How does one pivot from humanitarian work to launching a game-changing business in the luxury camping industry to becoming a Venture Capitalist? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, Marcia sits down with Sarah Dusek, co-founder of Under Canvas and Enygma Ventures, to explore her remarkable journey from non-profit endeavors in Africa to revolutionizing outdoor hospitality to investing in innovative change. Sarah's pathway to success exemplifies the entrepreneurial courage and innovation needed to thrive in today's business climate. This discussion with Sarah isn't just about her transition to an accomplished entrepreneur; it's also about her shift to a venture capitalist with Enygma Ventures, focusing on female-led businesses in Africa. Confronting the fundraising challenges as a woman in business, Sarah now dedicates herself to empowering other female entrepreneurs, sharing lessons gleaned from her own experiences.
How does one pivot from humanitarian work to launching a game-changing business in the luxury camping industry to becoming a Venture Capitalist? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, Marcia sits down with Sarah Dusek, co-founder of Under Canvas and Enygma Ventures, to explore her remarkable journey from non-profit endeavors in Africa to revolutionizing outdoor hospitality to investing in innovative change. Sarah's pathway to success exemplifies the entrepreneurial courage and innovation needed to thrive in today's business climate.
This discussion with Sarah isn't just about her transition to an accomplished entrepreneur; it's also about her shift to a venture capitalist with Enygma Ventures, focusing on female-led businesses in Africa. Confronting the fundraising challenges as a woman in business, Sarah now dedicates herself to empowering other female entrepreneurs, sharing lessons gleaned from her own experiences.
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Marcia Dawood
Well, hi, Sarah. Welcome to the show.
Sarah Dusek
Thank you so much, Marcia. It's so nice to be here and to spend some time with you today.
Marcia Dawood
Yes. And you're calling us from Cape Town, South Africa. So we're all excited to hear about what's going on in another continent across the pond. So please start off by telling us a little bit just about how you learned about angel investing, how you became an investor. And I know you're an entrepreneur as well, as well as an author, so we'll get into all that. So why don't you start a little bit with your background?
Sarah Dusek
Yeah, I consider myself an accidental entrepreneur in that my first career out of graduating from college, I went to working for NGOs and actually started my career in Africa. And I had no intention of having anything to do with business or anything to do with investing or anything like that, because to me, making money was like the dark side. It was know the, you know, the good versus the like. Taking on the empire is like taking on the capitalists. So this idea of becoming a venture capitalist myself, if you'd have told me this 20 years ago, I would have spat my coffee out at you, because it would have been really quite preposterous. But I ended up becoming an entrepreneur in my late 20s, early 30s, after getting really frustrated with working in nonprofits and getting burnt out and realizing that vehicle is not very good for driving change. It's not very good for solving big systemic problems. But actually, the vehicle that's great for solving problems is a business, because that's what a business does. It solves a particular problem with a solution and is sustainable because it has to make money to keep it perpetuating itself. So I got into this idea of business can be an amazing vehicle for driving change, doing good, which I know you are super passionate about as well.
Sarah Dusek
And that was sort of my entry point into entrepreneurship, was like, how could I do some good? Because that's my big passion. And driver, how can I do something meaningful in the world, and how can I contribute? So my husband and I went on this crazy, unexpected journey into entrepreneurship, but I had not the first clue about being an entrepreneur. I did not know much other than that you're supposed to make some money somewhere along the way. I did not know what investment was. I didn't know what venture capitalism was. I was very green because it just had not been the world that I'd been operating in. And so certainly becoming an investor myself was quite a surprise.
Marcia Dawood
Yes. So where along the way did under canvas come into play?
Sarah Dusek
Yeah. Under canvas was the company my husband and I spent a decade building together. After a few false starts in our business life and a few failures, as every good entrepreneur should really also say out loud, that there is no one who ever experiences any form of success that doesn't also first experience a whole heap of failure. So we definitely had our fair share of failures and finding ourselves needing to pivot and adjust and reconfigure our business ideas based on what wasn't working and what the market was telling us. But after our first three years of under canvas, we finally hit a business model that we thought was going to work, which became the business model that under canvas is today, which is a large scale tented hotels outside of national parks across the US, and finally figured out that that was our magic formula and started to grow and scale that company.
Marcia Dawood
And so under canvas is like glamping. Tell us a little more about that, because I like that idea so much more than just having to sleep outside on the dirt.
Sarah Dusek
Yeah, I liked it so much more too. For my sins, I married an amazing man from Montana who is an absolutely rugged, hardcore outdoorsman and loves everything to do with being outdoors and in the wilderness and in nature. And that was just not me. And I did not like the idea of sleeping rough out in the woods or having to go dig your own hold poop in. That was just not going to float my boat. But I did love the idea. Know him not being gone for a whole bunch of time and leaving me behind, and us, never the twain shall meet. So I remembered back to my sort of early years, my first career working in Africa, and remembering how spectacular the safari experience is and how just extraordinary it is to sleep out under the stars, but with a beautiful tent and flushing toilets and lovely, warm, lovely clean beds.
Sarah Dusek
And it suddenly dawned on us, maybe we could recreate something like that, and maybe that could be the bridge between us and it could be the bridge between us and the outdoors. So that was sort of the initial spark of an idea of a company. Could we recreate the safari experience for an american audience in the US? And that ended up being the company we built together.
Marcia Dawood
Now, you've since sold that company, right. But how much did you end up raising during that time? And what was the fundraising like?
Sarah Dusek
Yeah, it was very brutal because I didn't know that companies that are trying to grow and scale usually raise money. We didn't try and raise money. We bootstrapped the business sort of from the ground up. And I chuckled a gazillion credit cards and managed a little bit of bank debt. And it was very hard. The good thing about it was it forced us to focus on being profitable, because if we weren't going to be profitable, we were just not going to be able to sustain ourselves. So the very big plus for us, we had to figure out a business model that was going to work, and it had to be a profitable model. So we juggled like that for about five years, maybe even six years, before realizing that if we were going to scale or grow faster, that we would need to raise capital.
Sarah Dusek
And it wasn't until a female venture capitalist actually stayed in one of our camps one year. And she reached out and she changed my life. She really did. She reached out and said, do you know what? You have got a great business. I really think you should raise money because what you're doing is really extraordinary. And I see that you've got three camps now, and you could potentially grow much faster if you put some fuel in the tank, if you put some capital in the bank and help to help you grow. And I was like, well, that sounds like a great idea, but I have no clue how to do that. And so she introduced me to the idea of venture capitalism and what venture capitalists did and what they were looking for and how the investment process worked and the kind of numbers that VCs were interested in.
Sarah Dusek
And she took a quick look under our hood and looked at our numbers and said, yeah, you've got something. And I could see a pathway to a ten x here by the way that you're building and the way that you're trying to scale. And that's what venture capitalists are looking for. They're trying to make a ten times return. And it was all kind of gobbledygook to me. It was just information that I did not know. But as soon as she started to tell me what investors were looking for, she was also inadvertently unlocking knowledge to me as to how to build a valuable company, not just to attract investment, but also to understand the difference between having a small business and a business that is actually sellable someday and potentially very valuable, which was extraordinary information to me that literally revolutionized my world and is one of the reasons today that I am now a venture capitalist, because what I've realized about myself is I used to think I was very unusual and that I didn't know all this stuff. And what I now realize is that most women don't know these things.
Sarah Dusek
Most women don't know what building a valuable business looks like. And most women don't understand the difference between having a great little small business and what it takes to build a business that could be really big or could be and. Or could be very valuable. And that started my own sort of quest. And the challenge of actually raising capital as a female founder was very difficult and very frustrating. And I didn't have a tech company, which at the time, really was really what everyone was interested in. I mean, a bit like today, everyone's interested in crypto, has been interested in crypto, and now it's AI, and there's always some kind of buzz and trend, and if you're not in that space, it's kind of like, well, not interested in you. And I, of course, was not using the right language.
Sarah Dusek
I was still sort of learning what it was to walk in this space and build the kind of company that investors were looking for. So it was a very challenging fundraising journey. One of the reasons I became an investor and one of the reasons that I have written a book that I've written.
Marcia Dawood
Amazing. So then you sold the company, which was a nice exit for all involved.
Sarah Dusek
Yes.
Marcia Dawood
Right.
Sarah Dusek
Yeah. Selling a company for many zeros is a mind blowing event. I mean, it's something that no one ever really expects or anticipates. It certainly wasn't something I was anticipating and expecting. But I remember saying to myself at one point, it must have been sort of early into our fundraising era, six or seven years into sort of growing our business and realizing how hard this path was and how difficult it was to get the attention of mostly male investors that I was meeting. I think I met one other female BC, other than the original BC, who opened her little black book for me and told me all the secrets that were in it. And I struggled to connect, struggled to get attention, struggled to help people understand what I was doing. And the glamping industry at that moment in time, did not exist.
Sarah Dusek
We really were the pioneers for it. So this was like a whole nother industry that people didn't even think this was an industry. Today, that industry is worth about $6 billion in the US.
Marcia Dawood
Wow.
Sarah Dusek
It's definitely a thing now, but at the time, it was not. And I kept meeting sharks, I kept meeting people who I just didn't like personally, didn't like and didn't like their way of being, didn't like their way of doing business. And it just felt like this ugly. The thing that made me afraid of making money in the first place was I was encountering it for the first time with this Wall street mentality that was like, I'm going to stab you in the back if it serves me well, and I'm going to climb this. And I just hated it. It's horrible. So one of the decisions I made in my head was, if I ever do sell this company, if this company does ever become really valuable, I'm going to be the investor that I would like to find. I'm going to be an investor, particularly for women, and help them go on a journey.
Sarah Dusek
But of course, I still had to raise money and I still had to sell my business at that point in time.
Marcia Dawood
Right, so then you did start your own venture firm. So tell us about that.
Sarah Dusek
I did, yeah. We sold the majority of under canvas at the end of 2018. And in 2019, I did what I had said I was going to do a few years before. And we launched Enigma Ventures to invest only in female entrepreneurs, but focusing on female entrepreneurs in Africa. Obviously, my background had been from development work, both in Africa and in the Far east, and still strongly, passionately, and a believer in the reality that economies change the world. Like building an economy from the ground up by creating businesses and helping them grow. And scale is how we grow an economy, is how we help a nation move forward, is how we change people's lives. And so with that idea, we looked at the venture space in the US, and still seeing it was definitely very much in its infantile state for women, but also looking at the venture space in Africa and seeing not only was it difficult for women, but there was just virtually no capital being deployed across the whole continent.
Sarah Dusek
So you got a billion people in Africa, and when we started investing, there was less than $2 billion being invested at all in the continent, period. In the same time, it's something like 200 billion in the US, just for sort of comparison. So we just figured, well, we think our money could go a little bit further and maybe we could lever our experience and our knowledge and help create a bridge for other women, not only to help them try and fund their business, but also try and open up other markets to help them scale and grow. So 2019, we launched a venture capital fund, thinking it would be easy, on the back of being a successful entrepreneur, to raise funds for a venture capital fund. Not quite so much. Naivety was probably a really good thing, because I probably would never have launched our fund if I'd have realized how difficult it would be to actually raise funds to invest in women in Africa, or maybe just to even raise funds for women, period. But having got stuck in and actively engaged in doing that work, realized, gosh yes. This is definitely a tough uphill climb.
Marcia Dawood
Yes. So then from there, what's it been like trying to find companies, trying to find LPs for the fund, considering that you're in, were you just getting LPs from people in Africa or were you getting LPs.
Sarah Dusek
Yeah. Trying to raise from outside of Africa, trying to raise from the US, trying to raise from the UK, and trying to sort of help cross the divide with bringing money into the continent as the african continent, as opposed to trying to lever the money that was already here.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, we tried to raise money from the Middle east and us, like back and for those cross borders. And it's a challenge. Yeah.
Sarah Dusek
I mean, what I think I've realized is it is harder for Americans particularly to think about investing outside of America because there's so much opportunity in America and it's easier, it's simpler, there's lots of deal know, there's a really good ecosystem. And why would you make life harder for yourself than you absolutely have to if you're just trying to make money? The only reason to not do that is if you are interested about driving change and making a difference, and not only wanting to get a return from your capital, but also wanting to see something significant happen from that capital. And Africa is particularly rewarding in that regard.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. So tell me about some of the companies that you've.
Sarah Dusek
Yeah, so had a small first fund. We have done a $10 million micro fund for our first fund and had absolutely no trouble finding deal flow. And as investors, we're always talking about pipeline. And have you got enough potential deals to do, and are you finding good and good opportunities? And we have just been overwhelmed by the number of opportunities because there is so little capital being deployed on the continent and there are so many extraordinary people with incredible ideas building amazing businesses, trying to literally change the world. And so that part has not been difficult in the slightest. The only hard part being to decide who are the lucky ones to get some capital and who do you have to say no to because it just isn't enough capital. So I have typically looked at about 10,000 applications a year. Wow.
Sarah Dusek
The last three years and typically made two or three investments a year. So that's brutal. So we've now done 14 investments over coming up for a four year period now, and closed our fund one, fully deployed fund one, and are now actively trying to raise fund two. And we've done all sorts of different kinds of deals, but all with the premise of, is this business able to maybe touch a billion lives? Is this business able to rapidly scale and grow and is this something that we think we can do well and do some significant good through at the same time?
Marcia Dawood
Wow, that's great. And then that led you to write a book.
Sarah Dusek
It did. I mean, one of the things I noticed as I started meeting entrepreneurs, as I suddenly realized, oh gosh, I wasn't as unique as I thought I was. I wasn't as green as I was as green as I thought I was, but I wasn't unusual. And I started to realize, oh, gosh, all the things that I didn't know, most women don't necessarily know. And if you haven't been playing in the boys club, and you didn't go to an Ivy League school, or you didn't have investment banking parents, or you were well connected in the financial scene, most of the things that the speak of venture capital and the language around investment is unfamiliar to the average person, which obviously perpetuates it being harder for women to get funded if you're not using the right language and you're not in the know, or you're not very well connected. And so what I realized was there was this gap. There is inherent bias, obviously, in the system because 98% of the folks doing the funding are white men sitting in America. And that's going to influence who you invest in.
Sarah Dusek
Of course, just in the same way that I will be biased in who I invest in, just because I'm going to want to invest in things I understand or I connect with. So that's definitely a massive chunk of the problem, which we have very little control over. Right. But the other part of the problem is, can we understand what investors are looking for? One, and can we start thinking about building the kind of businesses that are investable? And what I started to see in general was that women were generally thinking too small, were generally underselling themselves, and were generally being realistic about what they thought they could achieve when, and not aggressive enough about driving the kind of growth and therefore the kind of return that a venture capitalist is typically looking for, the question then becomes, okay, if you now know what investors are looking for, if you understand what the metrics are that are going to be meaningful for someone who's looking to try and make an investment, how does that change or influence the kind of business you are going to build? And my idea was, gosh, if women just knew the rules of the game, if women had a chance to understand this is the expectation and this is what's required, would it? And could it make a significant difference in helping more women a get funded and b build the kind of businesses and change the stats around the numbers of women actually building big businesses, because it really is quite shocking when you think only 2% of women ever build a business that does more than a million dollars of revenue. That means anyone who has built a bigger business than does $1 million of revenue a year is literally a unicorn themselves because so few women do it. And I don't think that's because women aren't capable or women aren't as smart, or women don't have good business ideas. That just isn't the case. It's just we haven't had the generations of exposure.
Sarah Dusek
Women have generally been conditioned to think about building businesses that fit with a lifestyle of also having to manage and look after a home and children and all these other kind of responsibilities. And so we just are not in the loop. And so my challenge was, okay, can I help? I don't want to keep looking at 10,000 applications a year. I want every single one of those applications to be absolutely brilliant enough, investable enough for me to say yes. And that wasn't the case. And I wanted to see the quality of applicants go up. I wanted to see the kind of businesses that women were thinking about building change, and start using the right metrics and the right frameworks to think about building something that investor could get behind and actually make a fantastic return, and also do build something extraordinary that solves a problem that other people or men are just not thinking about. And so that really was the reason for writing the book and thinking about, can I create a bit of a manual? That's like the cheat sheet for women, the inside, like the VC who helped me understand, hey, this is what they're looking for.
Sarah Dusek
This is how you've got to position this. This is how you've got to think about this. This is the kind of speed that you've got to move at to be investable. Can I put all that down in one place? And can I tell my story at the same time? And the struggle of growing and building a company.
Marcia Dawood
Amazing. Thinking bigger comes out in September, but we will have a link so that you can preorder it in the show notes. Yeah. Really excited for this book. This is so needed. I talk to so many women, as I know you do, too, that like you said, I talk about it in my book as well. Generational networking is something that we just haven't had time yet to develop. Women have been in the workplace since World War II, so it hasn't really been that long and only in significant.
Sarah Dusek
Numbers, maybe in the last 30 years. Right. It's only sort of, in the last 30 years, one generation's worth, where we've had significant numbers of women actually in the work, almost as many women in the workplace as men in the workplace. I think we're about 75, 70, 80% women now in the workforce. So that's a massive shift. But you're right, we also haven't understood yet, I don't think, the rules of that game. And men have been playing this game a very, very long time. They understand that in order to win friends and influence, you wine and dine and you meet and greet and you play golf and you do a whole bunch of things that are not necessarily focused on sitting at your laptop day after day.
Sarah Dusek
But I think women have not only not necessarily understood that, but not necessarily had the time and capacity to network and build relationships in the same way that men have. And that's a gender issue, that's an ecosystem issue. I think it's a lack of role models issue, and it's the general lack of seeing other females being really successful. I mean, if you can't see it, it's very hard to be it. I remember even when I became a CEO, it never occurred to me that I could. It just wasn't in my wheelhouse, because I often, in the early days of our business, even though I did become the CEO of our business, because that was more in line with my giftings, I had a business with my husband, and I often thought of myself as his helper. I didn't like helping him, and he didn't like me helping him either. He didn't want a helper.
Sarah Dusek
He wanted a partner. He wanted somebody really in the trenches. But I often disqualified myself because the only role I thought I had to play, or could play was assisting and helping him. And so in my own mind, I know I've had massive shifts in thinking about what's possible and who I can be and what I should be, even in the last 20 years. And I'm just one person. And so I think as women, we're constantly having to navigate these big shifts about what's possible, what we're capable of, what's expected of us, where the ceiling is. And other women have to keep breaking the ceiling so that we can keep moving further, going faster, doing more, being who we've been created to be. So it's a journey.
Sarah Dusek
It's a journey. For sure.
Marcia Dawood
It is a journey, which is why I love the title of the book thinking bigger.
Sarah Dusek
Yeah. Because my hope is that if enough women can start thinking big enough and can start thinking about building the kind of businesses that are investable, we will get funded. It will be easier to fund us. It will be easier to be on the bandwagon with women just because they're looking and sounding and acting. They might be solving different problems, but we're understanding what it takes for big money to get behind us and make things happen.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, that's my hope. Yes, mine, too. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for being on the show today. Really appreciate it. And we look forward to the book coming out September.
Sarah Dusek
Thank you so much, Marcia.