A Letter From Lagos: Notes on What I Got Wrong About the African Tech Story This Year

Friends,

I owe you some honesty, so I'm going to spend this edition on it. If you've read me for a while, you've watched me chase the same story most tech writers chase: the funding round. Company raises money, I write it up, you read it, we all feel like something important happened. This year I've come to believe a lot of that was noise, and I helped make it.

Let me be specific about what I got wrong.

I confused raising money with building a company

A funding announcement is the easiest story in the world to write. There's a number, a quote from a happy investor, a founder photo. It looks like news. But a raise is not an outcome — it's a bet, and most bets lose. I wrote breathlessly about rounds that, eighteen months on, funded companies now quietly winding down. I gave you the thrill of the ascent and none of the physics of the fall.

The funding round is the wedding. The business is the marriage. I kept filing wedding announcements and calling it coverage of marriages.

From now on I'm more interested in the boring middle. Revenue that survives without subsidy. Unit economics that work when the promotions stop. The unsexy question of whether a thing actually makes money. It's less exciting to write. I think it's more useful to read.

I over-indexed on Lagos, and on English

I write from Lagos, in English, for a connected, urban audience — and I let that shape what I called "African tech" as if my window were the whole house. There is enormous building happening in places I rarely visit and in markets that don't perform well in English on Twitter. Francophone West Africa. The northern Nigerian trade economy. Rural fintech that never trends. I've been covering the loudest 10 percent and calling it the story.

• I'm going to travel more, and not just to the pitch competitions that fly me in.
• I'm going to write about companies that will never issue a press release.
• I'm going to be more suspicious of anything that trends easily.

I let the unicorn myth do my thinking

The billion-dollar valuation became my shorthand for success, and that was lazy. A handful of highly-valued companies absorbed a disproportionate share of both the capital and the coverage — mine included. Meanwhile, a profitable company employing forty people and solving a real problem got nothing from me, because it didn't have a number big enough to tweet.

Valuation is a claim about the future. Profit is a fact about the present. I've been treating claims as facts. That stops.

What I'm promising you instead

Fewer funding-round posts. More reporting from outside Lagos. More attention to the businesses that survive the year they were supposed to run out of money. More skepticism, generally — the kind I should have been applying all along instead of amplifying whatever the ecosystem wanted amplified.

I'm also going to be more honest when I don't know something, and quicker to revisit a story I got wrong. This letter is the first installment of that. It will not be the last.

Some of you subscribed for the hype. If you leave, I understand. But I think the real African tech story — the durable, unglamorous, actually-important one — is more interesting than the highlight reel I've been selling. I'd rather write that one, even if it gets fewer clicks.

Thank you for reading me even when I was wrong. Especially then.

See you next edition — from somewhere, I hope, that isn't Lagos.

— David