Essays
Building ventures past the point where the imported advice stops working.
The Dollar Discipline: How African Professionals Should Price Against International Rates
African professionals systematically underprice their services because they reference local pricing rather than international value. The dollar discipline is the practice of pricing in dollars, against international comparators, and earning the income the work actually deserves rather than the income the local market has been trained to expect.
When Sales Drop in an African Market, Read the Capital Conditions Before You Read the Funnel
When sales drop, founders default to diagnosing their own funnel. In African markets, the cause is often not in the funnel at all. It is in the capital conditions of the market, which move sharply and silently and reshape the competitive landscape before founders notice.
Plans Are Cheap, Execution Is the Asset: Why African Capital Goes to Operators, Not Visionaries
Zimbabwe never had a shortage of national vision documents. Most African ventures do not have a shortage of business plans. The shortage, in both cases, is execution capacity, and capital tracks execution capacity more closely than founders realise.
Raising Your First Round in Africa: What the Term Sheets Don’t Tell You
Most founder writing about fundraising was built for Silicon Valley conditions. Raising the first round in Africa is structurally different in ways the term-sheet templates do not capture. Here is the framework I have built across three rounds, including the lessons I had to learn from getting the first one wrong.
Customers Remember: The Memory Asset Most Ventures Are Quietly Destroying
Customers remember how you treated them in their hard moments. The memory becomes an asset that compounds across years of relationship. Most ventures are unknowingly destroying this asset through small operational choices made under pressure.
The Work That Compounds, and the Work That Doesn’t
Most founder writing about work ethic treats hard work as undifferentiated. The truth is that some work compounds and some work does not, and most founders are putting in the hours on the wrong category. Here is how to tell the difference.
The Founder’s Fiduciary Posture: What Lawyers and Doctors Know That Most Founders Don’t
Lawyers and doctors operate under a fiduciary duty that obligates them to act in the client's best interest, even at cost to themselves. Most founders operate without any equivalent posture. Adopting it changes how customers experience the venture and what the venture itself becomes.
Customer Alignment Is an Economic Fact, Not a Slogan
The slogan that 'your customer and your business are one' is metaphorical fluff. The economic reality underneath it is sharper and more useful. The interests of customer and venture are aligned in some ways and opposed in others, and Stay-Up phase ventures structure themselves around the alignments while honestly acknowledging the oppositions.
Stability, Impact, and the Posture That Combines Them
Most founder writing celebrates impact and ignores stability, or celebrates stability and ignores impact. The Stay-Up phase ventures hold both at once. Here is what that posture looks like in practice, and why most founders default to the wrong one of the two.
The Vocabulary of Stalling: Six Phrases Founders Use to Postpone the Work
Founders who postpone the work do so using a small vocabulary of plausible-sounding phrases. The phrases sound like reasoning. They are stalling tactics. Here are the six most common ones, what they actually mean, and how to detect them in your own thinking.