The Ecosystem Rewards the Performance of Success. That Is a Problem.
We have built an ecosystem that is better at packaging success than producing it.
Scroll through any major African tech or VC community on any given week and you will find a steady stream of funding announcements, panel highlights, Forbes lists, and carefully worded posts about lessons learned - always from a safe distance, always after the outcome is already known. What this produces is a version of this work that founders, aspiring investors, and young professionals are consuming as a blueprint, and it is leaving them dangerously unprepared for the actual conditions.
Eunice Ajim sat with me on The Grinders Table recently. She is the Founding General Partner of Ajim Capital and one of the early-stage investors in African tech today that continually shares her conviction. Before any of that, she had her car repossessed, was sleeping on friends’ couches, and was still showing up to startup events trying to build a company. She told me this without hesitation, and this was a very important context.
I believe the ecosystem hasn’t been particularly good at honest contemporary accounting. Like in Eunice’s story, the period when things are not working, when capital is drying up, when a pregnancy loss is happening in the background of a fund raise, when the market collapses midway through your first capital call. That period is largely invisible in the public record. We see the announcement. We do not see what the announcement was actually the beginning of.
When Eunice posted about launching Ajim Capital in 2022, most people assumed the fund was already raised. It was not. That post was Day 1 of the fundraise. What followed was years of quarterly updates to every investor she had ever spoken to, through SVB, through personal loss, through market contraction, sharing the highs and the lows with equal honesty. By the time she went to market for Fund II, she had an anchor LP who had been watching her for years. She did not need to introduce herself. She needed to close someone who already believed in her.
That is not a brand strategy. That is what trust actually costs.
The problem with the performance of success is not just that it misleads people. It is that it crowds out the more useful signal, that this work is genuinely hard, that most attempts fail, that the people who last are not the ones who made it look easiest, but the ones who were honest enough about the difficulty to keep going through it anyway.
The ecosystem would produce better founders, better investors, and better outcomes if more people in it were willing to do the same.
Eunice Ajim’s full conversation on The Grinders Table - covering how she raised Ajim Capital from strangers on the internet, her pattern-recognition investment thesis, and what African founders consistently get wrong about fundraising, is available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.