How Helium Assembled A Star Founding Team

Unearthing co-founders and employing laborers in the premature days of a startup is essential to its survival and expansion. Nigerian health tech startup, Helium Health, piloted this challenge in its earlier days by cobbling together a board of first workers that got the task done.

Helium Health was co-founded by Adegoke Olubisi, Dimeji Sofowora, and Tito Ovia in 2016 to use technology to contribute reasonable healthcare aids for Africans. Today, it optimizes medical reports by packing them electronically; and contributes a revenue scheme and healthcare financing solution for clinics, and a telemedicine aspect. In 2020, Helium Health raised $10 million in Series A funding to expand its offering across African countries. Last November, it expanded to the MENA region when it acquired a Qatar-headquartered and UAE-based doctor booking platform, Meddy.

To comprehend the process of bringing into the world, a star company plays in a startup’s early days.

Daniel Adeyemi, the Senior Reporter at TechCabal, spoke with co-founder, Tito Ovia, and current Head of  Public Sector Growth at Helium Health, on the fifth experience of Building From Ground Up, Season 2, by the UK-Nigeria Tech Hub.

Ovia was appointed a Forbes 30 under 30 recipient and a champion of the Future Africa Award for Disruption for her work on African healthcare through Helium Health. When Ovia is not fixing healthcare in Africa, she is occupied with the Feminist Coalition, a globally-acclaimed women’s rights advocacy group facilitating parallelism for women in the Nigerian society with a core focus on education, financial freedom, and representation in public office.

Locating co-founders

Ovia’s childhood dream was to provide healthcare services across Africa, but that dream did not materialize until she resign from her job at the Lagos State AIDS Control Agency.

At that time, Ovia was making an effort to figure out what to do next in the healthcare space. She also craved to vacate the country. A buddy of hers, who attended law school with her co-founder, Demiji, told her about a minor group of people trying to build a tech and healthcare company, but none of the co-founders was in the healthcare space. The friend informed Ovia to talk with them because they needed directions and would need the help of someone like her.

So, Ovia met with Goke and Dimeji for the first time for a chat intended to last an hour but was stretched to 7 hours. During the q, it was clear that they were all connected by a similar drive and interest. “We boundn86 a deeper level of wanting to be able to provide value and fix our country,” Ovia said.

Persuading your early set of clients

Ovia explained that it was challenging to persuade people, that they knew what they were doing. When they attempted to get their first 10–15 clients, they were instructed to introduce extra folk that could verify for them. 

As explained by Ovia, another challenge Helium Health encountered in its initial days was observing the strength of each of its board members and only allocating associated tasks to them. “If you are a minor team of 5, everybody performs everything. It was a scratch, and all hands were on deck to get things done.”

As explained by Ovia when she was inquired over how she survived the conflict and regulating relationships with her co-founders, she said that she likes good conflict and doesn’t detect it as a disastrous thing because it indicates that “nobody is a sheep—it indicates everybody is speculating and provided in the growth of the organization” and that She feels conflict as a pitch: “If you can’t persuade co-founders on a plastic direction, how do you expect to persuade the external world, your investors, and board?”

As pointed out by Ovia,  she said; she and her co-founders take administrative and leadership courses and amass intermediaries who foot in during their conflicts.  She moreover, disclosed they have counselors and unbiased teams who are instilled in the advancement of the company and deliver their viewpoints on critical issues.

What makes good co-founders?

Ovia reckons trust is one of the things that makes a promising co-founder. “I have to be able to close my eyes and speculate that you are not changing positions to fling me off a cliff.” This show²  g0uld be related to vulnerability, she remarked. 

She also believes co-founders must have similar values.

Ovia believes it is important that co-founders be at the right place in their lives. Everybody has to be able to align on how and where they want to end up.”

 “What this means is that, if you decide to be a high-growth startup, everybody must have the time and bandwidth to build it,” she said. This is because she explained, personal responsibilities might stop some people from committing to such gruelling work. “Sometimes, you have a co-founder slacking because they have other priorities in their life.”

She doesn’t believe that every entrepreneur craves a co-founder. Although, she believes every founder needs a strong executive team: a chief financial officer (CFO), chief operating officer (COO), and chief technical officer (CTO) “This is because, if anything goes bad, the strong executive team that you’ve built can do the heavy lifting.”

She warned against dashing into a co-founder association because it is like a marriage. 

Check out the Helium health website right here.