Essays
Building ventures past the point where the imported advice stops working.
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.
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.