Vusi Thembekwayo: from a marketing start-up at 21 to backing Africa’s growth companies
A former Dragons’ Den investor and international speaker, Vusi Thembekwayo turned a hard early lesson about due diligence into MyGrowthFund Venture Partners, an investment firm for high-growth African SMEs.
Vusi Thembekwayo was born in 1985 in Benoni on Johannesburg’s East Rand and went on to study at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Gordon Institute of Business Science, followed by executive education at Ashridge and Hult International Business School. At 21 he founded a forensic marketing agency, which was the first of several ventures that took him across African markets.
A speaker who became an investor
Thembekwayo built his public profile as a business speaker, addressing audiences on strategy, leadership and sales. By his late twenties, public profiles say he had delivered more than 200 presentations in 21 countries. He also led the advisory firm Motiv8, in which a majority stake was sold to a US-based group in 2017, according to one profile.
The move to investing followed. He founded MyGrowthFund Venture Partners, a venture capital and private equity firm that backs high-growth small and medium-sized businesses in Africa, and the School of Scale, a training platform for entrepreneurs. In 2014 and 2015 he appeared as an investor on the South African edition of Dragons’ Den, broadcast on Mzansi Magic.
The lesson that stuck
He has been unusually open about failure. In a 2015 Forbes Africa interview, Thembekwayo described a 2011 investment in a steel company that went wrong because he did not do enough due diligence. His takeaway, that entrepreneurs must make sure “the legal side holds water” before committing, shaped how he now talks about structuring deals.
Books and recognition
He has written Vusi: Business & Life Lessons from a Black Dragon (Tafelberg, 2017) and The Magna Carta of Exponentiality (2018), and is also credited with a book titled Underdogs. He was named GQ Business Leader of the Year in 2020 and received the Guardian Award at the EMY Africa Awards in 2024.
Why it matters
Thembekwayo’s career follows a path that many African founders will recognise: start early, learn publicly, take losses seriously, and then use the experience to help others avoid them. For a continent where small and medium businesses create most of the jobs but struggle to find patient capital, an investor-educator model is a practical answer, and a reminder that a founder’s most valuable asset can be what they learned the hard way.
