In The Promised Land, Grace Ogot sends Ochola and Nyapol across the border in search of richer soil and a better life. They find it, for a season. They also find something nobody warned them about: the particular loneliness of being the newcomers who wanted more. The neighbours who smile and also whisper. The suspicion that follows anyone who seems to be doing too well, too fast, on their own terms. Ogot was writing about migration and land. But she may as well have been writing about a founder’s first five years.
Nobody tells you that building something is, first and before anything else, a lonely act. Not lonely in the cinematic sense — you are usually surrounded by people, by staff, by clients, by well-wishers on WhatsApp forwarding you motivational quotes at 6am. Lonely in the specific sense that almost nobody around you is carrying what you are carrying, and almost everybody has an opinion about how you should be carrying it.
Twelve years into this, I have collected a working list of the advice that gets repeated most often to founders in Kenya, and that turns out, on contact with reality, to be mostly myth. Not malicious myth. Well-meant myth, usually recycled from a Silicon Valley podcast or a business school case study written about a company with forty million dollars of runway. I want to walk through ten of them, honestly, and say what actually sits underneath each one — because somewhere in Nairobi, or Kampala, or Kisumu, or Jinja, there is a founder awake right now wondering why the advice everyone keeps giving them does not seem to apply to their life.
Myth 1: “Hire Smarter People Than You”
Every founder has heard this one, usually from someone who has never met payroll. In principle it is not wrong. In practice it skips the first question: with which money?
The best people in any market are already employed, already counter-offered every quarter, already sitting comfortably at the institutions that can afford them. Telling a bootstrapped founder to “hire smarter than yourself” without naming a budget is like telling a man to buy a better boat without asking what is in his pocket. You do not out-bid Google. You find the people Google has not noticed yet, and you hire for trajectory over credential, one bet at a time, praying the ones you invest in stay long enough for the investment to pay you back.
Nobody warns you about the emotional tax of that strategy, though. I have watched people walk through our doors straight out of college — nervous, thin on paper, hungry in the way only someone with something to prove is hungry — and I have watched some of those same people walk back out years later into AWS, into Google, into the fintechs now quietly hiring the exact skills we spent years building in them. There is an irony in that I try hard not to let curdle into bitterness: I left Google to build this company, and more than a decade later, Google is one of the places harvesting what we grew. You invest in someone’s raw material. You absorb their early, expensive mistakes without complaint, because that absorption is the actual job. You watch them turn into something formidable. And then, the moment they are finally, truly smarter than you at the thing you hired them to do, the offer arrives that you cannot match, and they take it, and they should. You shake the hand. You mean the congratulations. Then you sit back down at your own desk, swallow whatever quiet grief is owed, and start the entire exhausting cycle again with someone new — because that, too, is the part of the job nobody prepares you for.
Myth 2: “Delegate”
To whom, exactly?
Delegation is real. It is also a luxury that arrives much later than the podcasts imply, and even then it never fully arrives, because you are the one who is legally, financially, and morally on the hook when it goes wrong. I have come to think of it like being handed command of a small dhow and being told to delegate the navigation to the crew — except there is no crew of engineers standing by belowdecks. There is you, a compass, a hull that leaks a little in the rain, and a handful of people who are learning to sail on the same voyage you are learning to captain. You do not get to walk away from the wheel because a book told you a real captain delegates. You stay at the wheel until the people around you have earned the trust to hold it themselves — and even then, when the water turns, everyone looks at you first.
Myth 3: Capital Is Out There, Waiting for the Deserving
Mohamed Suleiman Mohamed titled his novel simply Kiu — Thirst. Mzee Mwinyi in that story has everything money can buy and is still starving for the one thing it cannot: to be genuinely wanted, not managed. He pours his wealth toward that hunger, and the people around the money — his driver Idi most of all — learn to farm his thirst rather than quench it, right up until it costs him everything. I think about that novel often when founders talk about capital as if it is the thing that will finally make them feel secure. Money changes what is possible. It has never, in my experience, changed the ache that sent you looking for it in the first place.
Here is what nobody tells you before you start: no one owes you belief. Not a bank, not an investor, not a development finance institution with a mandate that reads, on paper, exactly like your business. You can have the numbers, the traction, the references, and still hear silence, because capital in this market moves on comfort and precedent, not merit alone, and comfort takes years to build with people who have never met you. And when capital does arrive, it rarely arrives clean — there is almost always someone standing near it, like Idi standing near Mwinyi’s fortune, whose interest in your success is not quite the same as your own. The thirst does not go away because the cheque clears. You learn, instead, to build without waiting for it to be quenched — which is a different skill entirely from having it satisfied.
Myth 4: Friends and Family Will Give You Business
They will wish you well. They will share your post. They will tell other people how proud they are of you. What most of them will not do — and I say this without an ounce of resentment, because I understand it now — is hand you a contract simply because they know you.
Parting with money is one of the hardest things a human being does, and it does not get easier because the person asking shares your surname or your church pew. Okot p’Bitek wrote Song of Lawino as the lament of a woman watching someone she loves become unrecognisable to her — a stranger dressed in a familiar face. There is a smaller, gentler version of that feeling that visits every founder: the friend who once knew you as the boy from the estate, now looking at you as “the businessman,” unsure whether to treat you as family or as a vendor, and quietly deciding it is safer to do neither. You have to let that go. You have to go and earn the business from strangers who will judge you only on the delivery, because at least strangers are honest about the terms.
Myth 5: Referrals Will Carry You
Adjacent myth, same root problem. People imagine that once you do good work, referrals cascade — that someone who respects you will hand your name to their network the way you’d hand a friend an umbrella in the rain.
They will not, not easily. A referral is a person staking their own reputation on yours, in front of people whose opinion of them matters. Nobody does that lightly, and nobody should. Mwangi Gicheru’s Across the Bridge follows a boy with nothing — a houseboy with ambition and no one to vouch for him — who crosses into a different life by sheer, repeated proof of himself, not by anyone lending him their name for free. That is the real mechanics of a referral economy. You do not get referred because people like you. You get referred once you have made enough people look good, quietly, over enough time, that recommending you becomes a low-risk bet on their own credibility. Earn that. Nobody is going to gift it to you.
Myth 6: Do Right, and It Will Be Recognised
This is the myth that costs founders the most, emotionally, because it is the one you believe the longest.
Nobody claps for the invoice you paid on time. Nobody sends flowers when KRA finds your filings in perfect order. Customers, if you are lucky, will occasionally say thank you — and I mean that sincerely, some of the kindest words I have ever received have come from clients who noticed the extra mile. But the people you invest the most in, day after day, year after year — your staff — are, paradoxically, the ones least likely to hand you grace when the relationship ends, even if you handed them everything you had while it lasted.
There is a particular, devastating asymmetry to this life. The sacrifices that cost you the most happen in the dark and are never witnessed: the nights you did not sleep, the personal loans you quietly took out to protect other people’s salaries, the months you paid everyone in the building before you paid yourself. The decisions that cost other people the most happen in daylight, in a room, with your name on them, in front of an audience. One employee once told me, years after the fact, almost as an aside rather than the point they meant to make — that because I had never once delayed a salary in twelve years, their own friends at other companies had come to quietly rely on them as a soft lender in the gap between paydays. Their pay was solid enough, every single month, that other people were building on it without ever knowing whose discipline made that possible. Nobody told me that at the time. Nobody thanked me for the months I paid the whole team and went without myself. It surfaced years later, almost by accident, the way most of the good you do in this life usually does.
I was reminded of the other side of that same asymmetry recently. An employee who left the company more than five years ago reached out through a mutual friend, unprompted, to say that I had been genuinely inspiring to work under, that the skills I’d pushed them to build were the same ones carrying their career today. It moved me more than they will ever know. But I also remember, clearly, the week I had to let that same person go. The anger. The words said about me in rooms I was not in. The narrative that spread, sharp and personal, in the immediate aftermath of a decision that had nothing to do with malice and everything to do with a business that had to survive.
Francis Imbuga’s Aminata is not a story about cruelty from strangers. Aminata’s claim to her late father’s land is entirely just — his own will says so — and it is her uncle and her own brother, the people who should have stood nearest to her, who turn on her for asserting it. Imbuga’s quiet, unsentimental point is that being right and being resented are not opposites. They often arrive in the same room, from the same people, at the same time. That is the part of running a company nobody prepares a founder for: doing the correct, defensible, necessary thing does not protect you from the anger of the person standing closest to you when you do it. They remember the moment. The context arrives later, if it arrives at all. Five years later, in my case. That is the actual timeline of being understood. Plan your emotional life around it accordingly.
Myth 7: It Gets Easier As You Grow
It does not get easier. It gets different, and the difference is not always kind. At five employees, the weight is intimate and total. At thirty, the weight is distributed but multiplied — thirty households now depend on decisions you make on a Tuesday afternoon, thirty sets of hopes are quietly tied to a cash flow only you can see in full. Ken Walibora’s Kongowea Mswahili, the orphan at the centre of Siku Njema, does not walk one hard road and then rest. He walks, and the road changes, and he keeps walking — carried, book after book, by the simple, stubborn conviction the title names outright: that a good day, siku njema, is still coming, even if today was not it. That is the actual discipline of scaling a company. Not the absence of hardship. The refusal to stop believing that the next stretch of road is the one that gets easier, even when it rarely is. Scale does not retire the walking. It just changes the terrain under your feet.
Myth 8: Your Team Is Your Family
I understand why founders say this, and I said it myself for years, sincerely. But family does not require a performance review, and family does not resign with two weeks’ notice when a better offer lands, and — this is the part that took me the longest and cost me the most to learn — family does not need an HR policy to know it is loved. A company does. The moment you run a company on the emotional logic of family instead of the structural logic of an institution, you are building on sand, and you find out exactly how much sand the day something goes wrong and there is no policy, only your personality, standing between your people and chaos. Treat your team with the warmth of family. Build the institution like it is not one. Both things are true at once, and the founders who only hold one of them eventually get hurt by the part they forgot.
Myth 9: Being Right Will Eventually Be Known
There is a comforting story we tell ourselves — that the truth travels, eventually, at its own pace, and catches up with the headline that outran it. Sometimes it does. More often, the correction is a footnote and the original story is the headline, and the two will never travel at the same speed or reach the same audience, no matter how thoroughly the record is eventually set straight. I have lived enough of that particular physics to stop expecting otherwise. What I have learned instead is that vindication is not a strategy. Building, quietly and consistently, in full view of the people who actually matter to your life, is the only version of “being known correctly” that is within your control. Let the rest travel at whatever speed it travels.
Myth 10: You Can Switch It Off
This is the loneliest one, and it is the one nobody says out loud at founder meetups, because everyone is busy performing resilience for everyone else in the room.
There is no closing time on this. You do not clock out of a company you built from nothing. It follows you into the shower, into the school run, into the cold, silent stretch of three a.m. ceiling-staring. In those hours you are not doing payroll arithmetic in the abstract; you are carrying thirty different lives, one line item at a time — quietly calculating how a client’s delayed invoice might land on an engineer’s school fees, or a support agent’s parent’s medical bill. Your heart does its own quiet arithmetic alongside your mind, while the person next to you sleeps peacefully, entirely unaware that you are, once again, at war with a reality only you can see.
I will say the honest thing here, because an essay like this one has no room left for anything less. There were seasons, at my lowest, when I wished I could simply disappear and let the company carry on without me — not from any wish to harm myself, but from sheer exhaustion at being the one fixed point that thirty families’ futures were quietly leaning against. I could not do it. I have never been able to do it. Even on holiday, even on a weekend with my phone face-down on the table, I remain, somewhere underneath whatever I am doing, the last line of defence. Nobody warns founders that the hardest part of this life is not the workload. It is the specific, heavy isolation of being the only person who carries the whole shape of the dhow, all the time, everywhere you go, whether or not you are anywhere near your desk.
Bonus Myth: Growth Will Finally Make Them See You
There is one more myth I had not planned to write about, but it deserves its own paragraph rather than a reshaping of the ten above: the myth that if you grow enough, for long enough, the people who knew you when you were small will eventually, fully update the picture of you they are carrying.
They mostly will not. Not the former colleague who once outranked you and still, years later, corrects you gently in rooms as though the correcting were still owed. Not the relative who declined to hand you your first contract and still, today, introduces you at family functions by the smaller job you no longer hold. Not the senior figure who mentored you for a season and now, watching you outgrow the room he once controlled, finds a dozen small ways to describe your success as luck, or timing, or somebody else’s work you happened to be standing near.
I used to take this personally. I no longer do, because there is a name for what is actually happening in each of those rooms. People form a fixed picture of you the day they first meet you, or the day they first hold some authority over you, and updating that picture afterward costs something real — a quiet demotion in the private hierarchy they have always ranked you both against. Most minds resist paying that cost. It is considerably easier, and a great deal less humbling, to keep you exactly the size you were the day they decided who you were.
There is a harder layer underneath that one. If someone who was once smaller than you, or junior to you, or simply beneath you in whatever order you both silently agreed on, goes on to build something real, it is their sense of standing that takes the hit, not yours. Watching a former junior succeed forces an uncomfortable arithmetic — either their own long-held sense of superior standing was slightly wrong, or the story they tell themselves about their own trajectory needs revising. Most people choose neither. They choose, instead, to keep minimizing what they are looking at, because minimizing you costs them far less than re-examining themselves.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o gives us the sharpest version of this I know in The River Between. Waiyaki is raised up by his own community — educated, trusted, named their Teacher, treated for a season as the very saviour his father always said he would become. Then Kabonyi, an elder who once stood senior to Waiyaki’s own father, watches the young man’s stature outgrow anything he can comfortably place beneath his own — and it is Kabonyi, not a stranger, not a colonial officer, who engineers the moment his own people hand Waiyaki over to be punished. Ngũgĩ is not writing about petty jealousy. He is writing about what happens when a community’s genuine elevation of a person collides with an elder’s need to remain, in his own mind, still the tallest man on the ridge.
I have made my peace with the version of this I live with. Some of the same people who declined to give me business when I was starting out, who still today speak of me carefully, at half-volume, as though too much acknowledgment might cost them something — I no longer wait on their permission to consider the crossing complete. Their frozen picture of me was never actually a picture of me. It was a picture of who they needed me to remain, for their own comfort, at a moment that has already passed. I let them keep it. I am not the one still living inside it.
What Actually Gets You Through
None of this is a complaint. I want to be precise about that, because it would be easy to read ten myths in a row and hear bitterness where none is intended. This is a record, not a grievance — the kind of record I wish someone had handed me twelve years ago, not to talk me out of building, but to tell me honestly what the building would actually feel like on the inside.
Ochola and Nyapol, in Ogot’s telling, do not find an easy promised land. They find a harder, more honest one — and something in them is sturdier for having crossed into it, whatever it cost them along the way. I think that is the truest thing literature has ever told me about this life. Nobody hires smarter people than you for free. Nobody delegates the whole weight away. Capital does not arrive because you deserve it. Friends do not become clients because they love you. Referrals are earned in silence, over years. Good deeds mostly go unthanked, by the very people who benefited from them most. It does not get easier. Your team is not your family, even when you love them like one. Vindication is not coming on your schedule. Growth will not make the people who knew you small finally see you whole. And there is no off switch.
And still — you keep sailing the dhow. You keep walking Kongowea’s road. Not because someone told you it would be easy. Because somewhere back at the beginning, before anyone warned you otherwise, you decided the crossing was worth making anyway.
Oscar Limoke is the co-founder of Pawa IT Solutions and Konversations. He writes about technology, leadership, and what it actually costs to build something in Africa.