When scaling feels like selling your soul

Most African founders don’t launch startups with a pitch deck and seed capital. They start from necessity. A job ends. A deal lands. A door slams shut. You start something small to survive and suddenly you’re building a business.

Few start with innovation. The market doesn’t reward that here. Innovation belongs to those who’ve already made it. But we push anyway.

We learn. We build. We restructure. We hire and fire. We press the pedal harder when it clicks.

That’s when the fear sets in.

Because scaling isn’t always success. Sometimes, it’s suffocation.

Your name becomes the brand. At first, that’s fine you’re the face people trust. But one day, it starts choking you. You want to step back. You can’t. The business has fused with your identity.

You raise funding. Round one is exciting. Round two? Exhausting. The media slaps a “billionaire” label on your head. Bloggers come sniffing. Family and friends pitch ideas. Everyone wants a slice.

The pressure compounds. Expensive schools, family investments, political tides, community expectations. The weight grows, and the joy quietly fades.

Then comes the village. Not metaphorically literally. Cousins, former classmates, even that uncle you’ve not spoken to in a decade. They show up sometimes with opportunity, often with entitlement. They call it community, but it feels like consumption.

Your win becomes public property. Everyone has access. And if you decline? You’re proud. You’ve changed. You forgot where you came from. What they don’t see is that sometimes, you’re just trying to breathe.

I sat down with three seasoned founders Pauline Warui, Peter Nduati, and Lenny Nganga to talk about scale. What we expected to be a business strategy session turned into something more personal. Raw. Almost therapeutic.

Each of them has felt that deep shift when scaling turns from vision to burden.

Pauline Warui, once a corporate executive, had to pivot after being pushed out. She quickly learned that founding isn’t strategy on paper it’s emotional survival.

“Now that I’m here,” she said, “every decision feels like life or death.” She transformed her corporate skills into a business. But with growth came glare. “It’s not just scaling a business,” Pauline said. “It’s scaling your capacity to withstand everything that comes with it.”

Peter Nduati built a pan-African health insurer and exited through a buyout. But what looked like success came at a personal cost. “I sold equity for peace but lost identity.” Even trying to rebuild, the spotlight stayed. “You want to restart quietly. But the noise finds you,” he said.

“Everyone thinks you’re still that billionaire.” He tried to buy the business back. He failed. He moved on.

Lenny Nganga, a marketing veteran, watched growth turn to chaos. “You’re proud to employ hundreds,” he said. “Then suddenly, you’re therapist, banker, boss carrying it all.” Systems cracked. Culture strained. “You realise you’re everything to everyone.”

His words echoed in all of us. Founders carry more than company weight they absorb others’ dreams, burdens, and needs. Sometimes, it breaks you. Other times, you become the institution.

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Eventually, you play in the public sector because government is the biggest buyer. That, too, is another trap. One policy shift, one political fallout, and your business teeters.

So you go back to school. You search for answers. But they teach you Apple and Coke nothing about managing the extractive ecosystem, tender fraud, or the emotional weight of being both CEO and shock absorber.

You leave with frameworks. Still you wonder was it worth it?

Most people think the battle is with the business. But the real war? It’s with yourself.

At the beginning, you’re lit up visionary, driven, sure that this time it’ll be different. And maybe it is. But no one warns you that growth will demand a personal death, old habits, outdated beliefs, even the very identity that got you this far. You outgrow old tools and letting go feels like betrayal.

That’s why most founders don’t fold from laziness they fold from grief. From shedding a version of themselves they once needed. But the ones who sit with it who grow through it don’t just become better entrepreneurs. They become someone new. Someone whole.

The Nairobi Securities Exchange once had 162 listed companies. Many have since quietly delisted or suspended trading. Even giants such as Deacons and Mumias didn’t make it. If they couldn’t hold, what about the rest of us? Some exit through sale but often it’s more relief than reward.

We celebrate scaling. But rarely talk about staying power. Or the wisdom lost when stories remain untold.

Because scaling in Africa is often a double-edged sword.

It begins with external dependencies ,investor pressure, political volatility, and a culture that glorifies winning but punishes vulnerability.

Then come the internal fractures: emotional fatigue, loss of autonomy, and the long, quiet moments where you realise the journey has reshaped you entirely.

Without buffers like a real support ecosystem or risk diversification the outcomes are painfully predictable: rapid rise and fall, diluted vision, and reputation risk. That’s why we don’t just need capital we need a code.

We need an African Founder Operating System a survival framework rooted in truth. One to help founders:

• Navigate political, social, and financial terrain
• Confront emotional, moral, and identity-based pressure
• Build cultures anchored in trust, resilience, and clarity
• And most of all, document our own case studies of failure and success as maps for others

To those who’ve scaled and handed over we honour you.

To those still fighting speak up. Your scars are someone else’s survival guide.

That’s why we built Founders’ Battlefield to speak when it matters.

The Author is a Serial Entrepreneur Founder Seven Seas ,Ponea Health and creator of Founders’ Battlefield