The Most Uncoventional Entrepreneur, Nicos Nicolaou
Nicos Nicolaou talked excitedly about his trip to recruit students from Myanmar. I stared in disbelief as an American serving on the board of the largest university in Cyprus. Then again, I was in Cyprus where the board room overlooked the green line patrolled by the United Nations separating Cyprus in the world’s last divided capital city.
Myanmar should have come as no surprise — after all Nicos had also advocated for recruiting students from Iraq (“don’t worry — the northern part is safe where the Kurds are in control”) or Sudan (the southern part, not the northern one).
Nicos came to the board seeking Euro 100,000 to experiment with recruiting African students to an online university in conjunction with a UK university. There was no business plan, just a concept that Africa required tens of millions of seats to reach even half its demand and there was not a single African university in the Top 100 globally.
Someone needed to build the university for Africa, and Nicos Nicolaou claimed to be the only person in the world who could do it. Nicos did not fit the definition of any entrepreneur I had ever met. He was in his mid-fifties and very far from Silicon Valley. The first time we met he told me about his snail farm and foray into building UAV drones for the Cypriot military. His greatest business success to date was building a small college campus in Larnaca, Cyprus.
But Nicos started traveling to places I had to look up on Wikipedia. Malawi was the poorest country in Africa where the national delicacy was ants, but Nicos went and figured out how to get a university license there. He became a digital marketing expert who got over 2 million Facebook friends for UNICAF University.
When Google looked at their most impressive advertisers globally, they selected my former snail farmer from Cyprus who had figured out how to acquire students from Africa at a LTV/CAC of 3 to 1.
Everytime I pressed Nicos about how he was so successful, he would talk about understanding the people of Africa. The cynic in me would ask how a mid-fifties Cypriot could understand millennials in Africa. But somehow he understood that the price-point Africans could afford was only about $2,000 for each program. Massive internet connectivity issues made any modern learning management system unworkable in Africa. Students had to be able to access all their educational content on their mobile device, but UNICAF also needed local centers where students could go to get high speed internet. He hired a couple of students who ended up in Cyprus from Russian to create a proprietary, incredibly high quality, low bandwidth learning management system.
Perhaps what I am most proud of is the quality of the education that our students are getting. When compared with their British brethren on the same tests, our UNICAF students do as well or better. The average UNICAF scholar has their salary increase dramatically upon graduation. But it’s the human element of what UNICAF has created. When travelling through the Lilongwe airport with Nicos, we gave our passports over to the security guards. They started huddling together and talking excitedly in their native language and called a few other guards over. I started to get nervous — I had no desire to be stopped at Malawian passport control. They came over to us and asked “Are you the Nicos Nicolaou who is the CEO of UNICAF University?” When Nicos answered affirmatively, they all asked how they could apply to the school.
I was an “accidental” investor in Africa. It was quite humbling to realize how little I understood about the African experience. I had little to add to the board discussions, not that Nicos would have listened to me. Nicos seemed to break all the rules — that’s probably how we ended up with a learning center in Mogadishu.
When we wrote the first Euro 100,000 check, I assumed it was a silly experiment that would fail fast. If you told me that my crazy Cypriot friend would coax CDC, the development arm of the British government, that lead UNICAF’s A round, and Goldman Sachs to lead the $28M B round announced today, I would have called you crazy. Today, there are over 16,000 students throughout Africa studying at UNICAF university physical centers and online with plans to grow to over 100,000 students in the next 5 years.
At the closing dinner last month for the Goldman round, I asked Nicos to say something inspirational to the senior team. He smiled sheepishly and said “Thank you. Now let’s eat”. Shortest victory speech of any CEO in our portfolio.
