How the PPS Framework Changed the Way We Evaluate Founders at FirstFounders

At FirstFounders, we have always believed that the most important factor in a venture's success is not the idea, it is the founder behind the idea. Over the past five years of building and funding early-stage ventures across Africa, one question has guided everything we do: is this founder genuinely the right person to solve this problem?

For the first two years of our studio, we answered that question informally. We relied on interviews, gut instinct, and pattern recognition. Then in 2021, Zainab Adewunmi Aderinwale joined FirstFounders as Lead Venture Strategist and changed how we think about founder evaluation entirely.

What is the PPS Framework?

The Passion Problem Solution (PPS) Framework is a structured, psychology-driven evaluation methodology developed by Zainab to assess founder readiness and founder-venture alignment. It examines three core dimensions of every founder we work with.

Passion — Is the founder's motivation intrinsic and deep enough to sustain them through the inevitable failures of early-stage building? Or is it surface-level enthusiasm that will fade when the work gets hard?

Problem — Does the founder understand the problem they are trying to solve at a level that goes beyond research and into genuine lived proximity? Can they speak to the specific barriers their users face in a way that reveals real depth of understanding?

Solution — Is the proposed solution genuinely coherent with the problem the founder described? Or are they reverse-engineering a problem to fit a product they were already attached to?

These questions sound simple. They are not. Most entrepreneurship tools ask founders to describe their market, their business model, and their competition. The PPS Framework asks founders to examine themselves. That is a fundamentally different and far more rigorous evaluation.

What It Has Produced at FirstFounders

Since embedding the PPS Framework in our founder evaluation process in 2021, the quality of the ventures we have built has improved measurably. Our portfolio includes ventures that have gone on to raise significant institutional funding, establish national partnerships, and build category-defining products across Africa.

The most visible example is Terra Industries, whose founders went through our PPS-informed selection process during their early engagement with FirstFounders. Terra Industries has since raised $34 million in institutional funding, one of the largest seed rounds in African tech history in a round led by 8VC, the firm founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, with participation from Lux Capital and other top-tier global investors.

Other portfolio ventures including PocketLawyers, PayAfta, and Vant have attributed a significant part of their early strategic clarity and investor readiness to the structured founder evaluation process that the PPS Framework introduced.

Why This Matters Beyond FirstFounders

The PPS Framework has now been adopted beyond our studio. The Osun State Government of Nigeria adopted it as an official founder selection tool for their women's entrepreneurship programmes, reaching over 1,000 women entrepreneurs across the state. Make Mee Elegant Foundation applied it in their Free Skills Acquisition Training Programme and documented an 80 percent completion rate among participants including survivors of human trafficking compared to below 50 percent before PPS was introduced.

A Note of Gratitude

As FirstFounders enters a new chapter with a new board and a renewed focus on AI-first venture building across Africa, we want to acknowledge the foundational contribution that the PPS Framework made to how we evaluate and develop founders. The methodology Zainab built during her tenure with us continues to influence how we think about the most important question in venture building: not what is the idea, but who is the founder.

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