Tomi Davies
Harry Tomi Davies (born June 9, 1955) is a Nigerian British investor, speaker, author, entrepreneur, philanthropist and advisor to technology companies. He is the chief executive officer of TVCLabs, a technology business accelerator based in Lagos, and the founding president of the African Business Angel Network (ABAN), an organization that supports investment and mentorship for African startups. He has worked in information technology and consulting with companies including IBM, Marks & Spencer, Ernst & Young, and Sapient. He also speaks publicly on topics related to business and entrepreneurship in Africa.
Quotes
[edit]- A governance framework that begins with monitoring but never defines authority is incomplete. A system that can be stopped but not recovered is incomplete. An incident review that produces a report but changes nothing is merely administration.
- AI governance must operate continuously because the system itself doesn’t remain static. Models are updated. Permissions expand. Tools are added. Prompts change. External services behave differently. A system that appeared acceptable at procurement may become materially different after integration. Governance must therefore follow the full process through deployment, operation, change, incident and recovery.
- Organisation is the combination of people, processes and technologies that delivers the Proposition. If AI becomes part of that delivery system, then delegated authority, monitoring, containment, escalation and recovery must be visible in the operating model.
- This also affects how investors should assess the venture. The relevant questions aren’t limited to whether the company uses AI or whether the model performs well in a demonstration. Investors should ask where AI creates value, what authority has been delegated, how actions are traced, whether harmful actions can be reversed and who owns escalation.
- The evidence should be operational, not aspirational. A founder should be able to explain how the system behaves under normal conditions, what happens when it doesn’t, and how that behaviour affects customers, revenue, costs and risk. AI governance maturity is therefore becoming an investment-quality signal.
- Never undermine the power of local co-investors, especially if they belong to groups, syndicates, or networks as investment collaborators. These individuals can provide you with guidance on where to find good venture opportunity and help monitor and evaluate post-funding.
- I started out as what was then called a systems engineer in IBM writing microcode for the PCjr. At the same time, I taught COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages. This was in the mid-eighties. So, I came to Nigeria, I did my youth service at Elf Aquitaine. After finishing youth service they made me the head of data processing.
- Currently, I’m trying to finish A Fatherless People: The Secret Story of How the Nigerians Missed the Road to the Promised Land by Dele Ogun. It is the best-researched book on Nigeria I have come across. You start to get an understanding of how Nigeria ended up the way it is.
- I’m also rereading The Inevitable.
- For music, I’m on Amazon Prime and I love my Jazz. My favourite jazz artist is Stanley Clarke. There’s also Billy Cobham. That’s what I listen to.
- Watching: Currently, nothing, but I’m a Marvel comic fan so for anything like the Avengers, I’m in. But generally, I’m not big on TV, in fact, I’m notorious for not doing TV.
- Until these systems mature, investors will continue to hesitate, and founders will continue to operate below potential.
- I retain an active role in some of my investment portfolio companies at the board level mostly in a non-executive capacity. I also teach technology in business to SME’s at the Pan Atlantic University’s Enterprise Development Centre (EDC). Occassionaly, I provide advisory services to business owners who want to exploit technology in innovative ways and take on speaking engagements.
- Individual angels are few but growing across most African countries. In the last few years as individual angels and syndicates are beginning to materialise, we have seen the creation of local angel networks such as Lagos Angel Network and Nairobi Viktoria Ventures, national ones like the Ghana Angels Investor Network and Cameroon Angels Networks and regional ones like the Africa Angels Network *These angel investment networks led to the creation of the African Business Angels Network (ABAN) made up of networks from countries such as Nigeria, Cameroon, Egypt and Ghana. The aim behind ABAN is to increase the angel investor gene pool across the continent by supporting creation of syndicates and networks, providing angel investment education and advocating angel investment enhancing policies to policymakers.
- Like others across the globe, the Nigerian Tech ecosystem system continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, maturing in some areas, disrupting some sectors and innovating others while delivering unprecedented change in its wake. We are now starting to see startup entrepreneurs like Chika Nwobi, Tayo Oviosu, Sim Shagaya and Jason Njoku mature into becoming angel investors in their own right, how cool is that?
- I am fascinated by the new set of combined diaspora and local leadership teams in startups such as Andela and find it interesting how new ideas like Shoppey, SheHive and the summer code schools are coming on the scene.
