Venture capital disrupted: When your Rolodex learns to dial itself

AT THE weekend, I introduced a West African founder to a UK-based WhatsApp group of high-value investors and operators I'd been plugged into a couple of years ago.

- ANDILE MASUKU

The response? Crickets. Not because the founder wasn't impressive. She was. But ostensibly because the group had grown weary of introductions from people spending their social capital like venture money: liberally, hopefully, and often without carefully-curated specificity.

I'd used Ghanaian Jasiel Martin-Odoom's forwardable blurb template to craft the introduction. Martin-Odoom, who leads fintech investing at Accion Venture Lab, knows a thing or two about the mechanics of connectivity. He has published hundreds of consecutive days of content and built AI tools that he says have dramatically reduced his newsletter production time.

He created his forwardable blurb guide specifically because, as he puts it, ‘in a continent where there is so much information asymmetry, the right networks is the difference between success and failure in fundraising.’

The blurb was good. The introduction was warm. The silence that followed reminded me that human goodwill, unlike venture capital, doesn't scale. Every favour spent is one fewer in the bank.

Which is precisely why Andrew D'Souza's Boardy has captured my attention. Boardy is an AI 'super-connector’ with an Australian accent, infinite memory, and apparently inexhaustible goodwill. You call it, tell it what you're working on, and it facilitates double-opt-in introductions from a network it's building through tens of thousands of conversations and counting.

D'Souza, the former co-founder and CEO of Canadian fintech unicorn Clearco, says he wanted to build what he calls ‘an AI Richard Branson’ that could help founders find their zone of genius without depleting anyone's social capital in the process.

The numbers suggest something is working. D'Souza claims that within 24 hours of announcing Boardy Ventures, he received expressions of interest totalling $170 million from prospective limited partners.