Harnessing the Power of Your Portfolio: Lessons from the VP Founders’ Retreat

In August 2022, I was sitting in the lounge at OR Tambo Airport in Johannesburg, on my way to Botswana’s Okavango Delta. A trip I'd planned as a chance to decompress and reset before resuming my role at Ventures Platform.
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Airports have a way of creating space for thinking. With a few quiet hours before boarding, I found myself turning over an idea in my head: a founders' retreat, built around the theme “mindful leadership”, drawing from a workshop I'd experienced years earlier that I thought would resonate deeply with entrepreneurs.

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Then Kola Aina called. He wanted to discuss what my first assignment might be. To my surprise, the topic was organizing a founders’ retreat. The invitations had already gone out, and what was left was someone to help sharpen the vision and execute.

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I remember feeling a quiet sense of alignment when that call ended.

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That was the beginning of what has now become four editions of the VP Founders' Retreat — and one of the most meaningful initiatives I've worked on at the firm. As I reflect on the journey, I want to share what we've genuinely learned, not just as a recap, but as a resource for other VC firms and platform teams thinking about building something similar.

Why We Built This and Why It Matters

Being a founder is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Studies have shown that entrepreneurs experience significantly higher levels of stress, anxiety, and burnout than the general population. One study by Michael Freeman at UC San Francisco found that they are 50% more likely to report mental health conditions compared with non-entrepreneurs.

The journey is lonely in ways that are hard to explain to people who haven't lived it. Your brain never fully switches off. The pressure is relentless. And yet, there's a particular craving — for people who get it, who've felt the same weight, made the same impossible tradeoffs — that only other founders can meet.

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That's the gap the Founders' Retreat was designed to fill.

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At Ventures Platform, we believe our portfolio is one of our most powerful assets, not just the capital we deploy, but the collective intelligence, experience, and relationships that exist across our companies.
The retreat is our most intentional effort to unlock that asset: creating space for founders to step away from the daily intensity of running their companies, to learn, to reflect on the year behind them and think carefully about the one ahead, and, perhaps most importantly, to be in a room with each other.

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Across four editions, we've brought together between 26 and 49 founders per retreat, from Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, and beyond. We've watched founders who met at the retreat go on to become each other's customers, advisors, collaborators, and friends. What we didn't fully anticipate was that it would become something founders now plan their January around, something they say influences how they start the year.

One founder described it simply as “a rare opportunity to step back and think about leadership instead of just reacting to the business every day.”

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Here are some of the elements that make it work.

Lesson 1: The Environment Is Everything

The first and most foundational decision is the venue, and I don't mean this in a superficial, "nice hotel" sense. I mean it strategically.
Founders are, by default, incredibly busy. They are running companies, managing teams, putting out fires. If you put them in an environment that enables them to dash off and attend to work — a hotel in the city, somewhere familiar — you will lose them. Mentally, if not physically.
The venues we've used share a quality that I now consider non-negotiable: they are removed. They create a natural boundary between the retreat and the rest of the world. The serenity isn't incidental; it's intentional. It signals to founders that this time is different, that they are allowed to be present.

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We also strongly encourage device-free sessions. Founders understand this intellectually, but it requires active encouragement. The framing matters: this is not a demand; it's a gift. A few hours of genuine presence, protected from the tyranny of notifications.

Lesson 2: Founder-Led Conversations Are the Heart of It

We have brought in incredible external speakers and facilitators over the years: executive coaches, ESG experts from British International Investment, MDs of Nigerian banks, the CEO of Paystack, seasoned board veterans, and more.

And yes, founders learn a great deal from these experts and facilitators, but they often learn even more from one another.

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In 2025, we introduced dedicated founder-led breakout workshops: sessions where founders themselves took the stage to share real-world experience on topics like scaling a team, product strategy, and AI in operations. The feedback was extraordinary.

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In 2026, we continued this with a founder-only panel, "What Will Outlive Us?", moderated by a founder, where they spoke openly (no cameras, no recording) about culture, governance, and succession.

One founder's response captured what these sessions consistently unlock: "Learning from peers is always the best and helps understand the motivations and camaraderie to keep going."

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All this to say, these conversations have become some of the most memorable moments of the retreat

Lesson 3: Theme First, Then Everything Else

One of the things I'm most proud of at VP is how seriously we take the intellectual content of the retreat. Our founders are builders. They are intelligent, curious people who are hungry for ideas and actionable insights, not only networking and nice meals. They value content that challenges them and expands their perspective.

Every edition has been anchored by a distinct theme:

> 2023: “Mindful Leadership and Well-being” — the first physical edition, focused on equipping founders with the emotional intelligence tools to lead better and live better.
> 2024: "To the Moon: Visionary Leadership" — helping founders articulate a clear vision for their companies and lead their teams toward it.
> 2025: "Sustainable Growth Through Transformational & Resilient Leadership" — navigating inflation, currency volatility, and the rise of AI without losing what matters.
> 2026: "Leadership, Legacy, Liquidity" — zooming out from the day-to-day to ask bigger questions: what kind of leader do you need to become as your company scales? What will your company stand for long after you're gone? And how do you actually create financial value for yourself and your stakeholders?

The theme isn't just a headline. It shapes the speaker selection, the workshop design, the breakout topics, and the fireside chat framing. At our most recent retreat, for instance, our keynote speaker was Ladi Balogun, Group Chief Executive Officer of FCMB, who spoke about succeeding his father as leader of the institution and shaping its next chapter. The conversation brought the theme “Leadership, Legacy, Liquidity” to life.

When it works well - and I think it has worked well - founders leave feeling like they experienced something coherent. A weekend that had a point of view and was worth the time they chose to invest in the retreat.

Choose your theme by asking: What do our founders most need to think about right now? Not what's trendy, not what sounds impressive - what is actually hard for them right now, in their companies, in their markets?

Lesson 4: Balance is Key; Fun is NOT Optional

Founders appreciate high-quality content, but they also need room to breathe.

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Over the years, we've experimented with different formats for the fun elements of the retreat: sports activities, team games, boat rides, bonfires, karaoke, and open time, where founders choose how they spend it. What we've found is that many formats work. The specific activity matters less than the intention behind it - creating conditions where founders can relax, let their guard down, and connect as people rather than as CEOs.

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Some of the most valuable exchanges happen not in sessions, but during these moments: a walk in the morning, a late-night conversation that runs well past the scheduled end of the day. Not overloading the schedule and protecting space for fun and rest is just as important as the content itself, and getting that balance right is easier said than done, and is something we continue to refine each year.

Lesson 5:  Structure the Relationship-Building; Don't Just Hope It Happens

One of our core goals has always been connection: founders building relationships with each other that outlast the retreat. And this is something we've gotten progressively more intentional about.
In 2023, we set up a community on Circle.so to handle communication during the retreat and sustain connections afterward. In 2024, we added a WhatsApp community layer for faster, more casual engagement. We've also introduced pre-booked one-on-one advisory sessions with VP team members, venture partners, and external facilitators and industry/subject-matter experts, which have grown into one of the most consistently valued elements of each edition.

In 2026, 43 of these meetings took place across the three days. Founders describe them as targeted, practical, and directly useful in ways that larger group sessions can't always be.

The data on connections tells a consistent story too: at every retreat, the majority of founders report forming between 4 and 9 meaningful new relationships. Some have become business partnerships. Some have become customer relationships.

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But none of this happens by accident. You have to design for it - shared apartments so founders are living together, not just meeting in sessions; unstructured time built deliberately into the schedule, intentional introductions. The magic is real, but it does require some engineering.

Lesson 6: Keep Improving; Ruthlessly and Humbly

Every edition has generated learnings that shaped the next one. Some of these were uncomfortable but important to acknowledge.

We heard that founders wanted more peer-led sessions, and we introduced them in 2025. We heard that the office hours were valuable but too short. We expanded them, creatively wove more time for it into the agenda.

After 2025, we heard founders wanted more peer-led sessions, so in 2026, we built a full founder-only panel into the core programme, and it became one of the highest-rated sessions of the edition.

The retreat is not a product you ship once and maintain. It's a living programme that has to earn its relevance every year. The only way to do that is to debrief honestly, collect feedback rigorously, and be willing to change things that aren't working, even if you were proud of them.

One practical note on feedback: we share the survey during the closing remarks on the final day, while everyone is still seated in the room, and give time for people to fill it in before they leave. It sounds like a small thing, but it means the feedback is rich, immediate, and representative.

Document everything. Every edition. The learnings are cumulative, and they compound.

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What This Has Meant for Our Portfolio

Four editions in, the VP Founders' Retreat has become more than an event. It's become part of the fabric of how we support founders and how founders understand what it means to be part of the Ventures Platform community.

We've seen founders take the frameworks from our retreats and build their own company off-sites around them. We've seen mentoring relationships form between early-stage and later-stage founders that have quietly shaped strategic decisions. We've seen people arrive depleted and leave re-energised — not because we gave them answers, but because we gave them a room full of people who understood the question.

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Perhaps the biggest lesson from four editions of doing this goes beyond retreat design: venture firms can unlock enormous value by deliberately harnessing the strength of their founder community. Founders are often heads down in their own companies, and communities like this don't emerge on their own.  If you want a portfolio to become a real network, you have to design the conditions for it.

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As a portfolio grows, founders naturally sit at different stages of the journey: navigating product-market fit, scaling teams, or preparing for liquidity events. When they come together, that diversity of experience becomes an asset. The portfolio begins to support the portfolio.

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The Founders' Retreat is simply one way to unlock that potential. There are many others. What matters most is recognising that within every portfolio lies a powerful community of builders, and that when it's brought together thoughtfully, it can become one of the most valuable things a venture firm offers.

If you're a VC firm wondering whether this kind of investment is worth it: it is. Not because it looks good in a report or on socials, but because founders are human beings doing extraordinarily hard work, and one of the most powerful things you can offer them, alongside capital and connections, is the experience of not being alone in it.

And sometimes, all it takes to start is a phone call in an airport lounge. 

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The VP Founders' Retreat is an annual initiative by Ventures Platform, made possible with the generous support of AfricaGrow and Proparco. Special thanks to every founder, facilitator, speaker, and LP who has been part of this journey.

‍ Watch the highlight from the 2026 Founders Retreat