she heard this. 

“Who would have thought?” she says. “You can’t make this stuff up, right?”

She met 70% of their investment criteria– the most anyone had to date. Lucky, for sure. But she had grabbed the opportunity and spent seven years angel investing to put herself in the position to grab this luck. 

After MasterCard, she added three family offices, some more high-net-worth individuals, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and just two years after beginning the entire journey ended with a 60% oversubscribed $16 million fund one. 

“I make it sound easy, but to get 35 LPs, I took about 500 rejections,” she says. “So you have to keep sending stuff, and the most important thing is not to take it too hard. It’s not personal. It’s just that people aren’t ready for you, or your idea is one whose time has not yet come.” 

80% of the high-net-worth individuals who wound up investing in her fund had never invested in the asset class. 

Wainaina describes the VC Lab experience as drinking from a firehose. It’s a lot of information coming at you fast, and if you don’t keep up and do all of the assignments, you get weeded out quickly. It’s not a learning program; it’s a doing program. 

“It was very hard, but certain things I learned from the program were brilliant,” she says. 

She remembers one crucial piece of advice she got from Mike Suprovici at Decile Group on a pitch. It was deep into an exhausting process, which she describes as drinking from a firehose, while also teaching a course at Yale. (No small thing!) It was late one evening, and she was practicing her pitch– again– talking about all the reasons it was so challenging to invest in Africa, the advantages she would have, and he interrupted her. 

“No, you need to change the message,” he said. “You keep telling me why it’s so hard, why there’s not enough capital flowing into the continent, you need to tell me about the opportunity!”

“I remember that changed our deck completely, and it resonated with LPs out there,” she says. “We had a way heavier burden because we also had to pitch, and we had to educate at the same time.”

She says the most valuable support she’s gotten from Decile Group has been the mechanics of building a fund and the ongoing support from the Decile Partners system: The financial administration, the accounting support, and the relationship management. Getting a ready-made system allowed Wainaina to focus on fundraising and investing, and build a leaner firm from the beginning. That meant more of her capital could go towards investing. 

“The Decile Partners system particularly gives our LPs access to their own accounts 24/7; that’s really powerful stuff,” she says. “Now that we look around to see what else is in the market, this is real value for money. A lot of people offer one part of the package, but rarely is it all combined.”

I asked her how she would have wound up as a VC if she hadn’t gotten that email. Because clearly, Wainaina was destined to be a VC. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “I was done with banking. I may have gone into a fund of funds or private equity. I knew I had this calling, and I had to answer it. I’m very glad I started the fund, but I didn’t realize it would be this much hard work. If I’d known, maybe I would have joined a larger fund and been a partner. But now we will be that bigger fund, and we’ll hire partners.”