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The first-ever Black investor on the Midas List of the world’s top venture capitalists, Ajao is looking to generate big impact — and profits — at Base10 Partners.
By Alex Konrad, Forbes Staff
When Adeyemi “Ade” Ajao sold his human resources startup to Workday in 2014, he didn’t expect to stick around. Launched just over two years before, Identified was already the entrepreneur’s second exit. Since the first — a Spanish Facebook challenger bought by Teléfonica for $100 million — he’d shown up at Stanford’s business school with some cash to invest in classmates, and made 30 or so bets. A career at a prominent venture capital firm beckoned.
But first, the budding investor agreed to help Workday get into the startup investing game itself. And so that summer, Ajao found himself in the nearby office of TJ Nahigian, CEO of a job-finding app called Jobr, looking to write his first official venture check. The partnership made immediate sense, Nahigian agreed. But he was too late: Jobr had closed its seed round just days before.
“I don’t think you get it,” Ajao told his fellow entrepreneur. “I’m not leaving your office until you let me invest.”
It was, Nahigian says now, one of the best decisions Jobr ever made, as Ajao helped counsel it through to acquisition two years later. And it was the first of many VC wins to propel Ajao, 40, into a near-instantly successful VC career. The cofounder and managing partner of Base10 Partners, Ajao debuts on this year’s Midas List of top venture capitalists at No. 96 due to his fund’s investments in Mexican logistics unicorn Nowports, Atlanta-based restaurant software maker Popmenu and a herd of later-stage unicorns like table manager Carta and design software maker Figma. His most successful bet yet: Nubank, the São Paulo-based digital bank that went public in December 2021 and now sports a market cap of about $30 billion.
The Midas List 2023
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Nubank helped nine investors, including Ajao, make the Midas list this year. It’s part of a broader trend of investors in companies that went public in past years dominating the ranks. Because they built large positions for so cheap, early backers of home-sharing site Airbnb, crypto exchange Coinbase and China’s video-sharing app Kuaishou, for example, all surged despite those stocks mostly trading today at a fraction of their IPO highs.
With fewer first-timers (seven in total) on Midas than in past years, Ajao is a notable exception. There’s Base10, the firm he launched with Nahigian in 2017, already the first Black-led VC firm to reach $1 billion in assets under management. Then there’s Ajao’s unique approach to profit-sharing, which includes historically overlooked universities in his venture gains, and which will generate hundreds of scholarships on behalf of the companies that take Base10’s checks.
Above all, there’s Ajao himself: a Silicon Valley transplant of Nigerian-Spanish descent known for his humility and warmth – and a persistence that has helped him snag shares in some of tech’s brightest startups.
“I’m an optimist,” Ajao says. “I do think the world is slowly moving in a positive direction.”
Lingering IPOs
This list of the 10 IPOs helping investors make the Midas ranks is full of familiar names. That’s because hardly any new businesses are going public these days. Among the companies staying private for now is the list’s overall biggest driver: $220 billion (valuation) ByteDance.
Coder capitalist
The son of a Nigerian engineer father and Spanish architect mother, Ajao spent his childhood based in Lagos, traveling across Europe to follow his dad’s work projects. He was 9 when they settled in Málaga, where Ajao, who spent his after-school hours coding in Cobol, and his brother were the only non-white students. Ajao embraced his outsider status: “Yeah, so I’m different. Isn’t that cool?”
A gifted student, Ajao and several high school friends began to set up websites and build simple video game modifications, fancying themselves “The Triple Alliance,” a sort-of hacking group. Ajao dreamed of moving to the U.S. and proving himself at a school like Princeton or Stanford; following the death of his mother while still a teenager, he stayed closer to his brother instead, enrolling at Madrid’s Universidad Pontificia Comillas as part of a six-year program where he would earn three degrees in economics, finance and law.
We got a lot of: ‘You want money for a website where you ask college kids to put their pictures? Sounds like a Nigerian scam.’
Ajao’s studies took him to exchange programs in Atlanta, Freiburg, London, San Diego and Washington, D.C., and to internships in banking, consulting and corporate law. But he preferred big data research and spending his spare time building websites for petty cash. With a former school soccer teammate from home, he launched a site that moved his friend’s party organizing and club promoting online and eventually drew thousands of students as a proto-social network. He was an exchange student at Emory University when a new site called Facebook rolled out on campus. “It was like a movie moment,” Ajao says now. “I was like, ‘this is a much better version of what we are trying to do!’”
With his friend and several others, Ajao turned to professors and affluent classmates’ parents for capital to build a local alternative for Spanish students, Tuenti. Without pedigrees or a strong local startup ecosystem, they scrounged up about $1 million. “We got a lot of: ‘You want money for a website where you ask college kids to put their pictures? Sounds like a Nigerian scam,’” Ajao says.
Tuenti’s founders were inexperienced, but they quickly built a working mobile app. That was enough to hold off a challenge by fellow Spaniards studying at Stanford who started a Facebook competitor for their country around the same time; over the next five years, Ajao held his own against Facebook itself, too, signing up half of Spain’s computer owners and, according to him, generating more web traffic in Spain than the U.S.-based social network and Google combined.
In a long-term global battle against Facebook and its deep pockets, however, Ajao knew he was outgunned. So, flush from the sale of Tuenti to Telefónica for $100 million in 2010, Ajao arrived at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business prepared to help student entrepreneurs as he’d previously needed back home. With his business school classmates, Ajao launched three startups: Identified, which used AI to scour social media for recruiting purposes, staffing marketplace Jobandtalent and a Latin American Uber rival called Cabify. Identified, which he chose to run full-time, was acquired by Workday for about $50 million in 2014 (it was mostly stock, which was eventually worth more than $100 million). Jobandtalent and Cabify — the two he seeded with cash from Tuenti’s sale — are currently valued at $2.4 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively.
Ajao’s partners in those businesses revel in telling founders that his investor talents surpass his managerial skills. “They’ll tell founders, ‘Ade’s great, particularly when he’s not running things,’” he jests. “‘Have him pop up and share stories when you need him.’”
Investing for the 99%
That’s just fine by Ajao and Nahigian, who joined forces in 2017 to launch Base10, a new-look venture firm they hoped would back meaningful businesses for the vast majority of the planet, not just to improve the lives of the richest 1%. The common thread of Ajao’s and Base10’s investment wins: a strong thesis, such as the impact of “automation of the real economy” — think physical shopping, logistics and food. One early Base10 investment is Popmenu, a marketing and ordering business for restaurants based in Atlanta. Led by founders with little tech experience, far from tech’s power corridors, Popmenu didn’t fit the criteria of many VC competitors. But by 2021, when Popmenu raised $65 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global and including Salesforce’s venture arm, the startup claimed to reach more than 5,000 restaurant locations.
“He intimately understands, because he was in my seat before.”
Another differentiator for the multilingual Ajao: an eye for applying his firm’s theses to emerging markets like Latin America. The region was historically challenging for venture capital firms looking for reliable returns, Ajao says; while still fundraising, some advisers even warned Base10’s partners to downplay their interest there. Doing so would’ve meant missing out on companies like Nubank and Nowports, which surpassed a $1 billion valuation last year. A higher difficulty, according to Ajao, translates into higher profits. “A bad day at work at Workday was losing a contract to Oracle,” he says. “But a bad day at Cabify was Mexico City kicking you out.”
True Unicorns
Game-changing AI startup OpenAI (valued at about $27 billion) and Indian edtech giant Byju’s (valued at $22 billion) were among the few unicorns that maintained or increased their last valuation, helping investors navigate a sea of red ink.
But it’s been a more recent move against venture norms to promise away some of his firm’s profits that has helped propel Ajao’s portfolio into elite company. Two years ago, Base10 announced the Advancement Initiative, a $250 million fund to invest in later-stage companies closer to listing on the public markets. The fund commits half of its profits to scholarships for underrepresented students at Historically Black Colleges & Universities, in the names of the successful startups that generated the funds.
At Nubank, cofounder and CEO David Vélez says that while he knew Ajao in his startup’s earliest days, the Advancement program played a major factor in his making room for Base10 to invest later, ahead of its IPO. But Ajao and Base10 have proven helpful in other ways, too, the Colombian-born entrepreneur says, including filtering up potential acquisition targets. As Nubank eyes future expansion in Africa and Europe, he expects to lean on Ajao again.
“It’s rare to get valuable product advice from VCs,” says Iman Abuzeid, cofounder and CEO of Incredible Health, who turned to Base10 and the Advancement fund to lead her Series B last year. Ajao has helped Incredible Health secure an investment from healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente; he’s also met recently with its CTO and head of product on ways to take advantage of new AI tools. “He intimately understands, because he was in my seat before.”
‘Purpose and profits’
Long used to excelling as an outsider, Ajao, who in addition to being the first Black Midas member is one of a record five Hispanic investors on the 2023 list, doesn’t want his identity to define his investing. From the start, he and Nahigian both say they’ve looked to combine profits and purpose without becoming pigeon-holed as impact investors. “People have tried to put me in a box, and it still happens,” Ajao says.
But as Base10 has grown more established, he’s learned to embrace his own story as an example for others – and find ways for the firm to intertwine its financial success with positive impact. In 2022, Base10 committed to work to improve HBCU exposure to venture capital opportunities, partnering with billionaire Robert Smith and Vista Equity Partners. Such universities have typically missed out on VC profits that have benefited other institutions. “They’re capitalists first and foremost,” says Keon Holmes, a managing director at limited partner Cambridge Associates. “But opening up to these institutions, and educating them about the opportunity, is definitely a game-changer.”
For Ajao and Base10 to succeed in the long run, however, they’ll need the full spectrum of the firm’s investing to generate results, not just the pre-IPO checks where it’s found some of its most recent returns. The firm declined to provide financial results for its funds to Forbes. At CalPERS Private Equity, one of the nation’s largest and most influential limited partners, investment manager Benjamin Lee says Ajao and Base10 “stack up very well” on strategy, team, organization and performance. CalPERs invested $50 million in one of Base10’s most recent funds.
“We aren’t perfect by any means,” Ajao responds when asked about how he sees his role in the industry moving forward. “But I am very hopeful of how things are going to look 10 years from now, and I want to look back and say I was able to be a small part.”
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