Claudius Mbemba
Claudius Mbemba
Co-Founder & CTO @ Neu
“We need to be more focused on optimizing for a better future, a more sustainable future, a more realistic future, because the path we’re going down currently is going to drain our resources and exhaust us.”
Action Prompts
These prompts are inspired by Claudius’ story and the prospect of choosing stakeholders and shareholders who align with your company’s purpose. They’ll help you understand the deeper forces that shape your investor relationships.
// SELF REFLECTION
Think of a time when you felt you had to compromise your customer/employee’s well-being for the sake of the bottom line/profits, and journal your answers:
• How did that feel?
• What did you learn from that experience?
// TEAM EXPLORATION
Get 60 minutes on the books with your core leadership team to discuss these questions:
• What are your criteria for bringing on investors and influential stakeholders?
• How might a scarcity mindset influence how you show up with investors, funders, and other influential stakeholders?
What does sustainable growth look like to you?
Resource
Listen to this town hall conversation and sign the the pledge as a commitment to build accountability for creating an equitable, anti-racist organization.
Designed by Rachel Rodgers & team at Hello Seven.
Claudius Mbemba (he/him) is Co-Founder at Neu, a vacation rental cleaning startup. He's passionate about raising the number of BIPOC in tech and venture capital and advises early-stage founders and aspiring entrepreneurs.
Along with his Co-Founder Kwame Boler, Claudius was nominated for the 2020 GeekWire Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and graduated from the prestigious Techstars Seattle Startup Accelerator. He previously worked as a top software engineer at Microsoft, and played D1 college football at his alma mater.
We chatted with Claudius about Neu’s overall growth strategy, and how they’ve responded to the challenges of 2020 through being attuned to the emotional needs of their team, deepening into their social mission, and being intentional about choosing investors.
At the core of Neu’s business is a social mission. Informally known as “the Uber for house cleaners”, but there’s a key differentiator between the two companies. As Black men, the executive team of Neu is keenly attuned to the impact of systemic racism. As a result, they have decided to center the housecleaner as their customer (rather than the host), weaving social justice into their mission. As a newly venture backed tech startup, Neu now must contend with appeasing investors, while also holding true to the sustainable value in ensuring their most underrepresented stakeholder is supported in providing a quality service.
A profound insight from this conversation was the degree to which the human experience was similar for Claudius here in Seattle to his engineering employees in Nigeria. As the ripple effect of the BLM movement reached Africa, it’s core message resonated with countless Africans. Why would this be, considering that the heart of the movement was rooted in American systemic racism and police brutality?
Moky Makara, ED of Africa No Filter, summed up the reason behind this well: “What we have on the continent is colonialism and in both cases, with racism and with colonialism, it's the white perpetrator and the Black victim,” she says. “So I feel there's a lot of empathy with the situation our American brothers are experiencing now.” (Source)
As Neu enters its next growth phase which will include navigating conversations with investors, Claudius mentioned that staying true to their core social mission will be critical. They’ll have to identify how to strike the balance between profits, and leaving the world a better place than they found it.
Conversations between a black male tech executive and investors is inherently dismantling the unhealthy, capitalistic, growth-at-any-cost system. Claudius’ life experiences of striving within this system that wasn’t designed for him to succeed, heavily inform how he shows up as a leader and his life purpose. These conversations where he and his team renegotiate the terms of what success looks like through harmonizing growth, profitability, and customer satisfaction and well-being is the boundary where the emerging social justice worldview clashes with the existing capitalistic bureaucracy. This is what transformational change looks like.
• • •
Neu’s Core Social Mission
The demographic of the average house cleaner is a female of minority descent. We’ve decided to make this person the customer we serve. Our social mission is to enable that demographic to really have the time and flexibility to earn a living wage. That’s what drives a lot of the decisions we make around how we create our business, and how we expand it. In the case of Uber, and the gig economy in general, companies often pursue profits at the detriment of those who are enabling the service. Empathizing with our customers, and generating more value for them is the core of our social mission.
Waking Up to Systemic Racism
We’re in the midst of a collective awakening to the systemic racism baked into this country. As an African American male, this issue has impacted me on a personal level. I believe racial justice is a key issue that we need to overcome before we can appropriately address some of the other big issues and they’re all interwoven.
Respect and Authenticity Come First
We feel that to do your best work, you've got to bring your life into it. We’re deepening into creating spaciousness and being attuned to each other's needs. As a leader, it's critically important to create a judgement free zone that creates safety for our team, and model transparency and authenticity. There needs to be space to discuss what is on people’s minds.
Going into the end of the year, folks will be under even more stress, so it is going to be essential for leaders to to look out for their employees, who may not step up and ask for help. It's going to be key for me to be more mindful and attuned with my team’s emotional needs.
Unlearning the Myth of Scarcity
Growing up in the US, you’re indoctrinated into that capitalistic mentality. It’s an over-index on what I call the scarcity mindset and the competition mindset. You have to win at all costs. It's a winner take all society. That type of mentality leads to this constant pursuit for being the very best at making the most profits. So, the biggest need I see for society is going from that competition mindset to the creation mindset, also known as the abundance mindset. This world has abundant resources to be able to create value.
Ultimately I believe that regular working people should be able to withstand a pandemic. We should be able to live for 6 months to a year without needing income and be ok.
There's already so much value in the world. Monetary value has already been created. Yet, we push like there's never going to be enough. That’s what's driving the current imbalance in the world where people are pursuing ridiculous profits consistently even though they've had great returns last year and continue to add them. I personally have the mindset that there's already more than enough. We need to be more focused on optimizing for a better future, a more sustainable future, a more realistic future, because the path we’re going down currently is going to drain our resources and exhaust us. Eventually I think it's going to lead to kind of a breakdown which is something we’re already seeing happen in 2020. That is something to really sit down and reflect on.
Balancing Profits and Customer Success
Neu just closed a pre-seed round and we're now going to be a venture growth company. In any business, the bloodline is money. It's a balance between pursuing profits, and leaving the world a better place than you found it. That's my metric.
The way we’ve thought about mitigating the risk of pressure from investors in the future is being strategic about picking the investors we work with, and letting them know that while we do expect to grow at high rates, it is not going to be at the detriment of our primary customer. You have to be mindful of the investors you bring on and make sure that they are aligned with your vision.
Personally I’ll do my best to make sure we focus on our customer and not just on profits, because I firmly believe that if you do right by your customer, the profits will follow. It's just a matter of allowing the time and the space to grow to get there. I know investors are very impatient with getting the returns, so they have to push for high growth. We're going to need to push back a little bit to make sure that, yes we grow fast, but we don't lose the vision, we don’t lose our perspective.
You have to lead with empathy to hit the perfect balance. If you're leading with profits in mind, you’ll over-optimize for that to the detriment of everything else. The biggest thing about empathy is having the wherewithal to reflect on how your actions are affecting yourself, your team members, others, and being able to course-correct.
• • •
Join The Tour & Get Your Free Guide Book!
Use this collection of 28 self reflection prompts and team activities. Each one is designed to support you in exploring empathy, and building a work culture in alignment with your values and vision.