On a panel discussing fundraising, growth and exits, Jason, a serial entrepreneur, said not every business needs venture funding, and not every founder should build with an exit as the main goal.
“The house you build to live in and the house you build to sell are not the same house,” he told the audience, drawing a clear line between lifestyle businesses and venture scale businesses.
One of his biggest warnings was about hype. Asked whether narrative or numbers matter more, Njoku said storytelling can help in the short term, especially in emerging markets where investors are still learning. But hype fades quickly.
“Almost everybody’s pitch today had something AI-enabled in there,” he said. “It’s like saying my company is email-enabled. Everybody uses email. In a year’s time, everything will be AI-enabled, so it will have less meaning.”
In the long run, he said, founders are judged on fundamentals. Revenue. Profit. Execution.
“In the longer term, you need to show real numbers, because that’s ultimately what you’re going to be judged on.”
Njoku also stressed that founders need to be more deliberate about who they pitch. He recalled flying to the United States to pitch investors for a business focused on West Africa and realizing he was spending most of his time educating them about the region.
That, he said, is a waste of energy.
Instead, he advised founders to be more aggressive about filtering their audience and focusing on investors who already understand their market or are actively exploring it. When investors come into your market themselves, they are already doing their homework.
Another moment that resonated in the room was his blunt take on investors and control.
“The moment you take someone’s money, you lose control,” he said.
Even with majority ownership, founders can find themselves constrained by investor protections, board influence and expectations that may not match realities on the ground.
He argued that Silicon Valley culture has made fundraising feel like validation, even for businesses that could grow sustainably without venture capital.
Investor Farid Arab added that founders should also be careful about how much equity they give away early. Startups often need multiple rounds of funding, and giving away too much in the first round can create problems later, both for motivation and for future investors.
Njoku took the conversation further by sharing stories from mentors who exited their companies. One founder sold his company for hundreds of millions of dollars, yet was frustrated because earlier investor decisions had reduced his personal upside. Another built a profitable company with minimal outside funding, enjoyed the journey and still walked away with a life changing amount.
The lesson, Njoku said, is that a bigger headline exit does not always mean a better personal outcome for the founder.
He also challenged the obsession with unicorn outcomes. In his view, a business making one or two million dollars in annual profit can already provide freedom, stability and a strong quality of life. Yet many founders ignore that path and chase a rare venture style exit that statistically may never happen.
“The probability of you actually selling your company is very low,” he said, urging founders to be honest about the odds.
Njoku closed on a more personal note about ambition and time. Extreme ambition, he said, has a cost. Years of stress, delayed life decisions and pressure that affects family and health. When you are younger, you may be willing to pay that cost. As you grow older, those trade-offs feel heavier.
His message to founders was not to stop dreaming, but to think clearly about what kind of life they want and when they want to start living it.
Because in the end, success is not only about valuation. It is also about control, sustainability and whether the business gives you freedom along the way.
