“There is more money today looking for deals than there is good deals,” Vusi Thembekwayo told a room of founders, and then, in case that was too gentle, he added: “This is the easiest time it has ever been to be an entrepreneur.” Thembekwayo is the founder and chief executive of MyGrowthFund Venture Partners, a South African investment firm, and a speaker and author by trade. He made the claim in a keynote to a founders’ audience that ran through trends, customers and a story about meeting Nelson Mandela. The parts worth testing are the claims that sound like data.
The money and the deals
Thembekwayo said he runs a private equity and venture capital firm that looks for family-owned, founder-led, long-established businesses and helps their owners scale them. His argument was that capital is abundant and good businesses to put it in are scarce. He said PitchBook, a financial data provider, shows more capital chasing mergers and acquisitions than at any earlier point.
He was frank about how such claims are dressed. “70% sounds plausible,” he told the room. “69.78% sounds factual.” He then showed a chart of the number of deals since 1985, the year he was born, and said the largest annual count up to 2000 was 40,000 deals and that the count had reached 50,000 by 2022. We could not confirm those figures. PitchBook’s reports sit behind a bot check that refused our requests, and the captions of the talk are rough on the numbers. What we could confirm is the scale: the Institute for Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances puts worldwide announced deals at about 49,000 in 2018, after an 8% fall, so tens of thousands a year is the right order of magnitude.
On the money side, Bain & Company’s February 2026 private equity report counts $1.3 trillion of buyout “dry powder”, meaning capital that funds have raised but not yet spent. The same report counts 32,000 unsold portfolio companies worth $3.8 trillion. That complicates the slogan: investors are sitting on plenty of companies they cannot sell, even as they hold cash to buy. Thembekwayo’s own explanation is narrower. “Most of us are taught how to start businesses,” he said. “We’re not taught how to build businesses that are scalable and sellable.” Whether that is what limits good deals in South Africa is his reading, not a measured fact.
Where he says black-owned businesses die
The line that opens the keynote comes from a stretch about the business-owner stage, when a founder has a small management layer and no longer does all the work personally. “This is actually where the literature tells us most black businesses die,” he said. “We die here.” His explanation was that owners “fall out of love and into life with the business”: the early stage is ideas, websites and campaigns, and then come tax, performance management and what he called implementation fatigue, the grind of trying, failing and trying again.
We looked for the literature. South African research does document heavy failure among small firms: a 2026 review in the Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences reports that between 50% and 80% of small, medium and micro enterprises failed within their first three to ten years, blaming limited management, marketing and financial skills, weak internal controls and poor access to finance. A 2021 case study of the Maponya business cites a figure of 75% of new businesses failing. Neither, in the parts we could read, pinpoints the management-layer stage as where black-owned firms die. That is Thembekwayo’s claim, drawn from his experience, and we found nothing that supports it.
The customer point is separate in the talk, though the opening splices them together. “If there is one thing I think we can improve on here, it’s how we treat our customers,” he said. He described a friend’s personal care company that refunds any returned product in full, however much has been used, because “it’s called customer service, not system service.” That is an anecdote about one firm’s policy, not evidence about failure rates.
Firing your sister
The most human passage concerns hiring family. “I hired my sister when the business was small, but she’s kind of useless now,” he said, voicing the owner’s dilemma, and then made the point that the decision is not made in the boardroom: “the real boardroom is your mother’s kitchen, not your boardroom.” His test was practical: “Find out what happens on Sunday when you visit mama.”
It is a joke with a practical core. An owner who cannot dismiss a relative without a family meeting has a management problem, and a business that cannot dismiss underperformers stops improving. The Maponya study found the other side of it in a black-owned business that lasted across generations: family cohesion, shared knowledge and strict disciplinary mechanisms were its success factors.
Legacy businesses and the second generation
Thembekwayo said people of colour are “fantastic at being founders of movements,” but “where we have struggled is to be founders of businesses that are multi-generational.” His grandfather started businesses and did marginally well, he said, but when his grandfather died, the businesses died with him. Thembekwayo added that he is the first person in his family to have a university degree.
The statistic usually offered to back this kind of claim, on how few family businesses survive to the third generation, is thinner than it sounds. We set out its origins and its limits in our piece on his earlier keynote.
This is the thread back to his opening. For a private equity investor, a founder who builds something scalable and sellable has not failed when it changes hands. The alternative, from his own family, is a business that lasts only as long as its founder does. He asked the founders in front of him why they were not part of the buying and selling of businesses, and his answer was that most of us are taught how to start businesses, not how to build ones that can be scaled and sold.
