Asher's Blog

Some years ago, during one of the most challenging periods in our business, a friend asked me a question I was not expecting: Why are you still doing this?

We did not have much runway. The business was under pressure, and there was no certainty that the difficult season would end as quickly as we wanted it to. It was the kind of period in which an entrepreneur could reasonably ask whether continuing was an act of courage or merely an unwillingness to accept reality.

Because I had not prepared for the question, my answer was spontaneous. But looking back, I believe its spontaneity made it honest.

I said I was still working on the business because of the people for whom I felt responsible.

We had employees who believed in what we were building. They had committed their time, energy and careers to the vision. I felt responsible for ensuring that their belief was not treated casually. We also had investors who had trusted us with their money, and I felt responsible for multiplying the capital they had given us.

Beyond those responsibilities, however, there was another reason I could not stop: I knew we had not tried everything possible.

We had not tried every intelligent option; we had not made every necessary adjustment. We had not taken every strategic step available to us. At that point, we probably had not attempted even five per cent of what we were capable of doing. I could not walk away while knowing that.

Responsibility Changes the Meaning of Persistence

When you build a business alone, it can be tempting to think of persistence as a personal contest between you and failure. Once employees, customers and investors become part of the journey, it becomes something deeper. You are no longer responsible only for your ambition; you have become a steward of other people’s trust.

Employees make plans around the company. They build skills, support families and attach part of their identity to the work. Investors make a different commitment, but it is still a commitment: they place capital at risk because they believe that the founders can create something more valuable with it.

This does not mean a founder must keep an unviable business alive indefinitely or personally guarantee that every investment will succeed. Equity investment involves risk, and no honest founder can promise a particular outcome. Stewardship does not mean manufacturing certainty where none exists. It means treating other people’s trust with seriousness, communicating honestly, controlling what can be controlled and refusing to become careless simply because the journey has become difficult.

I have a strong conviction that capital should be multiplied. When someone gives us capital to build, my responsibility is to search for creative, strategic and disciplined ways to increase its value. I do not believe that difficult markets, exchange-rate movements or operational setbacks release me from that responsibility. They may require us to revise the strategy, reduce costs, rebuild the product, change the team or pursue a different part of the market, but they do not give us permission to stop thinking.

The biblical parable of the talents in Matthew 25 has shaped how many Christians think about stewardship: what is entrusted to us should not be buried out of fear. Yet the lesson must be applied with wisdom. Responsible multiplication is not reckless risk-taking. It is faithful, productive management of what has been placed in our hands.

That is the kind of stewardship I want to practise—with money, relationships, opportunities and ideas.

I Did Not Want to Stop Before We Had Truly Tried

There is an important difference between saying, “This strategy has failed,” and saying, “This mission is impossible.”

Founders often confuse the two. A product is not working, so they assume the vision is wrong. A sales channel stops producing results, so they conclude that there is no market. A funding conversation fails, so they behave as though the company has no future. Sometimes the business really should close. But sometimes what has failed is only the present method.

When my friend asked why I was continuing, I knew there were still meaningful actions available to us. I could see decisions we had not made, customers we had not approached, products we had not improved, partnerships we had not explored and capabilities we had not built. I also knew that some of the most important changes would involve people.

Looking back, I should have begun making some of those decisions earlier. There were difficult people decisions I delayed. I have since learnt that great ideas do not execute themselves. You need excellent people to convert insight into reality. If you want to accomplish your most ambitious ideas, you cannot surround the mission only with people who are available or comfortable. You need people with the character, competence, discipline and intensity required by the destination.

Keeping the wrong person in a critical role is not kindness to the business, the team or even the individual. It slows the company, places pressure on stronger team members and delays the moment when the person can move into an environment better suited to their abilities.

Persistence sometimes means holding on to the mission while letting go of a team structure that can no longer deliver it.

Resilience Must Be Joined to Reality

There is a form of persistence that is merely stubbornness. It ignores the evidence, repeats the same action and expects loyalty to the original plan to produce a different outcome. That is not the kind of resilience I admire.

The better model is what Jim Collins describes in Good to Great as the Stockdale Paradox: confront the brutal facts of the present reality while maintaining faith that you will prevail in the end. Both parts are essential. Optimism without facts becomes fantasy, while facts without hope can produce paralysis.

In a difficult season, the founder must be capable of saying several things at once:

• Our runway is short.
• Our present approach is not working well enough.
• Some people or products may have to change.
• The market still contains a real opportunity.
• We can find a better way to pursue it.

This is why disciplined reflection matters to me. I meditate. I think. I read books. I speak with mentors. I listen to customers and study what the numbers are saying. I try to create enough quietness to see beyond the pressure of the current moment.

Insight rarely removes the need for hard work, but it can redirect hard work towards the actions that matter most.

Staying Alive Is a Strategy, Not the Entire Purpose

I often say that the purpose of a business is to remain in business and continue doing business. What I mean is that survival is the condition that preserves every other possibility.

A company that runs out of cash cannot serve its customers tomorrow, employ its people next month or compound its investors’ capital over the coming years. Profit and cash discipline are therefore not embarrassing distractions from impact. They are part of what makes sustained impact possible.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently shown that business survival falls substantially as companies age; in its historical establishment data, only around half of new establishments remain after five years. Different countries and sectors will produce different rates, but the lesson is universal: staying alive cannot be taken for granted.

Paul Graham offers founders a useful question in his essay, Default Alive or Default Dead?: if a company continues with its present expenses and revenue growth, will it become profitable before it runs out of money? The question is uncomfortable because vision can make founders feel that money will somehow arrive before the deadline. Arithmetic is less sentimental.

However, survival is not the entire purpose of a business. A company can survive while serving no meaningful need, treating people badly or becoming afraid to innovate. The fuller objective is to create value for customers in a way that allows the organisation to endure, improve and keep creating value.

Survival gives the mission time; it is not a substitute for the mission.

Building in Africa Requires a Particular Kind of Discipline

Building a startup in Africa creates a financial tension that founders in more stable currency environments may not fully experience.

You may raise equity in United States dollars while earning most of your revenue in naira or another local currency. Investors will often assess your progress in dollars, but your customers pay you locally. When the local currency depreciates, the company can grow its revenue in naira and still appear to have lost momentum when the number is translated into dollars.

Imagine that a Nigerian company earns ₦600 million when the exchange rate is ₦600 to one dollar. That is equivalent to $1 million. If the company grows local revenue by 50 per cent to ₦900 million, but the exchange rate moves to ₦1,500 to one dollar, its translated revenue becomes only $600,000. The business has grown materially in its operating currency, yet its dollar revenue has fallen by 40 per cent.

That simple arithmetic explains why an African founder must understand more than product and sales. You must think about currency exposure, pricing, capital efficiency, cash reserves, revenue quality, market expansion and whether some costs or revenues can be matched in the same currency. You must communicate progress in a way that distinguishes underlying customer growth from exchange-rate translation.

There are no magical secrets here, but there are strategic insights. A founder can improve pricing more frequently, sell to larger customers, build dollar-linked or international revenue where appropriate, control dollar-denominated costs, extend runway and raise capital before desperation destroys negotiating power. None of these steps eliminates macroeconomic risk, but together they can create resilience.

This is one reason discipline matters so much to me. In a volatile market, careless execution becomes more expensive. You cannot control the exchange rate, but you can control whether you understand your unit economics, whether your team is productive and whether you are pursuing customers capable of transforming the scale of the business.

Evidence That the Opportunity Is Real

I keep working because I can still see a large market and many paths that we have not fully explored.

Recently, we signed our first enterprise customer with thousands of employees. We are also in conversations with another organisation that has thousands of employees. Those developments did not happen merely because we remained optimistic. They came from learning, repositioning and taking strategic steps that we should probably have started earlier.

One enterprise customer does not complete the journey, and a promising conversation is not the same as a signed contract. But these developments provide evidence that the opportunity we saw was not imaginary. They show us that when the product, proposition, people and distribution begin to align, the business can move into a different category of customer and impact.

This is what thoughtful persistence is meant to produce: not endless activity, but better evidence.

Every season should teach the company something. We should know more about our customers, our economics, our people and our market than we knew six months earlier. If time is passing but insight is not increasing, then we may be enduring rather than learning.

I do not want to measure resilience only by how long we have stayed. I want to measure it by how much wiser, stronger and more capable we have become while staying.

The Best Strategy Still Requires the Best People

As the opportunity becomes clearer, the importance of people becomes even greater. The quality of a company eventually reflects the quality of the decisions made repeatedly inside it. Those decisions are made by people. A brilliant strategy placed in the hands of an undisciplined team will produce inconsistency. A large market pursued by people who cannot learn quickly will produce frustration. A company with ambitious promises but weak execution will eventually lose the trust of customers and investors.

This is why I now think more carefully about whom we build with. We need people who can think, receive difficult feedback, remain focused and perform at a high level. We need leaders who care deeply about the product and the customer. We need people whose ambition is supported by discipline, because ambition without discipline is simply desire.

Getting the best people does not mean hiring only famous executives or people from prestigious companies. It means finding people whose character and capability match the work, giving them clarity and holding everyone—including the founder—to a serious standard.

One of the hardest responsibilities of leadership is accepting that the team that carried a company through one stage may not be the team that can take it through the next. Gratitude for yesterday must not remove honesty about tomorrow.

What I Mean by Ambition

I strongly believe that we can build one of the most successful and impactful businesses to come out of Africa.

That is not a small ambition, and I do not say it as a motivational slogan. A conviction of that size places demands on the founder and the company. It requires the humility to admit what we do not know, the patience to build capability, the focus to reject distractions and the discipline to execute repeatedly when the excitement has disappeared.

It also requires taking the work one day at a time. There is no contradiction between enormous ambition and daily faithfulness. In fact, daily faithfulness is how enormous ambition becomes credible. The company we want to become will be built through today’s customer conversation, today’s product decision, today’s hire, today’s financial review and today’s willingness to correct an error.

James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Goals tell us the direction, but systems determine what we repeatedly do. If we want to become a globally significant company, we must build the operating habits of a globally significant company before the world gives us that description.

We have to become disciplined before scale exposes our lack of discipline. We have to build strong people systems before growth makes weak hiring unaffordable. We have to understand our finances before larger numbers disguise poor economics. We have to listen to customers before success makes us believe we already know everything.

Knowing When Persistence Has Become Denial

The statement “I have not tried everything” must not become an excuse to avoid a necessary ending. No founder can literally try every imaginable action, and endless experimentation can consume capital while producing no meaningful learning.

Responsible persistence needs boundaries. Before committing more time or money, ask:

1. Is the customer problem still real and important?
2. Is there credible evidence that customers will pay for our solution?
3. Are our experiments producing better information or merely repeating old assumptions?
4. Do we have a realistic route to sufficient revenue, capital or profitability?
5. Is the mission still worthy, even if the current product or structure must change?
6. What milestone and deadline will determine whether we continue, pivot, sell or close?

Quitting a strategy is not always quitting the mission. Closing a company is not always a moral failure. Sometimes stewardship requires protecting employees, creditors and remaining capital from a situation that has ceased to be viable.

The test is not whether continuing feels brave. The test is whether continuing is supported by truth, learning and a credible path forward.

Why I Keep Doing What I Do

I keep building because I feel responsible for the people who have joined the journey and for the capital that has been entrusted to us.

I keep building because there are still intelligent moves available to us, and I do not want to stop before we have honestly pursued them.

I keep building because the market continues to reveal opportunities, including enterprise customers whose scale can transform both our business and the value we create.

I keep building because I believe Africa can produce companies that are not merely locally successful, but globally significant.

And I keep building because I believe we have the capacity to become one of those companies.

Conviction alone will not get us there; we need resilience, but resilience must face facts. We need ambition, but ambition must become discipline. We need strategy, but strategy must be executed by excellent people. We need confidence, but confidence must remain humble enough to learn.

We will meditate, think, read and seek counsel. We will listen to our customers and study our numbers. We will make difficult decisions earlier. We will continue to build momentum, one day and one disciplined action at a time.

There may be no secret formula, but there is still a way forward.

As long as the opportunity remains real, the mission remains worthy and there are intelligent things we have not yet tried, I will keep building.

References

• Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
• James Clear, Atomic Habits
• Paul Graham, Default Alive or Default Dead?
• Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Entrepreneurship and the U.S. Economy
• The Holy Bible, Matthew 25:14–30