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First published on August 23, 2026
If you start a business in a normal environment, you face a very simple but brutal problem: you must convince people to give you more money for your product than it costs you to provide it. If you fail, you run out of money and stop being a business. We call this bootstrapping, but it’s really just doing business.
But if you start a business in an environment suddenly flooded with foreign venture capital, your problem changes. Your job now includes convincing customers to pay for your product now, and doing the same for investors to fund your runway later. Over the last few years, the Kenyan tech ecosystem got very good at the second job, while systematically forgetting how to do the first.
Originally published by TechCabal.