Essays
Building ventures past the point where the imported advice stops working.
The Invoice Is Not the Sale: A Collections Discipline for Markets Where Terms Are Fiction
In most of Africa an invoice is not the end of a sale. It is the opening of a second negotiation nobody agreed to have. The businesses that survive treat credit as a product they sell deliberately, not a courtesy they extend by default.
Who Runs It When You Are in the Other City
Go away for two weeks and look at what stopped. What continues without you is your company; what stops is your job description. Distance does not create the weakness, it reveals one that was already there.
Which Currency Does Your Business Think In?
Every venture has a functional currency, the one its arithmetic runs in. Most founders have never named it. The three mismatches that follow are where African ventures die quietly, and where investors price risk you have not examined.
The Four-Number Friday: A Twenty-Minute Operating Review That Survives a Bad Week
Four numbers, per venture, every Friday, in twenty minutes. A weekly operating review small enough to survive the weeks you do not want to do it, and specific enough to catch a problem a month before your customers do.
Boring on Purpose: Why Reliability Is the Cheapest Moat in an Unreliable Market
In a market where nothing works predictably, being predictable is the product. Why reliability cannot be bought in a funding round, why it is measured at your worst week rather than your average one, and what it costs to build.
The Constellation: How Founders Build Multiple Ventures Coherently Rather Than Chaotically
Some founders operate multiple ventures simultaneously. The default pattern is chaotic and exhausting; the disciplined pattern produces a coherent body of work in which the ventures reinforce each other. Here is what the discipline actually looks like, drawn from operating across four ventures simultaneously.
Filtering Counsel: How African Founders Should Evaluate Advice
Founders receive enormous quantities of advice. Most of it is wrong for their specific situation, and the cost of acting on wrong advice is one of the highest preventable costs in venture-building. The discipline of filtering counsel is one of the most undervalued founder skills.
Engaged Observation: The Discipline of Reading What Your Venture Is Telling You
Most founders react to what their venture surfaces; the disciplined ones observe their venture deliberately and detect the patterns that reaction would miss. Engaged observation is the practice that distinguishes the two postures, and it is one of the highest-leverage disciplines available to founders who learn to run it.
Cherry-Picking Clients: How to Build a Client Base That Compounds Across Years
Most founders accept whichever clients arrive. The ventures that compound are built by founders who deliberately select which clients to accept and which to refuse. The selection discipline is the asset, and most founders never develop it.