Seven years ago when I was alone in the world and exploring the bleak post-university reality of life outside my parents’ pockets, I found something that would make me rich. The “Young People’s Revolution” was a campaign put together by a company called Vemma, led by a charismatic rockstar founder called B.K. Boreyko. B.K., as he was known to the in-crowd, had come up with a genius way of disrupting unemployment, underemployment and poverty among young people using Vemma as a vehicle, and he was on a world tour to promote his genius business, complete with Armani suits, private jets, champagne and the obligatory reference to his two great kids who “kept him grounded.”
The never-ending scam
The genius business? Well, you would put in an initial sum of about £80 and buy into the “YPR.” This money would get you a few cases of an energy drink made by Vemma called Verve. Now you weren’t to find people who would actually buy Verve – apparently, that would defeat the whole purpose of “YPR.” What you were supposed to do and what would make you fabulously rich beyond your dreams, was to recruit other people to pay me £80 so you would become their Verve distributor. They, in turn, were not to sell the Verve, but to recruit other “downlines” to buy in with £80 in a never-ending fractal of Vemma Verve investment, with some of the money from new recruits going to you and most of it to your “uplines.”
Now if you’re thinking this sounds suspiciously like MMM, that’s because that is exactly what it is. The only difference is that where MMM was a basic pyramid scheme, “YPR” was a product-based pyramid scheme. That is to say, a Ponzi scheme, but with a useless product that had no market outside the scam network.
Within a week, I rapidly cottoned on to the fact that YPR would never make me rich, or in fact do anything more than hoover money up from all of us hopeful schmucks, making B.K. a rich man while leaving us in worse situations than before. I quickly cut my losses and ducked out. Others weren’t so lucky.
For the next three years, thousands of people around the world (including here in Lagos) struggled to actualise the bright yellow dream B.K. sold to them, until finally in 2014, the company shut down after legal action instituted by the United States Federal Trade Commission. It emerged that “B.K.” was actually Benjamin K. Boreyko, a serial scam artist with a preference for pyramid and multi level marketing schemes, who avoided using his full government name to avoid detection if people googled his name.
Within a few months of the very public government takedown of his unethical “business” which functioned by chewing through vast numbers of intellectually incurious teenagers and young adults, “B.K.” was at it again, this time with another company called “Bode Pro.” The product? An energy drink that promised to cure diabetes and hypertension, just like Verve. The business model? A never-ending downward funnelling distributorship that people could buy into with a certain amount of money…you get the picture.
The founder is a Demigod: An idea that needs to die
In Nigeria and around today’s tech-driven world, we live in a culture that encourages hero-worship of founders and other entrepreneurs. We are constantly fed with many types of aspirational and motivational messages hammering on the idea that full self-actualisation only comes from “taking the leap” and “making your dreams come true.” Practically every short visit to YouTube recommendations includes a detour into the fantastic world of brilliant and successful founders – a world that nobody mentions is completely fictional.
The conversion of founders into celebrities and cultural icons has been driven in no small part by the Tech industry. Whereas entrepreneurs typically had to work for decades and build slowly before becoming billionaires in the 20th century, the emergence of the San Francisco class of 20-something and 30-something year-old Tech billionaires has upended more than just economic conventions. It has also given the beneficiaries and their audiences the unfortunate idea that these people are “visionaries,” and are necessarily worth listening to.
In reality, as I have mentioned elsewhere, a 30-year old who built an app that made him a billionaire through share issuance is still essentially a 30-year-old computer nerd. Additional zeros on a bank balance do not bestow wisdom, intellect, maturity and insight that were not previously there. Merely having (or appearing to have) money does not in any way make a person’s opinion about anything weighty. With recent and ongoing events around certain supposed entrepreneurs who have built a following on Nigerian social media, it is time to learn this lesson finally.
Always lookout for the complete story
We have all seen that photo of Jeff Bezos in 1994 working out of a garage with a basic-looking personal computer, with the caption implying that he ran on fumes for years until boom! – Amazon blew. In reality, Jeff Bezos was the child of extremely comfortable middle class professionals who could afford to give him an expensive Ivy League education at Princeton University. This was followed by a successful career in investment banking at Deutsche Bank. Grass-to-grace, aspire-perspire-acquire story he certainly was not.
Bill Gates who famously dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft, was the child of a multimillionaire who cut him a 7-figure cheque to do just that. Mark Zuckerberg, also another famous Harvard dropout was not a street boy-done-good from a single-parent household in Compton. He also came from a background with enough comfort and safety net to permit him to drop out of the world’s most prestigious university and risk sacrificing his career prospects to build a website. Also just as crucially, he had a network that included venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who gave him $500,000 in summer 2004, barely six months after launching.
Elon Musk, the embodiment of the billionaire founder genius living in the future already, lost all the money he made from his PayPal investment on a series of failed ventures. He was bailed out in 2009 by a U.S. government contract that effectively gave Tesla and SpaceX more runway to carry out R&D and eventually launch a viable, commercially successful electric car. These are the stories that we do not hear about celebrity founders to help us properly contextualise their success and see them as ordinary people, as against demigods.
It is for this reason that despite a wealth of evidence showing that the most effective and successful entrepreneurs do not spend most of their energy curating a picture of success on social media, many people still fall for the numerous snake oil salesmen on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. That founder who can’t stop talking about “God’s blessing while showing off luxury watches and cars?” Probably a fraudster. The Twitter mentor always talking about how they “won the day?” Probably a pretender maintaining a facade. The Tech bro who spends all day on Twitter getting into fights and offering his unsolicited opinion on every issue from Mambilla to Manhattan? Probably living on investor money without doing any real work.
These characters are a dime a dozen, and they thrive in Nigeria because here more so than perhaps anywhere else on earth, we have been conditioned to view money and perceived status as the ultimate judge of status. They know this, and they are exploiting it to the full. There will of course be a Twitter pile-on here and an EFCC bust there, but these are infrequent one-off events that barely make a dent on the growing epidemic of personality cult entrepreneurs. They have created an entire ecosystem around themselves, aided and abetted by an obliging culture.
We now have to torch that culture to the ground and kill it with fire.
DAVID HUNDEYIN
