There is a story about how to build a technology company that has become so dominant it feels like the only story. Raise money from investors. Spend it faster than you earn it, deliberately, to grow as fast as possible. Lose money for years. Chase scale above all else, capture the market, and become profitable — or get acquired — much later, if at all. This is the Silicon Valley startup model, and a generation of African founders has absorbed it as simply how it is done.
It is not how it is done. It is one specific way of building a company, evolved for one specific environment, encoding bets that mostly do not hold here. Copied into the Tanzanian context unexamined, it does not just underperform — it quietly destroys businesses that could have thrived on a different model. This is distinct from my broader argument about Western advice; this is about one particularly seductive and damaging import: the growth-at-all-costs startup itself.
The model is a bet, and the bet is local
The Silicon Valley model is rational where it was born, because of conditions specific to that environment: enormous pools of risk capital willing to fund years of losses, a vast homogeneous market you can scale across quickly, an exit culture where companies get acquired or go public for sums that justify all the prior losses, and infrastructure and salaries that make the whole machine run.
Under those conditions, "lose money fast to grow fast and win later" is a defensible bet. The capital exists to fund the losses. The market exists to absorb the growth. The exit exists to pay everyone back. Remove any of those and the bet changes from bold to reckless. And in Tanzania, several of them are simply absent or far weaker. The deep risk capital is not there in the same way. The market is more fragmented. The exit culture barely exists. The model's core assumptions, transplanted here, mostly do not hold — which means the bet that was rational there becomes a way to lose here.
"Lose money fast to win later" is a rational bet only where deep capital, a vast market, and a real exit culture exist to back it. Remove those, and the same bet is just a way to go broke faster.
What copying it does to a good business
The damage is specific. A founder here, having absorbed the startup gospel, makes choices that actively harm an otherwise healthy business:
They prioritise growth over profitability when they cannot afford to. Without deep investors to fund years of losses, deliberately losing money to grow is not a strategy — it is just running out of money slowly. Businesses that could have been modestly profitable and durable instead burn through their resources chasing a scale they have no runway to reach.
They despise the thing that could save them: actual revenue. The startup model treats early revenue as almost a distraction from growth. But for a business without a deep capital backstop, revenue is survival — it is the only fuel there is. Founders trained to chase users over income end up with neither.
They scale prematurely and break. Hiring ahead of revenue, expanding before the core works, spending against money that has not arrived — all sensible if a big raise is coming, all fatal if it is not. The startup playbook says grow now and fix the economics later; here, "later" often never comes, because the business dies first.
They measure themselves against the wrong scoreboard. Judging a Tanzanian business by Silicon Valley metrics — user growth, market share, funds raised — a founder can feel like a failure while running a genuinely good, profitable, durable company. The imported scoreboard tells them to take risks that destroy the very thing that was working.
The model that fits: build something that pays for itself
So what is the alternative? It is older, less glamorous, and far better suited to here: build a business that is profitable, or on a clear path to it, and that grows from its own earnings rather than from a constant external drip of investor money.
This means earning revenue early and treating it as the point, not a distraction. It means growing at the pace the business can actually fund, which is slower but does not depend on a raise that may never come. It means being durable — built to survive and compound over years — rather than built to either explode in growth or die. It is, frankly, just the classic idea of a good business, the kind that existed long before the startup model, recovered and applied with discipline.
This is not anti-ambition. A business that is profitable and growing from its own strength can become very large, and it does so on solid ground rather than on a bet that the capital and the exit will materialise. It is a different kind of ambition — to build something that lasts and stands on its own, rather than something that wins a funding-fuelled race or dies trying.
The takeaway
The Silicon Valley startup model is not a universal law of company-building. It is a local strategy for a local environment, encoding bets about capital, markets, and exits that mostly do not hold in Tanzania. Copied here without examination, it leads good founders to despise revenue, chase unfundable growth, scale prematurely, and judge themselves by a scoreboard built for someone else's game — and it destroys businesses that a different model would have made thrive.
Build the other kind. Earn money early and mean it, grow at the pace your own earnings allow, and aim for durability over a funding-fuelled sprint. It is less glamorous than the startup story, and it is far more likely to leave you, in ten years, running a real and valuable company on ground that is genuinely your own. Do not copy the bet that was made for somebody else's conditions. Make the one that fits yours.