Essays
Building ventures past the point where the imported advice stops working.
The Year Nothing Happened: How to Read a Flat Year Before You React to It
Three quarters in, the numbers look like last year's. Before you call a strategy offsite, work out which of three very different things a flat year is telling you, because two of them are good news and the response to each is different.
Parting Well in a Small Market
The person you let go in March will be across the table in November, working for your biggest prospect. In a small market, how you end an employment is a governance decision that follows you. Five rules for doing it properly.
Formal Is a Capital Strategy: Why the Compliance You Resent Is the Asset Investors Read First
Founders treat registration, tax clearance and proper books as a cost imposed from outside. They are the price of admission to every kind of capital that matters. Informality is a loan from your future self, and the interest is compounding.
How a Legal Gap Became a Sector Opportunity: From Kose Drivers at Roadblocks to a Cabinet Decision
Kose drivers were being arrested, fined and having their cars impounded for using an app to earn a living. Three weeks after one conversation with CZI, Cabinet approved a five-month moratorium and asked the sector to regulate itself. This is what actually happened.
Build for the Outage: Operating When the Inputs Are Not Guaranteed
Somewhere in Harare the power is off right now, and nobody finds that sentence remarkable. Most ventures are designed for the day everything works. Here is how to design for the day it does not, which is the ordinary day.
The Partnership Conversation You Have Before You Need It
Founders postpone the conversation about who owns what, who decides, and who leaves, because there is nothing yet to divide. That is precisely the moment it is cheap. Five questions to settle with a partner while the answers still cost nothing.
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.