🔥 Dash Investors Burned
Key lessons from the Dash Fraud, how founder personalities shape innovation, and supply chain funding woes
Nicolás Cerdeira
November 02, 2023
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💸 Story: Dash Fraud Is Bad For African Startups
🔗 Weekly Picks
⚰️ Failed Startup: Chinese EV Startup Explodes
💡 Insight: The Six Startup Founders' Personalities
🚀 Framework: Exponential Leverage
📉 Declining Trend: Supply Chain Funding Woes
This issue is brought to you by Masterworks, the fine-art investing platform.
💸 Story: Dash Fraud Is Bad For African Startups
Dash, the Ghanaian fintech startup, has closed due to fraud.
Dash claimed to have 200,000 users and process over $250M in transaction volume during its seed round, but internal investigations later revealed that the numbers were inflated and at least $25M was missing from the company’s account.
Not only did Dash’s closure result in financial losses for its investors, but it also led to a loss of trust in the African tech ecosystem.
Some takeaways from this failure:
It’s important to do deep due diligence, both qualitative and quantitative, in the early stages of startups.
Strong financial operations and governance structures are necessary in order to prevent fraud and mismanagement.
Local African VCs have to play a vital role in performing due diligence, leveraging their knowledge of the local market and ability to thoroughly examine business operations.
Despite the challenges, African tech still garners significant investment interest, with a growing focus on profitability and financial sustainability.
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🔗 Weekly Picks
Lessons from a failed B2B startup (Link).
Performance vs Brand marketing for your startup (Link).
How did Loom get acquired? (Link).
State of Health Tech 2023 (Link).
WeWork will file for bankruptcy next week (Link).
AI startups are at the mercy of Big Tech (Link).
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💡 Insight: The Six Startup Founders' Personalities
A Nature study analyzed data from over 21,000 startups to determine the impact of founders’ personalities on startup success.
The research identified six distinct founder personality types collectively known as FOALED. Each type represents a unique combination of personality traits.
The FOALED model:
Fighters: Spontaneous, tough, and uncompromising entrepreneurs who approach challenges head-on and are not afraid to push the boundaries.
Operators: Conscientious and agreeable leaders who ensure the smooth operation of their startups.
Accomplishers: Organized, confident, and mild-tempered founders who excel in managing and achieving their startup goals.
Leaders: Adventurous, self-controlled, and assertive founders who thrive on taking risks.
Experts/Engineers: Imaginative and intellectually curious people contributing their technical expertise to shape the startup's path to success.
Developers: Founders who bring innovation to startups with a blend of technical skills and creativity.
The study also highlights the importance of personality diversity within founding teams. According to the findings, startups with a mix of founders with varying personality types tend to be more likely to succeed.
🚀 Framework: Exponential Leverage
The concept of superlinear returns is an important but often misunderstood phenomenon.
While we are often told that “you get out what you put in,” the returns for performance are rarely linear.
Superlinear returns can happen in different areas of life, like business, fame, power, military victories, knowledge, and benefiting humanity. This means that the rich tend to get richer.
There are two major causes of superlinear returns:
Exponential growth: Something grows at an exponential rate, such as bacterial cultures or startups.
Thresholds: Occur in situations where there is a distinct cutoff point, such as proving a theorem or hitting a target.
The steeper the return curve, the more inequality there is with superlinear returns.
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📉 Declining Trend: Supply Chain Funding Woes
Investors have significantly reduced their investments in the supply chain management sector, with funding for supply chain startups declining in 2023.
According to Crunchbase data, US funding for supply chain startups in 2023 barely surpassed $1 billion, compared to the previous year's total of over $5 billion.
The global freight industry is currently experiencing broad pricing declines, with container freight rates and US trucking volumes and revenue decreasing in recent quarters.
Some supply chain startups have already faced major struggles, such as Convoy, which recently announced it is shutting down operations due to a "massive freight recession."
Other companies, including Flexport, Uber Freight, and Deliverr, have also experienced layoffs or financial challenges.
While some sizable supply chain-related deals are still happening, they are not on the same scale as those seen in 2021 and 2022.
Investors are becoming more cautious about sinking large amounts of money into supply chain startups, and the funding environment for these companies looks set to remain constrained in the near future.
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That's all of this week.
Cheers,
Nico
Thanks to Masterworks for sponsoring this issue. Investing involves risk and past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures and aggregate advisory performance masterworks.com/cd