Stay Alive: Why Survival Trumps Vision in African Entrepreneurship

Silicon Valley has a seductive mantra: "Move fast and break things." Fail fast, fail cheap. Burn through investor money to find product-market fit. The assumption is simple: you can afford to get it wrong multiple times before getting it right.

Fortunately or unfortunately, African entrepreneurs don't have this luxury.

When failure means not just a professional setback but an existential crisis, you need a different playbook. That playbook is built around a counterintuitive principle: survival trumps vision.

The Luxury of Failure

"Fail fast" assumes failure is a learning experience with recoverable consequences. It assumes family safety nets, easy follow-on funding, and forgiving ecosystems that celebrate "intelligent failures."

For most African entrepreneurs, failure is devastating. There's no easy bounce-back. When you fail, you lose your own money, your family's money, your friends' money, and often your team's unpaid salaries.

This constraint forces a fundamentally different approach: stay alive long enough to succeed.

Survival as Strategy

This isn't about playing it safe. It's recognising that in uncertain environments, the ability to survive and adapt creates more value than the ability to predict and execute perfectly.

Consider how this played out at Aella, one of the first African fintechs to get into Y Combinator:

Vision: Democratise lending for everyone in Africa

Survival Reality: Start with salary earners who can prove income

Adaptation: Build models to serve people without formal documentation

Result: 2+ million users across Nigeria and the Philippines

The vision remained constant. The execution path was ruthlessly pragmatic.

Wale Akanbi, Aella's former CTO, on my podcast - The Grinders Table, describes the Y Combinator advice that shaped their approach: "Stay alive. When there's life, there's hope." This led to decisions that would horrify Silicon Valley playbooks: engineers doubling as customer service agents, six-person teams managing millions of users, feature prioritisation based on immediate survival needs.

Innovation Through Necessity

Resource constraints create unexpected advantages. When Aella couldn't rely on traditional credit scoring, they invented network-based fraud detection—analysing customer connections to predict creditworthiness.

"If you already have 500 people that have been proven fraudulent within our system," Akanbi explains, "we know where you would likely be."

This wasn't in the original plan. It emerged from a survival necessity but became a defensible competitive advantage.

The Global Shift

This survival-first philosophy isn't just for African entrepreneurs. As markets become more competitive globally and capital becomes more expensive, survival thinking is becoming a competitive advantage everywhere.

Silicon Valley's current obsession with profitability and efficiency is essentially rediscovering principles African entrepreneurs never had the luxury of forgetting.

The "move fast and break things" era assumed infinite resources. This new era requires moving fast while keeping things working. Adapting quickly while staying alive.

The New African Model

African entrepreneurs should adopt this model: hold vision lightly, hold survival tightly. Pivot without losing purpose. Stay alive long enough to see ambitions become reality.

Dead companies with perfect visions help nobody. Living companies with adaptive visions can change the world.

Stay alive. When there's life, there's hope.

And sometimes, hope is enough to change the world.