Peter Allerstorfer: ‘We Worked So Hard and It Was Just Taken From Us'

This is the tale of entrepreneurs who found out the importance of control in the harshest of ways. They built a company from the ground up, only to lose it until hard work brought sweet victory.

- Ancillar Mangena

It’s a gloomy summer’s day in Cape Town. A blanket of never-ending dreariness fills the skies. Bleak-ness has played a big part in Peter Allerstorfer’s journey to entrepreneurship. On this day, he is dressed in blue much like how he felt three years ago when he – and his partners – went into business.

This is a long way from Austria. He is overseeing the remodeling of their offices in the heart of the mother city, just as he remodeled his life when he travelled 13,500 kilometers to Africa. He swapped his well-paid job at McKinsey & Company for building companies around the continent.

“I was missing something. I felt like doing something hands-on and creating something and seeing the results. I got an opportunity from Rocket Internet to build African operations and I took it,” says Allerstorfer.

He moved to Cape Town to start Zando, one of South Africa’s largest e-commerce fashion stores, and later Jumia, Nigeria’s largest e-commerce shop. He did the jobs well.

“It was a difficult thing to do because I had a promising career ahead of me. I wanted to start something entrepreneurial. We got funding and we just had to deliver the work and run the company. The company was running and we were a fully-fledged retailer.”

It was far from enough.

“I stood there and saw all these things and realized I have put so much work on something that isn’t really mine. That’s when I realized it was time to build something on my own,” says Allerstorfer.

He co-founded Silvertree Capital, an investment company that builds businesses in Africa by bringing together new and old economy business models, with Paul Cook and Manuel Koser.

Starting his own business was hard. It also ushered in his worst day.