Seyi Fabode (Varuna) & Ellen Rudnick

As a Black founder, Seyi Fabode, MBA ’10, has experienced the challenge of investors taking him seriously.

Fabode, an immigrant from Nigeria, recalls an investor calling him and his African-American partner in his first venture, Power2Switch, “boys.” It happened again 10 years later, after Fabode had founded the clean water company Varuna Tech.

“I have two kids, I’m a grown man,” Fabode said. “And you can tell there’s this, I’ll say, discount and disregard and disrespect that is just embedded in some of these conversations that I can’t imagine some of my White counterparts experience.”

In this podcast episode, Fabode speaks about his entrepreneurship journey with Ellen Rudnick, a senior advisor on entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth and the first executive director of the Polsky Center.

He took Power2Switch, an online marketplace to help people choose electricity suppliers, through the New Venture Challenge in 2009. And while it was not selected to advance to the finals, the experience was pivotal in helping to make the business a success, he said.

The entrepreneurial peers Fabode met through the program continue to serve as mentors and investors. The early mistakes he made in his haste to assemble a team taught him the value of hiring slowly. And Michael Polsky himself, the namesake of the Polsky Center and CEO of Invenergy, served as chairman of his board.

Power2Switch was acquired by Choose Energy in 2013, and five years later Fabode launched Varuna Tech, which uses sensors to measure water health in municipal water systems and alerts the proper authorities if something is wrong. The company is drawing interest as the world comes to grips with the dangers of water contamination.

“I feel we’ve timed this right,” Fabode said.

In his interview, Fabode discussed what makes a good hire, the need for more mental health support for entrepreneurs, and the challenges that continue to face minority and women founders.