Bulls n Bears Entrepreneurship Zone :: Meet the Boss: Clive Butkow, CEO, Kalon Venture Partners

[Bulls n Bears]

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1. What part of your job keeps you awake at night?


At Kalon Venture Partners we invest other people’s money in tech startup
businesses. This is a risky asset class and making sure we have dealt with
all the risks of our investments – e.g. team risk, product risk, market
risk, deal terms risk, and to ensure we de-risk our investors capital – is
what keeps me awake.

Secondly, I lie awake thinking about how we ensure that when our investee
companies mature to the point where they have a killer product, a clear and
sizable market, and a robust distribution channel, they have the opportunity
to become a “scale-up”, which is a world-changing company that touches
millions or even billions of lives.


2. Name three traits required to survive in this role.


*         Relying on other people. I am convinced that nothing I do is more
important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, I bet on
people, not on strategies

*         Accept that failure is a process and not an outcome while not
endorsing it, but embracing it

*         Perseverance, drive and loads of energy


3. What is the biggest misconception about your job?


That being a venture capitalist (VC) is glamorous. Being a VC is extremely
hard and every day brings different unforeseen challenges. As a VC you are
not building one startup, which is difficult in itself, you are helping
build multiple startups. My days are unpredictable as I am putting out fires
consistently and every day the fires are different and challenging.


4. Who has had the greatest impact on your career?


My three key mentors at Accenture. One being a great sales and commercial
person, the second being a world-class leader and thirdly a phenomenal
relationship person. They taught me the three most important pillars of
being an entrepreneur, namely the importance of relationships – people buy
from people; the importance of being commercially savvy and being able to
sell – nothing happens until the cash register rings; and lastly the
importance of leadership – everything in business rises and falls in
leadership.


5. What is the best career advice you’ve ever received?


Let fires burn.

In every business I helped built there were always fires. Which fires do
you have the ability to extinguish right now, and which will be easier to
extinguish later (and vice versa)? If a fire is urgent, but you can’t
effectively fight it right now, you might have to ignore it and hope that
external circumstances put it out. Likewise, if it isn’t necessarily urgent
right now, but will wreak a lot more havoc if allowed to spread, you might
consider saving yourself the ordeal later by nipping it in the bud.

The art, of course, is knowing which fires to let burn. Prioritising your
fires tends to be a function of a combination of different factors. The
first is urgency: which fire is going to damage or kill your business the
soonest? This doesn’t have to be limited to fires that endanger the
existence of the business; for a startup, a fire that kills your ability to
grow is nearly as deadly in the long run as one that threatens to put you
out of business tomorrow.


6. The top reason for your professional success?


Focus!

I have learnt in building many parts of Accenture’s business and many other
startups that you can never be too focused: The main thing is to keep the
main thing the main thing.

I learnt that individuals or organisations with too many priorities have no
priorities and risk spinning their wheels and accomplishing nothing of
significance. In turn, laser-focusing everyone on a single priority – today,
this week, this quarter, this year, and the next decade – creates clarity
and power throughout the organisation.

I learnt the hard way, that focus is not about too many products or
services or customer segments. Some entrepreneurs seem to be easily
distracted by the next big thing which is very seductive and they cast their
net a mile wide and inch deep. If you go too wide too fast you can drown in
opportunities, you need to be careful. Too many entrepreneurs try and hedge
their bets when they initially start their companies – they try and be
everything to everyone and become nothing to no one.


7. How do you relax?


I am a learner and my downtime is spending time with my family, watching
sport and learning. Learning from reading non-fiction books about
entrepreneurs, leadership, technology and other autobiographies of
successful people. I believe that every person should be in permanent beta
and a work in progress, as learning is a journey not a destination. I spend
on average a few hours every day reading and on average read a book a week.


8. By what time in the morning do you like to be at your desk?


I train every morning, seven days a week, for an hour to help release the
endorphins and reduce my stress levels. Following this, I work from a coffee
shop and ‘eat my frog’. I learnt about ‘eating your frog’ from one of my
global mentors during my Accenture days. The metaphor, ‘eating your frog’,
means before doing anything else in the morning – including responding to
emails – you take your hardest, most unpleasant task and complete that
before you do anything else in the day. The ‘frog’ is the ugliest most
difficult task that normally will be relegated down the to do list and not
completed.

To summarise, until my ‘frog is eaten’ I don’t sit at my desk.


9. Your favourite job interview question?


I always like to think about a person’s trajectory or a business
trajectory, so I like to figure out if the person is a learner. Are they
open-minded? Are they humble? Are they down to earth? Are they getting
better every day? I’ll try and assess that in the interviews that I do, and
I’ll ask questions like: “what did you learn from that?” or “tell me
something that you learnt from that and how you applied that?” And I look
for specific examples of both what they learnt and then what they did
differently in the future. That will show me if they are a learner or not,
that they have humility to realise that they aren’t always right on
everything, and that they either can or can’t take fast action and really
put that learning in place and start to use it. Really just asking around
what they learnt and to share examples of how they applied that in the
future.


10. The biggest perk of your job?


Meeting literally hundreds of entrepreneurs from across South Africa and
the rest of the world. These people inspire me with their passion and
perseverance in solving some of the worlds biggest problems and particularly
on the African continent where we have some of the most significant
challenges.

Secondly, when I mentor entrepreneurs and help them understand that success
leaves clues and I enable them to compress years of knowledge and experience
into months, weeks, days or even hours. This give-back is extremely
rewarding and humbling as I also learn from every entrepreneur I engage
with.


11. In addition to your own industry, name one untapped business
opportunity in Africa.


As a venture capitalist we look for entrepreneurs that solve problems for
large markets. The two biggest areas I believe will make the biggest impact
on the continent is healthcare and education. By solving these two problems
with affordable and assessable solutions will change the lives of the
hundreds of millions of African’s who do not have access to either.

Former COO of Accenture South Africa Clive Butkow is CEO of Kalon Venture
Partners, a digital disruptive technology venture capital company based in
Johannesburg. --Howwemafeitinafrica



Clive Butkow

 

 

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