Funfere Koroye,

What I’m currently working on is complex. Firstly, I’d need to explain what happened last year. 12 months ago, I got the Tech Visa; it is a Visa for tech entrepreneurs looking to move to the UK either to start a Tech company or join a tech company. At the time that I was awarded the visa, I wasn’t sure of which one I wanted to do. I’d say I was working freelance and exploring my options in the last 4months. In the last 8years of this Visa being active, only 4,000 people have been awarded this Visa in the tech category, so it is a very difficult Visa to get. More recently I got into an accelerator, incubator, and VC firm called ANTLER . ANTLER is one of the most respected builders in the world and one of the most qualified in the EU, UK region. They have about 50,000 Africans every year globally and they only accept 2,500 globally. It is really good, that is a 5% acceptance rate. With joining ANTLER, the goal is to build a company. The only role ANTLER has is that you find your co-founder in their program and if the two of you have an idea, you pitch to them and you instantly raise $125,000 if they accept your venture. Yeah, so that’s what I’ve been up to in the last 12 months.

I was working on something for the health industry, I was working on something for FinTech and I was working on Fashion. However, these things were more like projects than actual ventures and the reason I took this approach was that I wanted to see what I was very passionate about. I am going to tell anyone reading this right now if you want to validate what you’re working on going through an accelerator, incubator or venture-building studio. Yes, they’re difficult to get into but if you get into one it streamlines your pass to an MVP and your pass to what I will call your first start-up. Fail or Win the key thing is about meeting with seasoned professionals and not building on your own. So, yeah I was working on a few ventures over the last 24 months.

No, that’s not the case. If you know me on social media, I do a lot of things that people don’t do. I started a hashtag called #unfortunately. What I did was that I posted all my rejections in the last 24 months and these were all jobs that I applied for that said they won’t move forward with my applications. If I’m being totally honest, I have been failing totally forward for the last couple of years and the important reason to fail forward is to learn lessons and one of the lessons I learnt was that you need to talk to the people that understand what you’re doing, you need to apply for jobs and you need to hear NO to understand that you’re either not as good as you think or you need to upskill. I do not like sharing only good news so that’s why when I got into ANTLER I made sure that even when I was sharing this very fantastic news of getting into this VC studio, I was also shocked that there were a lot of rejections because for me, I build products and ideas based on trying to sell them to companies and I can tell you that out of 99 ideas I’ve sold only one just to put it in perspectives.