‘People have this investing  thing figured out all wrong’

“Remember, if you die in the simulation.” 
“Yeah, yeah, we know, you die in real life.” 
“What? No! You need to reset the simulation with this terminal! What is WRONG with you humans?!”

A young trio of gentlemen informed an individual captivated by the virtual reality goggles that while I was making my way to the building where my interview with the founder of Xeno Corporation was scheduled. I was left in total shock, but I did not try to look back to see their faces. It is a mystery. Not totally, but in part because I eavesdropped on them including ‘dream’ in their dialogue as I entered the building. 

In the meantime, Xeno’s first-floor office is a single room that has been partitioned off. It has a really cute décor. Ample light, artwork, flowers from the roof, and everything a contemporary designer could think of in his pitch to a developer.
Xeno essentially invests, saves, and pays yearly returns to its clients.  Mr Aéko Ongodia, its founder, outdid himself in a bid to optimise the things he could control—such as the interior design of his workspace—because he was starting from scratch. 

“If you ask me for the names of the plants, I don’t know … but we have a range of beautiful plants that are hanging from the roof and others on the side of each workstation,” Mr Ongodia says with a big grin on his face. 
Xeno offices are simply divided work areas with lovely chairs in various light colours, background music, and plants instead of a reception area, boardroom, or any other type of specialised office. In a way, they are eco-friendly.
The assets under management of this company, which caters to 100,000 registered investors, increased from Shs31 billion to Shs60 billion in 2023.

Happenstance
Mr Ongodia has a long, witty face and some grey hair. He likes wearing brown brogues and blue suits. 
As he says, “unlike other people, for me, the idea did not just come to me—maybe the realisation, but not the idea—from a very young age.” 

He claims he stumbled upon the financial market while still a university student. 
I show him a picture of floating lights from the roof reflected on glass, but with a door nearby to block the view, before he finishes. He laughs while enjoying the ambiance and at this moment he is stretching a little bit. 
A few minutes back, he was addressing his investors in an hour-long annual general meeting. The reflections on the glass just behind us appear very exquisite, akin to a work of art that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. 
“I just had that urge to be great in financial markets,” he says. 
Mr Ongodia first developed this desire in the late 1990s while watching CNN where there was a constant strip down indicating the Dow Jones had fluctuated by these points on the screen. His curiosity piqued. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is a popular stock market index that tracks 30 US blue-chip stocks and it’s mostly shown on a lower strip on my US broadcasts with small green and red triangles showing the fluctuations.

“So that’s how I went down the rabbit hole into Xeno. What takes it up and what takes it down? So if you answer such a question, it’s difficult to answer, and if you follow through for the actual answer, as I have done over the years, it’s still mysterious [laughs] but not completely, you might end up here” he says.
“So that’s how I discovered that I needed to know lots of math and a little bit of how the economy works,” he adds.

He decided to tell his friend about this brilliant idea that was ripening in his mind, even though his friend was not convinced then. These days, that colleague works in the same field as him but not in the same company. 
“You need to tell someone because if you don’t, this is a lonely journey. So I told some; some got interested, and others didn’t. If you don’t share it with someone, you run mad in the sense that it might actually be true that what you are thinking is great, fantastic, and has a future, but without sharing it with anyone, you wouldn’t know that you are wrong,” he says.
 
“By the way I describe it, it is very simple; it wasn’t simple. It’s hard work. I used to disappear in the basement of Makerere University during the day because that’s where the books were for advanced finance and math books at that time and then during the night I would go to the computer science lab, basically learning all this stuff. Am self-taught. Nearly all of it,” he looks me in the eye, emphasising this.

Education
According to him, if someone has a great idea, they should back it up with education—such as a bachelor’s degree—because investors and other people will not trust you with their money if you do not know what you are doing. 
“You have to explain everything deeply,” he emphasises. 

I glance through the glass window, taking in everything he is telling me, and for a moment I see the young gentlemen I saw crossing the road when I first entered the building, but it appears they were waiting for a colleague. Now, there are five of them.
I turn to face him again, but he is putting a cocktail glass on his mouth. It’s nearly done.

He tells me that if you want to run a successful start-up, you should be in the running to be hired by some of the bigger companies in the areas that you are interested in. 
“That is exactly what I did. I had made the decision to work exclusively for financial institutions,” he says.
This is reminiscent of the tale of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Inc, who began his career at Atari as a video game designer before founding Apple in 1976.

Starting a business
When the conversation gets heated, I ask Mr Ongodia about the theory that says businessmen—who are primarily the founders of companies—give up their most prized stakes to remain with less than four percent because they are perceived as being avaricious, ambitious, and all those kinds of traits. This is happening to Microsoft and Apple Inc as well. He chips in quickly. 

“Let me break it down for you.” I bring my recorder close to him.
“When you start a company, you need to raise money, and you are not talking about an SME; that’s not a company that’s an SME. A start-up is very different from that. A start-up is one that has been set up to grow so fast and become a very large company that is publicly traded. Its final destination is a very large company. The difference between the two is the growth rate,” he says. 
“In order to grow fast, you give up stakes in the process. The company gets successful, but how do these people who invested know how to get returns? They do so for capital gains. That three percent is three percent of a $100 billion (Shs3.8 trillion) compared to 100 percent of a $1 million (Shs3.8 billion),” he adds.

I get that, and then we get to the most significant query that every Gen Zer keeps thinking about. How, in this day and age, can I accumulate wealth? It appears that he was quite explicit about that. He smiled, answered, and picked up a glass to finish up his passion juice cocktail. 
“People have this investing thing all wrong,” he says. 
He explains that people think investing is all about acquiring an asset, which is okay. 

“But I just don’t think it is the right way. Investing is about objectives like building wealth and your time frame for that. This is when you look out for what set of assets you can invest in that collectively deliver that goal you want. And that’s how unit trusts and exchange-traded funds work. It’s not one piece of land, one building, or one sight, but a collection of assets—a portfolio. So that’s the portfolio perspective, so that once you start on that journey, the performance of individual assets doesn’t knock you off if I go south,” he concludes.