cornerstone
Building a Team Under Constraint: How African Founders Should Think About People When Capital Is Scarce
Most founder writing about team-building was written for environments where talent is abundant, capital is plentiful, and retention is purchased through compensation. African teams are built under different conditions, and the disciplines that work are different. Here is the framework I have built across four ventures.
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.
Beyond Your Sympathy Market: Why Your First Customers Will Mislead You
Your first customers will be your friends. That is the problem. The sympathy market pretends to be a market and is in fact your social network priced. Here is the framework that distinguishes it from real revenue, and the test that proves your venture has crossed the threshold.
From Start-Up to Stay-Up: The Sprouting Curve, Explained
The Sprouting Curve is the framework I built to explain why most ventures fail before year five and what separates the survivors. Drawn from Beyond Inception, this is the case for treating early-stage learning as the asset and earnings as the lagging indicator.