At large venture capital firms, staff are typically split between two functions: the investment team and the platform team. While both teams interact often, they work separately, and only rarely do employees switch teams.
The investment team sources and selects the startups the firm backs, then manages those stakes over time, while the platform team helps the portfolio companies hire staff and introduce them to customers and partners, among other things.
That difference makes a switch rare for smaller firms, but for a VC firm like Launch Africa, which has built a portfolio of over 170 companies across 20 African countries in six years, that scale creates a problem most funds never face: how do you manage 170 companies across different sectors and countries?
One of its answers was to split the work into two: a platform and operations team that drives value across the whole portfolio at scale, and a portfolio management team that goes company by company into the numbers, the projections, and the runway.
Another was to transfer Jeffery Akemu, an associate for almost two years, from the platform team to the investment management team earlier this year.
