Direct Contact With Reality
Growth is bittersweet
An entrepreneur’s employee died suddenly this morning.
And that’s when I could finally put what I’ve been feeling into words.
We decided to build a company with direct contact with reality.
To have fifteen investees and their teams in a developing market is to experience more growth than we realistically could have hoped for. It also means experiencing more tragedy.
This quarter hit me harder emotionally than I expected.
With enough people, statistically, you’re going to encounter a tragedy every week. The human condition makes itself known on a daily basis.
Some challenges seem like business problems at first.
A founder’s ego, often required to start a company, grows large enough that they stop seeing the mistakes they’re making.
Two ambitious people drift apart not because they’re different, but because they’re so similar.
A founder contracts cerebral malaria and falls into a coma, which according to Google has a 25% chance of death. We live in a country where malaria still hasn’t been eradicated. Not a typical risk factor for a Silicon Valley startup.
Another founder’s personal struggles begin spilling into the business. At first I framed it as an operational problem. Missed targets. Difficult conversations.
But beneath all of that was something much sadder: a person fighting battles I couldn’t solve for them.
I found myself wondering: could we have done something differently?
My biggest surprise wasn’t any of those situations.
It was how unsurprised our experienced investors were.
One investor said:
“That’s all? You haven’t said anything yet that scares or surprises me.”
Another told me stories from his own company. A top salesperson who left to become a priest. One employee had a baby she didn’t want; another wanted a baby and couldn’t have one.
Made a point of only raising “smart” money, investors who themselves had experience as entrepreneurs. That decision seems to be paying off, even if it means we are raising from a much smaller pool of capital.
For a long time, Kuzana’s mission was simple:
Mint 1,000 more millionaires.
But this quarter made me realize that’s a metric, not a mission.
As they say “once a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a good metric.”
The mission is something deeper:
Personal transformation through business growth.
There’s something special about the pressures of business. It means being in contact with the real world and over long periods of time, reality does not lie to you.
I can invent theories, philosophies, and essays all day long.
Business doesn’t care.
Reality tells you when your idea is bad.
Reality tells you when your assumptions are wrong.
Reality tells you that a spreadsheet is not the same thing as a human being.
We realized the same principle was true commercially. Our best businesses are the ones closest to the customer.
The business closest to the customer learns the fastest because reality smacks them in the face in five hours, not five months.
We call that Demand Ownership. Read about that here.
Ironically, the Mission insight came from the Kuzana community itself. Conversations with investors, entrepreneurs, and an EOS consultant helped us realize that every customer, entrepreneur, employee, and shareholder is ultimately participating in the same process.
Growth is transformation.
And transformation is not always beautiful.
Sometimes it looks like success.
Sometimes it looks like failure.
Sometimes it looks like grief.
Sometimes it looks like resilience.
For some of our investors, Kuzana is their first angel investment. Every update carries uncertainty.
For others, this is one position among many, but their first investment in Africa.
Either way, everyone involved is taking a step into the unknown. Personal transformation.
That’s why I like a quote from Elon Musk.
When asked about Tesla’s early days, he later reflected that “there was perhaps only a 10% chance it would survive at all.”
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
That’s the best kind of work.
The kind that would not have happened, or would have happened much later, without you.
Because there is something special about staying in direct contact with business reality.
Over long periods of time, business does not lie to you.
