Category: Blog

I have sat through too many investor briefings where the first slide celebrates a headline FDI figure. The room nods. The presenter moves on. But the number on that slide is often a vanity metric—lumpy, reversible, and disconnected from the everyday machinery of an economy. If you want to understand whether a market is building… Continue reading Why Foreign Direct Investment Numbers Tell You Less Than Domestic Capital Formation

By Adaeze Okonkwo Walk into a boardroom in London, Nairobi, or Lagos where a multinational is planning its African market entry, and one statistic will almost certainly dominate the first ten slides of the deck: smartphone penetration. The number is presented as the gateway metric—the single indicator that supposedly reveals whether a country is ready… Continue reading The Problem With Measuring African Markets by Smartphone Penetration Alone

I’ve lost count of the strategy meetings where someone drops a slide titled “Smartphone penetration: 34%,” and half the room starts packing up mentally. The logic sounds crisp—too few devices, no scale, let’s check back in three years. It’s the kind of clean, bloodless statistic that kills market entry before anyone asks a single shopkeeper… Continue reading You Can’t Size an African Market by Counting Phones

Every quarter, another batch of investor decks and strategy reports lands on my desk, all opening with the same worn-out line: “Africa’s smartphone penetration has hit X%.” The number has budged maybe a percentage point or two. The conclusion never changes—the digital opportunity is growing faster than ever. The analysis stops right there. It really… Continue reading Why Counting Smartphones Won’t Explain Africa’s Markets

In the late 1990s, a strange economic experiment took shape in the crowded markets of Lagos. Vendors stacked VHS tapes beside tomatoes and used jeans. The films on those tapes weren’t Hollywood’s newest exports. They were homegrown Nigerian productions, shot over a few days, cut on basic gear, and duplicated in small batches. What emerged… Continue reading How Nollywood Built a Distribution Model That Silicon Valley Cannot Replicate

Every year, another multinational arrives in Lagos convinced it will capture Nigeria’s fabled middle class. And every year, several of them retreat or shrink their operations, bewildered by the gap between their projections and reality. The pattern is consistent enough that it deserves a proper explanation—one rooted in commercial structure, not in lazy generalisations about… Continue reading Why Nigeria’s Middle Market Is Harder to Enter Than Multinationals Expect

The Attribution Model You Trust Is Fundamentally Broken I spent six years at McKinsey building financial models for CMOs. We’d layer attribution platforms on top of marketing stacks, run multivariate analyses, and produce these beautifully formatted dashboards that told executives exactly what they wanted to hear: paid search drove 41% of pipeline, content marketing drove… Continue reading Dark Social Captured 65% of Your Deal—And Your Attribution Model Missed It Entirely

The Shift Nobody’s Talking About Directly When I pulled the data on Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 cohort, the first thing that jumped out wasn’t what got the most press coverage. Yes, there were the usual consumer apps. Yes, there were the obligatory fintech plays. But the real story lives in the concentration: roughly 40 percent… Continue reading What Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 Batch Reveals About Where Smart Money Actually Flows

The Numbers Tell a Story About Priorities Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch landed with over 170 companies, and if you want to understand where venture capital is actually flowing in 2025, you need to stop listening to the narrative and start reading the portfolio. The concentration is stark: roughly 40% of the batch focused on… Continue reading What Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 Batch Reveals About the Real Money Shift in Startups

The Shift Nobody Saw Coming (Or Everyone Ignored) Let me start with something that should make every talent leader sit up straight. Between 2023 and 2025, the percentage of employees willing to take a pay cut for a four-day workweek jumped from 52% to 68%. That is not a marginal movement. That is a fundamental… Continue reading The 4-Day Workweek Is Now a Recruiting Weapon — Here’s What the 2025 Microsoft WorkLab Data Actually Says