💼 The Best African Investor You've Never Heard Of

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• The Best African Investor You’ve Never Heard of 👀

Today we’re diving into one of Africa’s most important investors that you probably don’t know about: Helios.

But before we can understand the company, let’s understand the man behind it.

That’s why I’m doing this story in two parts.

Meet, Tope Lawani. 

The Oracle of Ibadan.

Tope Lawani connects global capital and know-how to African talent and businesses.

Over the last 20 years, he and Babatunde Soyoye built Helios into Africa’s largest private investment firm.

And today, Helios is an African Giant.

With investments of over $3.6 billion in African businesses.

But this wasn’t always the case.

Lawani's experiences shaped Helios. 

He saw how money can help the poorest and most vulnerable people and nations step out of poverty. 

In this two-part series, we will spend the first part diving into The Story of Tope.

👇🏾

Let’s go.

The Early Days

Born in Nigeria.

Four months after the Nigerian Civil War.

Tope grew up in Ibadan. The capital of Oyo State. About 128 km from Lagos.

Ibadan was at the time one of the largest cities on the continent. 

His dad was an information scientist at IITA then.

A deeply respected global research institution.

And the Lawani family lived on campus.

Introducing a young Tope to close to 100 nationalities.

5 houses down the street from him, lived researchers from Taiwan, Israel, Korea, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone.

This multicultural environment shaped Tope.

Making him comfortable with people from everywhere.

While also exposing him to diverse perspectives.

He went to a local primary school in Ibadan.  

Then later on went to high school in the middle of the country.

Where he met sons of presidents to students who were the first in their families to attend school.

Giving him an appreciation for how much good fortune plays in life.

It was not lost on him that he had already won the lottery.

His high school experience was a defining moment.

A lesson that taught him to use his capabilities to the best of his abilities to do something with his life.

 Moving to the U.S

Tope left Nigeria at 17 to study in the U.S.

He went to M.I.T. to study Chemical Engineering in Sept of 1987. 

An obvious degree choice then, considering the Nigerian Oil Boom in the 70’s and 80’s.

A month later, on October 19^th, the famous 1987 stock market crash happened, changing the course of his life.

Before the crash, he had no previous exposure to the financial markets.

But after that, it was all he read about.

From the book, Barbarians at the Gate.

News stories about insider trading scandals.

To exposés on Ivan Boesky, Dennis Levine and the collapse of Drexel Burnham.

 By the end of the year, when the popular film Wall Street came out, Tope had decided that Private Equity (PE) was what he wanted to do.

He joined The Walt Disney Company as soon as he graduated.

Working as a Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) analyst for a year.

Analyzing potential acquisitions and business lines for the company.

He then joined Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School to do a JD/MBA.

A joint degree in business and law.

His Harvard college application essay outlined his plans to be a PE investor in Africa. 

Inspired by Joe Flom and Marty Lipton, pioneering M&A lawyers in the 80’s.

Tope chose Law School to learn how to make deals.

And Business School to learn the tools of the trade that he needed to be a PE investor.

Chasing The Dream

In 1996, he joined TPG in San Francisco as employee no 11.

Working on the buyout of J Crew Group.

A deal he scouted in his final year of graduate school.

 Tope’s relationship-building skills landed him the deal.

Lawani was introduced to Emily Woods (founder of J Crew), through Cary Woods (Tope’s friend) and Emily’s husband.  

Emily wanted to get out of her father’s shadow (Her dad had funded the business).

She needed to buy the business to take it to new heights. So, Tope made the intro to TPG and ended up working on the deal part-time through his last school year.

The deal closed in 1997.

And that’s also how Tope ended up on the J Crew Catalog as a fashion model.😂

Tope thrived at TPG. Doing things that no 25/26-year-old had no business doing. Learning the ins and outs of building an investment business. The importance of hiring highly creative, entrepreneurial people.

TPG created an environment where the best idea wins. A truth-seeking approach that would serve Tope well at his future firm, Helios.

Working at TPG got him thinking about the limits of the PE model.

And how to think about scale when building an investment business.

Lawani led the execution of over $10 billion worth of buyouts at TPG.

From Burger King, Debenhams to Scottish and Newcastle Retail.

But through all that, he never got the chance to invest in Africa.

It was during his visits home, while at TPG, that he saw the growing privatization and rise of tech changing the continent.

Planting a seed of an idea that would pull him back to Africa.

The penny dropped when he met Babatunde Soyoye when he moved to TPG’s London office.

Baba was a fellow Nigerian, a trained engineer and an MBA graduate like himself.

He grew up in Nigeria. Studied Electrical engineering at King’s College London. Then did his MBA at Imperial College London.

It was like Warren Buffett meeting Charlie Munger. 

They had a shared vision.

With goals beyond making money, of helping transform the continent.

 There were also historical myths that Tope needed to debunk.

The notion that Africans cannot do it themselves.

Most PE firms operating in the continent then were not founded or managed by Africans.

So, in 2004, Tope and Baba left TPG to start Helios Investment Partners.

The 1st PE firm of its kind. Focused on Africa. Founded and managed by Africans.

And today, Helios has taken over the continent.

With;

• 📈Portfolio of 25+ companies across 30+ African countries.

• 💰Investments of over $3.6 billion in African businesses.

• 💼Exits of over $4 billion in proceeds to investors in their firm.

• 💵 Revenues of over $9 billion made through its portfolio companies.

But before they could do all that, they needed to prove themselves.

They needed to show that they could walk the talk.

Tune into Part 2 next week, to get the rest of the story.

In the next edition, we will dive into Helios' rise into the company it is today.

Inspiring, right? Let me know what you think of Tope’s story on LinkedIn here. 

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Cheers,
Jefferson.