Asher's Blog

For much of my life, I did what many sensible people are taught to do: pursue the next respectable milestone, secure it and remain safe.

Go to the next school. Obtain the next qualification. Find the next opportunity. Protect what you have achieved. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these decisions. Education, stability and careful planning are valuable. The problem begins when safety becomes the highest objective of life and we stop asking what we could build, change or solve if fear were not making the decision.

I did not realise how safely I had been thinking until a few years ago.

Many people have large private dreams, but organise their public lives around avoiding failure. We choose goals that will not embarrass us, ideas that will not require too much explanation and projects small enough to keep rejection manageable. Then, because the result resembles what already exists, we describe it as realism.

I have become increasingly passionate about a different way of thinking, particularly for Africa. We must learn how to begin with the resources available to us without allowing the size of our beginning to determine the size of our imagination. You can start small without thinking small.

What Texas Reminded Me About Scale

I was recently in Dallas, Texas, and the intensity of construction struck me.

Projects appeared to be happening everywhere. Roads, residential developments, commercial buildings and new infrastructure formed part of the ordinary landscape. If some of those projects were taking place in parts of my country, they might be treated as wonders. In Texas, life continued around them.

The impression was not only subjective. Data compiled from the United States Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey show that Texas led the country in 2025 with approximately 140,000 new privately owned housing units authorised by permits, even after a decline from the previous year.

That figure does not mean every project was necessary, affordable or well designed. Construction volume alone is not a measure of social progress. But it reveals what happens when institutions, capital, land, contractors, infrastructure and expectations have developed around building at scale.

What interested me most was the mentality. Large construction did not appear to exceed the city’s imagination. It felt normal.

Developed countries did not arrive at that level by thinking only about the next modest improvement. Their progress contains mistakes, inequality and waste, but it also contains generations of people willing to design systems larger than themselves—railways, universities, companies, factories, energy systems and technologies intended to serve millions.

Africa needs that scale of imagination. This does not mean we should dismiss small achievements. In environments where people must overcome inadequate infrastructure, expensive capital and unstable policy, what appears small may have required extraordinary courage. Scripture itself warns us not to despise the day of small beginnings in Zechariah 4:10.

The lesson is not to despise small beginnings; it is to refuse small ceilings.

“Finish Big” Must Mean More Than Becoming Famous

When I say that we should start something and finish big, I am not speaking only about valuation, publicity or the personal wealth of the founder.

A business is big when it solves an important problem for many people, builds an institution capable of enduring and creates value beyond the founder’s personality. Scale without usefulness is merely size. Attention without value is not impact.

You can build a company that becomes famous without making life meaningfully better for customers. You can raise substantial capital without developing a sustainable business. You can employ thousands of people inside a system that creates confusion rather than value.

Finishing big should mean that the solution becomes large enough, reliable enough and accessible enough to improve life at meaningful scale.

This is the first shift in thinking: begin with impact. Ask how many people currently experience the problem. Ask how deeply the problem affects their lives or businesses. Ask what they do today because your solution does not exist. Ask how much time, money, dignity or opportunity is being lost. Ask whether solving the problem for ten people reveals a route to serving ten thousand, ten million or an entire continent.

The size of the problem does not guarantee the size of the business, but a large business usually requires a market broad enough to support it.

Make Something a Lot of People Want

Y Combinator’s famous instruction is “Make something people want.” It is one of the clearest descriptions of the founder’s work because it returns attention to the customer rather than the founder’s excitement.

At one of our sessions, a speaker added a useful word to the idea: make something a lot of people want.

That addition introduces market size. A product can be genuinely loved by a small group and still be incapable of becoming a large company. There is nothing wrong with a good small business; small businesses create employment, independence and important local value. But if your stated ambition is to build at significant scale, you must examine whether enough customers experience the problem, can be reached and are willing and able to pay for the solution.

Do not test demand only among your friends, family, tribe or people who already like you. Their encouragement can help you begin, but affection may produce misleading feedback. People close to you may praise the idea because they believe in you, not because they would choose the product in a competitive market.

Speak to people who do not owe you support. Observe what customers actually do. Ask for payment. Measure whether they return, recommend the product and feel genuine loss when it is unavailable.

The question is not simply, “Do people like this?” The more useful questions are:

• How many people have this problem?
• How frequently do they experience it?
• How painful or expensive is it?
• What are they using today?
• Why would they switch?
• Can we serve them economically?
• Does the market expand as our capability improves?

Market size should not become an excuse to avoid beginning. Founders rarely know the final size of a market with certainty. New products can change behaviour and expand demand. However, ambition becomes more credible when it is attached to a problem capable of carrying it.

Think From the Human Problem, Not the Product

If you begin with a fixed product, you may defend the first solution even when it is not working. If you begin with a human problem, you can remain creative about how it should be solved.

Suppose your purpose is to help African workers build financial security. A savings application may be one expression of that purpose, but the deeper problem could also require access to investment, credit, insurance, financial education, payroll infrastructure or employer participation. The product can evolve while the purpose remains stable.

This is where creativity becomes important. How can software make the solution less expensive, more accessible or more reliable? How can data improve a decision? How can distribution reach people currently excluded? How can a complicated service become simple enough for ordinary use?

The largest opportunities often exist where the need is already widespread but the present solution is expensive, fragmented or inaccessible.

Peter Drucker wrote in Innovation and Entrepreneurship that innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. Innovation is not limited to invention. It can mean organising resources differently, simplifying an experience, changing distribution or making an existing capability available to people who could not previously access it.

Finishing big requires remaining committed to the impact while allowing the solution to become more intelligent.

Large Solutions Begin With Large Problems

The Dangote Refinery offers a useful African example of scale. It was built to address a contradiction that had persisted for decades: one of the world’s major crude-oil-producing countries depended heavily on imported refined petroleum products.

By 2026, the refinery represented an investment of roughly $20 billion and had capacity of around 700,000 barrels per day following expansion from its original 650,000-barrel design. Whatever commercial, regulatory and operational debates surround it, the scale of the undertaking reflects the scale of the underlying problem.

The same principle can be seen in telecommunications. MTN Group reported that, by the end of 2025, it served more than 307 million voice subscribers, 172 million data subscribers and 70 million Mobile Money customers across 16 markets. MTN Nigeria alone reported 87.3 million mobile subscribers for 2025. These numbers became possible because connectivity was not a niche desire. Millions of people and businesses needed to communicate.

Glo entered the same broad African need from a different competitive position. Each company’s story contains difficult questions about regulation, capital and execution, but the fundamental demand was clear: people wanted connectivity.

These examples teach us that large outcomes usually require more than a brilliant founder. They require a problem shared by many people, enormous coordination, patient capital, public infrastructure, regulation, employees, suppliers and customers who all participate in making the solution possible. You do not complete something big alone.

A Shared Vision Multiplies Individual Effort

The second requirement for finishing big is the power of working together. There must be a vision for the team, company, country or continent—a purpose clear enough that many people can locate their own contribution inside it. If the ambition exists only inside the founder’s head, everybody else becomes a contractor performing isolated tasks. Large work requires people who understand what they are helping to make possible.

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras popularised the idea of a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG, in Built to Last. A useful audacious goal is not simply a huge number. It should be clear, compelling and capable of concentrating effort over a long period.

For me, the question is: how do we power Africa and help society prosper in a way that gives employees, partners, investors and customers a shared sense of direction?

A continental vision must still become specific. “Transform Africa” is too broad to guide today’s product meeting. The organisation must translate it into the people it will serve, the problem it will solve, the measure of progress and the work required now.

A strong hierarchy of purpose might look like this:

• Continental purpose: the change we want to contribute to across Africa.
• Company mission: the role our organisation will play in that change.
• Strategic objective: the measurable result required during this period.
• Team contribution: what each function must deliver.
• Daily action: what each person must do today.

When these levels connect, ordinary work gains meaning; an engineer is not merely closing a ticket. A salesperson is not merely chasing a target. An operations person is not merely processing a transaction. Each role supports an outcome larger than itself.

The People Must Want the Outcome Too

Scale becomes possible when the founder’s ambition intersects with a broad public desire.

The spread of mobile communications across Africa was not only a corporate project. People wanted to speak with family, conduct business, send money and participate in a connected economy. The reduction of fuel imports is not only an industrial objective; it relates to foreign exchange, transportation, prices, employment and national confidence.

When many people want the outcome, customers create demand, employees find meaning, investors see opportunity and governments face pressure to build enabling rules and infrastructure.

However, public desire should not be used as a vague claim. Founders often say that “Africa needs this” without proving that specific customers will adopt the proposed solution. A social problem can be real while the product designed to address it remains wrong.

The purpose must be shared, but the solution must still earn acceptance. This is why large vision and small experiments belong together. The vision describes the destination; experiments reveal the route.

Start With Evidence, Not Grandeur

Thinking big does not require spending big at the beginning. Many ambitious founders confuse scale of vision with scale of initial cost. They hire too quickly, build too much infrastructure and create an organisation designed for millions of customers before proving that the first hundred care.

That is not boldness; it is expensive uncertainty. Start with the smallest version capable of testing the largest assumption. If the business depends on employers trusting you with payroll, win a small group and observe whether the service produces measurable value. If the vision depends on people saving for ten years, test whether they will begin, continue and return after the first interruption. If a marketplace requires both buyers and sellers, prove that you can create liquidity in one narrow category or territory before expanding everywhere.

Eric Ries calls this validated learning in The Lean Startup: progress is not simply building more; it is learning what creates a sustainable business.

The beginning may be small, but it should be pointed towards scale. You are testing a mechanism that can grow, not merely performing a one-off act that depends forever on the founder’s personal energy.

Play Safely With the Downside, Not With the Dream

The opposite of playing small is not behaving recklessly. An ambitious founder still needs to think about risk, cash flow, regulation, governance and the worst-case scenario. The difference is that risk management protects the mission rather than reducing the mission until it no longer matters.

You can limit the amount committed to an experiment without limiting the size of the future market. You can begin in one city while designing a product capable of crossing borders. You can use a partnership before building expensive infrastructure. You can establish milestones before releasing the next portion of capital.

One of the best ways to think big is to survive long enough to learn.

Ask:

• What is the largest credible outcome if this works?
• What must be true for that outcome to become possible?
• Which assumption presents the greatest risk?
• What is the least expensive way to test it?
• What loss can we survive if the test fails?
• What evidence will justify committing more?

This approach allows boldness and prudence to exist together.

Focus Converts Vision Into Scale

As I have written before, focus is essential. If your objective is to create a solution for a large number of people, you must focus on the few capabilities that make that outcome possible. Every attractive partnership, product idea or expansion opportunity cannot receive equal attention.

Large organisations are not built by pursuing every possible direction. They are built by concentrating resources behind a sequence of important decisions.

Focus helps you ask whether a new feature increases the number of people who can use the product, improves the depth of value for the core customer or creates an advantage required for scale. It helps you decide when to enter a new territory and when expansion would weaken the foundation. It guides capital towards the bottleneck that matters most.

The objective must remain visible. If the year is ending and the organisation has made little progress, the answer is not always to add more activity. Identify what is preventing the objective, concentrate on that constraint and stop work that is consuming resources without moving the result.

Finishing big requires saying no repeatedly enough that the important yes has room to grow.

Build an Institution, Not a Hero Story

Something truly big should eventually become larger than its founder. If every decision, relationship and piece of knowledge remains trapped in one person, the organisation has not yet become an institution. It may have a powerful founder, but it has not built the systems required to endure.

You need excellent people who believe in the purpose and are capable of improving it. You need governance that protects capital and relationships. You need processes that produce quality repeatedly, financial discipline that supports survival and a culture that can make good decisions when the founder is absent.

The founder’s role changes as the organisation grows. At the beginning, you may perform nearly every task. Later, your work is to attract people stronger than you in important areas, clarify the direction, allocate resources and create the conditions in which others can lead.

This transition is emotionally difficult because the behaviours that helped you start may prevent the organisation from scaling. Control can become a bottleneck. Personal heroics can conceal weak systems. A founder committed to finishing big must be willing to become a different kind of leader.

Big Thinking Must Remain Ethical

Africa needs larger ambitions, but scale should never become an excuse for exploitation.

History contains projects that were physically enormous and socially destructive. A company can serve millions while mishandling data, damaging communities or using political influence to prevent fair competition. A leader can invoke national development while concentrating benefits and distributing costs to people with little power.

The larger the ambition, the greater the responsibility. Think about who benefits, who bears the risk and what behaviour the business will require from customers, employees and government. Build compliance, fairness and transparency before scale makes corrections more expensive. Do not measure impact only by how many people touch the product; measure whether their lives are actually improved. Finishing big should mean creating an institution worthy of becoming big.

How to Begin Now

If you want to start something and finish big, begin with a disciplined set of questions.

First, name the problem. Describe it in the language of the people experiencing it rather than in the language of your proposed product.

Second, estimate its scale. Determine how many people experience it, how much it costs them and whether the need is growing.

Third, identify the smallest group that feels the problem deeply. Large markets are often entered through a narrow door.

Fourth, build the smallest credible solution. It should test whether customers will act, not merely whether they will compliment you.

Fifth, create a shared purpose. Explain why the work matters and how each person’s contribution connects to it.

Sixth, learn from evidence. Improve the solution without becoming emotionally attached to its first form.

Seventh, concentrate resources. Reject opportunities that do not strengthen the path towards the objective.

Eighth, design for repetition. Ask how the value can be delivered reliably without depending on heroic effort every time.

Ninth, earn the next level of scale. Add capital, people and territory when the evidence supports them.

Finally, keep enlarging the capacity of the institution. The size of the vision must eventually be matched by the quality of the people, systems and governance carrying it.

Small Beginnings, Large Destinations

I am now thinking differently about our own businesses. We are not yet where we want to be, and I do not want to pretend that ambition is the same as achievement. But the question guiding me is becoming clearer: how can we make something that a lot of people want? How can we solve a problem large enough to matter across Africa and eventually beyond it? How can we build the team, technology and institution capable of carrying that solution?

The answers will not arrive through aspiration alone. They will require customer evidence, creativity, capital, coordination, focus and years of disciplined execution.

But the first requirement is permission to think at that scale. We should celebrate progress without allowing yesterday’s achievement to become tomorrow’s ceiling. We should honour the difficulty of building in Africa without making difficulty our identity. We should manage risk without constructing lives so safe that they cannot produce significant impact.

Begin with what you have. Solve the problem in front of you. Listen to the customer. Prove the smallest version. Then keep asking how the solution can reach more people, become more useful and grow beyond your direct effort.

Start small if you must. Most important things do. But choose a problem, purpose and level of discipline capable of finishing big.

References

• Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
• Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
• Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• Y Combinator, Make Something People Want
• U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey
• National Association of Home Builders, Building Permits by State and Metro Area
• MTN Group, 2025 Annual Reporting Suite
• MTN Nigeria, 2025 Annual Report
• Reuters, Dangote Refinery Expansion and IPO Plans
• The Holy Bible, Zechariah 4:10