Most of what I learned about business didn’t come from books or frameworks. It came from systems that broke at 2am, customers who needed a real answer, and infrastructure that had to keep running whether or not the trend of the month worked out.
Seventeen years of running a hosting business in Kenya teaches you a few things that no MBA program covers.
Reliability is a feature, not a checkbox
When you sell uptime, you stop romanticizing speed. Shipping fast is great, but if the thing you shipped goes down on a Friday night, none of that speed matters. The businesses that lasted in our market weren’t the fastest — they were the ones whose customers stopped worrying about them.
More tools rarely fix the problem
Every year, a new wave of platforms promised to transform operations. Some did. Most just added another login. The teams that ran cleanest weren’t the ones with the most software — they were the ones who understood their own workflow well enough to know what to keep simple.
Full article coming soon. This is a working draft.
If you want to talk about any of this, reach out or connect on LinkedIn.