No one builds alone

The founding note for telia — a community for Africa's technology leaders.

I have watched too many good people build in isolation.

A founder in Harare wiring up a payment rail because Stripe doesn't reach her customers. An engineering lead in Nairobi solving, from scratch, a problem three other teams two countries away have already solved. A product head in Lagos carrying a vision no one around the table fully understands, because the nearest person who has done it before is on another continent. Each of them excellent. Each of them alone.

That isolation is not a personal failing. It is a structural one. The playbooks were written somewhere else, for somewhere else. The networks that compound a career — the quiet introduction, the honest second opinion, the "don't make the mistake I made" — were built in rooms most of us were never in. So we improvise. We read the foreign case study and translate it as best we can. We lead without the benefit of the people who have already led.

telia exists to close that gap.

What we believe

There is a Shona and Ndebele understanding of personhood that the rest of the world is slowly catching up to: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other people. Ubuntu. We are because we are together.

Most of the technology industry was built on the opposite premise — the lone founder, the heroic individual, the genius in the garage. It makes for good mythology and poor outcomes. The truth is that no one builds anything that matters alone. Behind every person who looks like a solo success is a community that caught them when they fell and told them the truth when it counted.

We think African technology leadership should be built on the premise we already hold to be true. Not leadership as a solitary climb, but leadership as a collective act. Not knowledge hoarded as advantage, but knowledge shared as commons.

What telia is

telia is a community of the people building African technology — founders, engineers, product leaders, operators, the ones making decisions that don't have a textbook answer.

It is a place to think out loud with people who understand the context. To ask the question you can't ask your board or your team. To find the person who has already solved the thing in front of you, and to be that person for someone else next month.

Concretely, that means:

• Writing worth your time. Honest essays on building in and for African markets — the payment problem, the infrastructure problem, the talent problem, the diaspora question — written by people who have actually done it, not summarised from elsewhere.
• A room where leaders talk to each other. Not a feed to perform in. A space to compare notes, disagree well, and help.
• Knowledge as commons. What we learn here is meant to be passed on, not locked up. That is the bundu way, and it is the open-source way.

Who this is for

telia is not for everyone, and that is the point.

It is for you if you are building something real and you are tired of building it alone. If you believe the next decade of consequential technology will be built on this continent and you intend to be one of the people building it. If you would rather be honest than impressive. If you understand that giving is how you earn the right to receive.

If that is you, you already belong here. The only thing left is to walk in.

Join us

telia is free to join, and it always will be at the door. Subscribe below and you will get every essay as it is published, an invitation to the conversations happening inside, and a standing seat in a room built for people exactly like you.

We are because we are together. Come build with us.

— Bryan Fawcett, founder