Capital & Ecosystem

Evidence-based coaching for founders needs three receipts: an action someone else can check, a comparison group, and gains that outlast the coach.

Most founder assessments run on the founder’s own answers. How to grade each answer as Said, Shown or Checked, and where to spend your verification.

Most programmes report outputs and never test whether their design worked. What it takes for an accelerator to learn from its own alumni, and why almost none do.

An assessment that awards the prize for completing it stops being an assessment. The design rules that keep a founder diagnostic honest, and the moment most of them fail.

Small firms count stock and cash and never count the people who determine whether either is handled well. Four crude measures that predict whether a business can grow without breaking its owner.

Thin-file lending needs a score, but most founder scores measure attendance and politeness. What belongs in one, what does not, and the failure mode nobody designs against.

Most founder dashboards measure things no decision depends on. The test for any metric is simple: name the decision it would change, and the threshold that would change it.

Across 99 accelerator alumni, founders who arrived without a business dropped out at 45 percent against 15 percent for those with a registered one. What that says about selection.

Ugandan startups raised US$22M of Africa’s US$4.1B in 2025. What lenders and investors check first, what readiness training changes, and three records to start this week.

Africa’s funding winter buried startups that raised $27M to $86M. The lesson is not about money. Capital multiplies an operating rhythm; it cannot create one.