What the two-day VC4A retreat taught us about building a world-class global team

The VC4A team gathered in Durbuy, Belgium, bringing together colleagues from four continents for a dynamic two-day retreat. Through a blend of focused strategy sessions and engaging activities, we refined our platform roadmap, identified new opportunities to enhance our program implementation support, and created plans to sharpen the online tools that empower the founders we serve.

With lively discussions, some planned and some happening spontaneously, our recent gathering focused on one main idea: Transformation. This change affects how we talk and work together, the choices we make, and what we care about as a team. Four important topics came out of this, that will guide what we do in 2025 and beyond.

• Our values guide how we work. We spent time talking about what values resonate most with us, what they mean in practice and what behaviors we would expect in how we work with each other and how we help our partners and the entrepreneurs we support.

• We’re connecting even though we’re far apart. Almost half of our team works in different places across nine countries, which makes collaboration challenging at times. We’ve found ways to build stronger and deeper connections that go beyond where we live, catering for efficient and respectful communication.

• Our platform and programs are interconnected in everything we do. The VC4A platform offers great products and services that are leveraged into the diverse entrepreneur support programs that we manage. And these same programs are hosted on and make use of our platform. To continue to create value for the communities that we serve, we will keep on investing time and resources into scaling our platform and the services we offer.

Session on remote work led by Barbara Onyejose and Alejandra Paniagua.

Besides our important work talks, our time together gave us good chances to build stronger personal connections within the team, which helps us work well together. We also played fun padel matches and mini golf, explored the old streets and gardens of Durbuy, and cooked tasty meals from different cultures together. This helped us form those great connections that make our work meaningful, effective, and fun!

Team after a fun game of padel.

So, as we all packed up to go back to our different homes across the globe, we look back at a great time together, in which we were all reminded of why we do what we do and how we can continue to make a difference in unlocking new startup opportunities!

We return to our work energised about the road ahead and grateful for your continued partnership. From Abu, Alejandra, Barbara, Ben, Bertil, Bolade, Boye, Femi, Gideon, Hendrik, Isabella, Jason, Julie, Kevin, Matt, Nathan, Tegan, Thomas, Tope, Vincent and Yaw, aka the VC4A team.