Before there was a Foundation Readiness Program, before there were workshops in Lagos, Accra, and Nairobi, there was a friend willing to fly toward the unknown — and get sent back for it.
Before there was an Africa 2100, there was a friend willing to get on an airplane with me and fly toward something neither of us could fully see yet.
He never made it past the airport.
More than two years later, I still think about what happened next.
The Friend
I had given myself four weeks. That was the deal I made with myself at the start — four weeks of discovery to figure out the problem to be solved behind the objective that had already taken shape during the earlier work with a coach: returning to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and giving back to the continent. The “why” was settled. The “how” was not, and I didn’t yet know where it would take me, or whether it would take me anywhere at all.
I didn’t want to do that discovery alone, and I didn’t want to do it with someone who would simply agree with me. I wanted someone who thought in systems, who could be objective when I couldn’t be, who had earned the right to push back because he’d already proven he would roll up his sleeves alongside me. That person was Travis Reed. I’d first met him years earlier as a consultant assigned to a transformation project under my purview — and what started as a working relationship became a friendship, built on the experience of that project and on how much our two minds simply worked alike. By the time I called on him for this, I trusted his approach to problems before I trusted my own instincts on this one.
Travis said yes without hesitation. He was, as he’d always been, generous of spirit and genuinely happy to help. And it made a difference almost immediately — not in the logistics, but in the posture I brought to the whole process.
The Challenge
Somewhere early in that process, I told Travis something I believed at the time was simply honest: given my prior failure with an earlier startup, and the hardship that came with it, I wasn’t sure a new venture was in the cards for me — wherever this expedition led.
Travis pushed back. Hard. He asked how I could claim to be running an honest discovery process if I wasn’t willing to trust the system enough to go wherever it actually took us. It wasn’t a gentle question. It landed because it was true.
I didn’t have a good answer. And I realized that if I was serious about discovery, I couldn’t decide the destination before the journey had even begun.
I opened myself to whatever the process delivered. That single exchange — more than any framework or workbook — is probably the reason Africa 2100 exists in the form it does today.
The Journey
The discovery moved the way good discovery should: we defined a hypothesis statement, validated it through an online survey, and let the results tell us what came next. What came next was in-person workshops and empathy mapping with selected respondents across three countries — a deliberate choice to meet people where they actually were, rather than where we assumed they’d be, and to understand the specific constraints and obstacles standing between them and starting a business.
We tapped local contacts in my network and began coordinating logistics for hosting aspiring founders — between 25 and 30 of them in each location. That’s when it got exciting: Travis offered to join me on the trip itself, eager for a first-hand experience of the continent. I’ll admit I’d never been fully comfortable taking on responsibility for a non-indigene’s wellbeing on a continent with so many unknowns. This time I wasn’t worried — Travis was deliberate and unflappable by nature, and he treated this as a purposeful trip, not a vacation, preparing for it accordingly.
Nigeria’s visa process turned out to be complicated, unclear, and ultimately misunderstood by both of us — mailed passports, in-person interviews, no one to call, no real timeline. Travis found an alternative, a visa-on-arrival option, applied, and heard nothing back but a confirmation email. He booked his ticket anyway. By then I’d already been in Nigeria two weeks, our first stop, waiting in Abuja while Travis flew in separately to Lagos, where my brother stood by to help him make his connecting flight.
The Setback
On March 1, Travis cleared his visa check and boarded his flight to Lagos. Hours later, everything changed.
- Travis: Flight was late. No one waiting at immigration?
- Travis: There is apparently an issue with my visa on arrival?
- Travis: The voa apparently expires after 14 days too?
We later learned the truth: the visa-on-arrival was never meant for a trip like his. It’s strictly for business travel, requiring a local corporate sponsor already registered with immigration — something none of us knew going in. Customs and immigration held him at passport control, and then put him back on the plane.
- Travis: No, door just closed
- Travis: Sorry my friend it looks like I am being returned to sender
- Chudi: OMG! I’m so sorry. Never in my wildest imagination did I think it would come to this.
- Travis: I’m sorry I let you down
- Travis: Not sure I prepped you enough to run the workshop alone
- Chudi: Stop! This is not on you in any way.
He had flown roughly ten thousand miles, cleared a visa check, boarded a connecting flight, and never once left the airport. He was put back on the same plane and sent home — and somehow, sitting in that seat, the thing he was apologizing for was not being prepared enough to help me.
The Response
Travis had designed the workshops. He was going to be the primary presenter. He was carrying the workshop materials — including the Legos we’d planned to use for the vision exercise. All of it went back across the Atlantic with him.
And on that flight home, before he’d even landed, he was already strategizing on how to bridge the gap.
- Travis: Stuff happens. Recall your friend’s comments on successful entrepreneurs run past obstacles.
- Travis: So what next for the workshops. Don’t be distracted.
I keep coming back to that sentence. Don’t be distracted. He was still in the air, still processing what had just happened to him, still unsure whether he’d even be allowed back into the United States — and his first concern was what would happen to the people we’d come to serve. He wasn’t saying the setback didn’t matter. He was saying it couldn’t become the story.
I ended up buying replacement materials locally. It truly was a shocking, deflating experience, and Travis spent his energy making sure I refocused on the reason we’d come rather than the disaster that had just unfolded. We spent the following week rebuilding the presentations together and closing the gaps his forced absence had opened — Travis running strategy and script from Jacksonville, me executing on the ground in Lagos, Accra, and Nairobi.
What It Actually Built
The workshops went ahead in all three countries, and they went seamlessly well. Those workshops weren’t simply an early activity. They were the first real test of the hypothesis that eventually became Africa 2100’s flagship Foundation Readiness Program. The problems participants described — the same constraints appearing again and again across three very different markets — gave us the raw material for what we built next.
It has been more than two years since March 2024. Travis has never made it onto the continent. I haven’t seen him in person in all that time.
And he still takes my calls.
Some organizations begin with capital. Others begin with an idea. I think Africa 2100 began, in part, with friendship — the kind that is willing to challenge you, stand beside you, and keep believing when the outcome is still uncertain.
Thank you, Travis. This one is overdue.
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