About the Project – UnicornBuilders.Africa

For a long time, I've been obsessed with one question: How do great companies get built?

I've worked in design and product (startups & corp). We know how tough it is to launch and scale something meaningful. I've personally been through the hurdles all founders face, not because we lack talent or ideas, but because we're dealing with challenges that typical Silicon Valley playbooks don't really solve.

For a while, I thought maybe the problem was funding. Or maybe it was a lack of talent, infrastructure, or mentorship. But then I started really looking at the founders who made it (and this was because of 2 main conversations with 2 people). And I saw something deeper. Patterns.

UnicornBuilders.Africa is an ongoing research project designed to connect the dots between Africa's most successful tech founders and the critical steps they took to build billion-dollar companies.

This isn't just another dataset on African startups. It's a networked knowledge base that reveals:

• •How unicorn founders actually got started—the key influences, decisions, and pivots that shaped their journey.
• •The specific sequences of events that tend to lead to high-growth companies in Africa.
• •The unique constraints and opportunities that African founders navigate—what worked, what didn't, and why.

The goal? Is that instead of just being inspired by success stories, we can actually learn from them.

I started by identifying the most successful African startup founders—the ones who built unicorns (valued at $1B+), soon-icorns (on the way to unicorn status), or category-defining companies.

Then, I went beyond the usual “biographies” and looked for repeatable patterns:

Most startup advice out there isn't built for Africa. It assumes you have stable infrastructure, massive VC funding, a deep talent pool, and an easy regulatory environment. But African founders build in a different reality.

• They bootstrap longer because capital isn't always accessible.
• They innovate around broken systems—whether it's fragmented logistics, cash-heavy economies, or unreliable internet.
• They partner instead of disrupting—working with banks, telcos, and governments to reach scale.
• They operate across multiple countries faster than US startups, because Africa's markets are smaller and fragmented.

This project is about understanding those realities and helping myself and people like me to learn from the ones who've already figured it out.

I would love this to be a living knowledge network—a place where African entrepreneurs can explore the real playbooks of successful founders, see their paths, and find their own.

If you're a founder, investor, or ecosystem builder, this project is for you. It's about learning from what's already worked—so you can build what comes next.

Let's connect the dots. Let's build.