In an interview for the RootsToFoods Capital Series podcast, Jeff Hoffman, Priceline co-founder and Chairman of the Global Entrepreneurship Network, says the talent to build world-class companies already exists across Africa. What unlocks it at scale, he says, is coaching, connectivity and capital that shows up ready to listen.
Speaking on the RootsToFoods Capital Series podcast, Jeff Hoffman — who has built companies, Priceline among them, invested in hundreds more, and spent decades running the Global Entrepreneurship Network across 190 countries — offered a blunt conclusion: the world already has the talent it needs to close the entrepreneurship gap in emerging markets. What it lacks is the infrastructure to find that talent and the coaching to scale it.
“The talent pool is just as strong everywhere. Intelligence is spread equally across the world,” Hoffman said, recalling a pitch competition in Algeria where the winner, Amira, had “the passion and the intelligence — she just had no access to resources, education, or networks.” The same story repeats itself from Sri Lanka to Moldova to Kazakhstan, markets where ecosystems have matured rapidly since the pandemic dispersed capital and know-how more widely than before.
“There are Amiras in every country. We need to find them and help them.” — Jeff Hoffman, Chairman, Global Entrepreneurship Network
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Hoffman, author of the scaling framework SCALE, says the ventures that grow share two traits: they build product from the customer in rather than the office out, and their founders learn to delegate. “No company has ever scaled without leaders willing to let go,” he said. Most founders are simply never taught how to scale, and by the time they think about it, it is often too late to design it in.
If he were building an emerging-market entrepreneurship ecosystem from scratch, Hoffman says the first investment would not be capital or infrastructure — it would be soft skills. “Founders interview, hire, manage, resolve conflicts and present to customers every day, and almost none of them have had a single minute of training in any of it,” he said. “The founders who combine high IQ with high EQ outperform in the marketplace by a significant margin.”
On the investor side, he says the single biggest fix is closing “the understanding gap” — founders pitch without understanding what an investor’s mandate requires, then have no idea why the phone never rings. “The onus for closing that gap is on the founder, not the investor,” he said, adding that coachability is the clearest early signal of a founder who will scale.
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Hoffman’s episode closed Wave 1 of the Capital Series, a five-part conversation on why capital struggles to reach African and emerging-market opportunity at scale. Asked what he would add, he pointed straight back to the previous episode’s guest, Dr. Frannie Léautier of SouthBridge Investments, who had argued that Africa’s biggest risk is not losing capital but failing to deploy it fast enough. “Frannie is absolutely right: the fear of inaction is the answer,” Hoffman said. “The most important decision is often the one you didn’t make. If I do nothing, I can guarantee failure. If I do something, I already have a shot at not failing. The fear of doing nothing should be the biggest fear.”
Jeff Hoffman was speaking with Ovidiu Bujorean, CEO of OviBees Ventures, on Episode 5 of the RootsToFoods Capital Series, building on Episode 4’s discussion with Dr. Frannie Léautier of SouthBridge Investments. Wave 2 returns in September with conversations on African institutional capital, Indian philanthropy and Indonesian family offices.
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