Startup Spotlight #197: Kenga
Startup Spotlight #197: Kenga
Kenga is a mediatech brand designed at the vanguard of Afro Gen Z culture and insights.
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I got the chance to speak with Arinze Obiezue, co-founder, CEO & Publisher of Kenga, about what he’s working on at his startup and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Obiezue is a 23-year-old writer, designer, and strategist.
He started his career as a Content Designer at Meta (formerly known as Facebook) in London, UK. At Meta, he designed product features that helped protect users from sensitive content across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. Before joining Meta, Obiezue had worked in e-commerce, strategy, and business development roles at top global companies such as Sanofi, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Chocolate City Records (Warner Music Group Africa).
Obiezue is currently a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University, pursuing a master’s degree in Global Affairs, specializing in Artificial Intelligence Policy. He also works as a Venture Associate Fellow at Sherpa Ventures, where he helps identify promising tech startups across Africa that are using technology to change lives and transform industries. At Kenga, Obiezue manages the company’s business operations, leads its strategic initiatives, and crafts the magazine’s editorial direction.
Startup Spotlight: Kenga
Problem: Little is known about the unique traits, behaviors, and preferences of African Gen Zs as a consumer class, as a people, and as political players, despite Gen Z being the largest demographic in Africa. Kenga fills that gap by creating media content and building communities that help brands connect with the people, ideas, and trends driving Africa’s Gen Z culture.
Market: With 444 million Gen Zs in the world’s youngest continent, the demand for media content that satisfies them and ads that can speak directly to them keeps growing. Each year, $5.1bn is spent on advertising in Africa as brands seek to connect with specific audiences and cultures. These parallel markets present an incredible opportunity for Kenga to create content and build communities tailored to Afro Gen Z culture while supporting brands profitably.
Solution: Kenga seeks to connect people and brands to the heart of Africa’s Gen Z culture and insights through our portfolio of media, research, and agency services powered by cutting-edge technology. For the past six months, we’ve been building out our first creative project, Kenga Magazine, which now has about 6000 readers in 45 countries and has been shipped to 4 continents.
Team: My co-founder is Desmond Vincent, who I met while working together on A Nasty Boy, one of Nigeria’s most renowned LGBTQ+ publications. At Kenga, our fully remote team of ten works across five countries in five different time zones.
Recent Success:
Obiezue: I’ve been most thrilled watching my team and I grow our skills and consistently raise the calibre of our work over the past few months to build a truly remarkable media company. A little over a month ago, we released the second issue of Kenga Magazine, which explored what music means to Afro Gen Zs and the different ways they connect with it. Through that issue, we’ve been able to establish a relationship with Spotify and are currently in talks with a few other exciting brands for a few other projects we’re working on. What’s exciting about this is that prior to Kenga, nobody on my founding team had created a magazine before, so we went into it with a lot of doubt and so much to prove to ourselves and to each other. Now, two issues in, after the release of our debut issue in April 2022, Kenga Magazine has built a readership base in 45 countries and counting. As we work over the next few months to fundraise our media expansion into video and audio content and the launching of our influencer/creator agency, I’m filled with so much excitement about how much more we can do at Kenga.
Recent Struggle:
Obiezue: The hardest part of running Kenga has been multitasking, having to be highly creative, highly analytical, and highly hybrid, depending on the task. However, I’ve found that compartmentalizing tasks based on left-brain and right-brain tasks make the struggle of multitasking easier. While journaling about my stress a few weeks ago, I wrote down what I called the ‘4 Ps of CEO Life’ to list and categorize the different things I needed to manage and lead in my role as CEO. The 4 Ps I came up with are: people, processes, purses, and paths. Managing Kenga’s people and path requires more right-brain thinking for me to know how to manage the different people on my team in a way that’s tailored to their unique personalities. Hence, they feel cared for as they work on projects that help Kenga advance on the path we’ve carved out for the company. On the other hand, managing Kenga’s purses and processes require more left-brain thinking as I work to ensure we’re working as efficiently as possible while maximizing our opportunities to be profitable.
Founder Advice:
Obiezue: Ego is the enemy. As founders, we’re naturally highly ambitious, skilled, and insanely driven with our fair collection of prior accomplishments. Those are the perfect ingredients for developing an oversized ego. As a founder, I’ve learned that the best idea doesn’t need to come from me; it just needs to come from somewhere within the room—from anywhere and anyone. I’ve also learned that it’s rarely about me, so criticism from mentors, investors, and colleagues must never be taken personally, but rather taken through a personal filter based on what’s important, relevant, and useful. I’ve also learned that as a founder, when I silence my ego, my work improves because I’m more open to failure, my decisions are more thorough because I seek out more perspectives, and my relationships are better because I’m unafraid to admit when I’m wrong and apologize quickly. As founders, divorcing our ego is one of the hardest things we could ever do because it goes against the founder's DNA itself. Still, it’s also one of the most worthwhile things we’ll ever do if we want to build truly remarkable businesses that change the world.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Obiezue: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Emmanuel Njoku, Founder of Lazerpay, a blockchain-powered payment platform infrastructure
Vidette Adjorlolo, founder of Sorted Chale, Africa’s best travel experiences company
Michael Sikand, co-founder of Our Future, the #1 source of business updates for Gen Zs
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