Offscript with Claude Grunitzky
The entrepreneur and investor shares how a childhood encounter with hip hop became the spark for a lifelong mission.
“I was destined for a political career. That was my family business.”
If Claude Grunitzky had followed the path laid out by his family, he might have been a statesman, an ambassador, minister, or perhaps president of Togo. His lineage nearly demanded it: his father once served as finance minister, and two of his uncles had been presidents. But legacy didn’t predict his trajectory.
Instead, today, he is recognised not as a politician (or an economist, another contrasting but very likely path) but for his work in Africa’s media and creative industries. In 2002, he co-founded hip-hop music station TRACE, helping introduce the genre to Africa. Now, he focused on amplifying new African voices through True Africa and its Limitless Africa podcast. Through it all, Grunitzky has lived many lives. But the values guiding him have their roots in Lomé, where he first began to understand the importance of stories.
Grunitzky’s life began in Lomé, the capital of post-colonial Togo. His early education reflected the zeitgeist of the newly independent country: ambitious, hopeful, yet deeply bound to French systems. “A lot of what we were taught was still driven by French curricula. And that was a bit of a problem for me. I understood that our African identity and history [were] being undervalued.”
A diplomatic appointment for his father took the family to Washington, D.C., when he was eight. He spent four years of his childhood in the US before being sent to France for school when his father was dismissed as ambassador. “After he was fired, my father couldn’t work again. So he sent me and my sister to France,” he recalls. “I ended up in a Catholic boarding school outside Paris.”
There, far from home, Grunitzky’s academic gifts flourished. He excelled in every subject, economics, the humanities, and even mathematics. “I see myself as somebody who can dabble in different subjects. And I’m, in that sense, a bit of a generalist as opposed to some of my friends who are much more specialists in either the arts or humanities or math and physics and science.”
He went on to earn degrees in political science from Sciences Po in Paris and a master’s in economics from the University of London. “I was drawn to the Anglophone mentality, which was a lot more capitalist than the French.”
However, as he climbed the academic ladder, another force was tugging at him: hip hop. Grunitzky had discovered hip-hop as a child while visiting his uncle in New York. “Those were the early days of hip hop,” he remembers. By the time he was a teenager in Paris, hip hop had crossed the Atlantic and had begun reshaping youth culture in Europe. Grunitzky saw that this was a global movement in the making.
“I decided to make it my dream. I had a sense that the subculture of hip hop would become mainstream and that hip hop would become the new pop culture. And I essentially started a business around that conviction.”
So at 23, fresh out of university, he launched True Magazine in London with his cousin. It was his first attempt at entrepreneurship, and his first major failure. The partnership collapsed after a year due to disagreements between the two. Grunitzky didn’t let that stop him. Within months, he launched TRACE Magazine, expanding on the same vision but on a larger scale. His goal was audacious: to show how hip-hop could shape global culture through music, film, fashion, and art.
Within a year, the magazine was a hit in London. Soon after, Grunitzky moved to New York, the epicentre of hip hop, to grow the business. “I decided to move to New York in order to be in the centre of gravity of hip hop, the birthplace of hip hop, because I wanted to expand my business from New York as opposed to just London.”
Building TRACE was brutal. Aside from the fact that he had no direct example to emulate, it was hard for him to justify the project to his family. It wasn’t an obvious path for a boy from a family of presidents and diplomats. His relatives couldn’t make sense of it. “They thought I was crazy,” he says. “You know, African families, sometimes, when people try to do things that are too artistic or creative, they don’t really understand. And here I was trying to be a creative entrepreneur in my 20s, and not knowing anything about accounting, not knowing anything about making payroll, and just going on instinct and making it up as I went along.”
But those instincts proved correct. In 2003, he raised $15 million from Goldman Sachs to launch TRACE TV, turning the publication into a global media powerhouse that gave African and diaspora artists a platform long before “Afrobeats to the world” became a slogan.
By 2010, after 14 years of building TRACE, Grunitzky was exhausted. He had built an empire, but it had become a cage, which took all of his time.“My ex-wife once said, ‘You’re married to TRACE, not to me,’” he recalls. So he walked away.
In the years that followed, Grunitzky began teaching at Harvard University, leading workshops for the Obama-era Young African Leaders Initiative, and mentoring young entrepreneurs across the continent. More importantly, he began to think about what it would mean to tell the African story as media platforms and consumption habits became increasingly digital.
In 2015, Grunitzky launched True Africa, a digital media company built on the idea that Africans should tell their own stories. “I wanted Africa to be seen,” he says, “and I wanted the Africa story to be told by Africans, not by outsiders who don’t understand our mindset.”
He poured over a million dollars of his own money into True Africa to get things started. When his pitch to African investors fell on deaf ears, he turned to global partners. Google eventually backed the venture, drawn to his vision. Today, True Africa’s flagship product, the Limitless Africa podcast, is published in English, French, and Portuguese, and it reaches millions across the continent and the diaspora. The company also airs not only online but also through partner radio stations. The show explores the intersection of technology, policy, and creativity across Africa, blending storytelling and insight in a way few others do.
Beyond media, Grunitzky has moved into investing. His latest venture, Equity Alliance, is a fund he co-founded with his late mentor, Dick Parsons, the former CEO of Time Warner. The fund backs early-stage startups led by women and people of colour who are often excluded from traditional investment circles.
Through Equity Alliance, Grunitzky has become the very thing he once sought: a backer of bold visions. To him, Africa’s creative economies are “engines of transformation.” “Film, fashion, music, design, gaming, digital media—these are some of the fastest-growing sectors on the continent,” he notes. “They already contribute over $58 billion to GDP and employ nearly 8 million people. But I want that 8 million to become 50 million.”
It’s an ambitious goal, but then again, this kind of audacity has always been Grunitzky’s compass. His career is marked by conviction. Trusting his instincts long before trends, investment logic or global validation arrived. Now that conviction is focused on getting Africans seen, heard and backed in the global creative economy.
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