Every week, somewhere on this continent, a new startup launches. There is a pitch deck. There is a demo day. There is a LinkedIn post with a photo of the founding team standing in front of a banner. Applause. Excitement. The feeling that something is beginning.
And then, quietly, most of them disappear.
Not because the founders lacked talent. Not because the ideas were bad. But because the ground beneath them was never solid enough to build on.
I have spent over a decade in African tech. I have built, invested in, incubated, and buried startups. I have watched brilliant people with real solutions fail for reasons that had nothing to do with their product or their hustle. They failed because the infrastructure they needed to succeed simply did not exist.
And I believe this is the conversation we are not having, honestly enough.
The myth of the missing founder
There is a narrative that Africa’s tech ecosystem is primarily constrained by a talent gap. That, if we just train more developers, produce more MBA graduates, and run more boot camps, the ecosystem will flourish.
Talent matters. Of course it does. But I have sat across the table from hundreds of founders in Cameroon, across Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, and beyond. The talent is there. The ideas are there. What is missing is everything around them.
When a founder in San Francisco launches a startup, they walk into a pre-built world. Angel networks with established deal flow. Legal firms that understand convertible notes. Accountants who specialise in venture-backed companies. Design agencies that speak the language of product. Mentors who have done it before and can compress years of learning into a single conversation.
When a founder in Buea, Douala or Bamenda launches a startup, they walk into a field. And they have to build the road before they can drive on it.
That is not a talent problem. That is an infrastructure problem.
What I mean by infrastructure
I am not talking about internet connectivity, although that matters too. I am talking about the invisible systems that allow an ecosystem to function.
Capital infrastructure.
In most of Francophone Africa, there is no established culture of angel investing. Local business leaders with capital tend to invest in real estate rather than startups. The result is that founders are forced to chase international investors who often do not understand local markets, or they simply never raise at all. We need homegrown investment networks that believe in local solutions. That is why I started Mountain Angel Network. Not to replace international capital, but to build the layer beneath it.
Knowledge infrastructure.
Incubation is not just office space with wifi. Real incubation means access to people who have navigated the exact problems you are facing. Fundraising strategy. Unit economics. Hiring your first engineer. Negotiating with a government procurement office. Most founders in our region are solving these problems alone, from scratch, every single time. The knowledge exists. It is just not organised or accessible.
Design and product infrastructure.
Too many African startups go to market with products that were built before they were designed. The UX is an afterthought. The brand is a logo someone made in Canva. And then they wonder why customers do not trust them. Product design is not a luxury. It is the difference between a tool people tolerate and a product they choose.
Community infrastructure.
Founders need proximity to other founders. Not for networking in the transactional sense, but for the kind of quiet encouragement that keeps you going when the work is hard and the results are slow. An ecosystem without community is just a collection of individuals struggling in parallel.
The problem with counting startups
We have become very good at measuring the wrong things. How many startups were founded this year? How much venture capital flowed into the continent? How many demo days were held? How many accelerator cohorts graduated?
These numbers feel encouraging. But they are surface metrics. They tell you about activity, not about health.
The questions I am more interested in are harder to answer. How many of those startups are still operating two years later? How many founders had access to legal counsel before signing their first term sheet? How many had a mentor who actually built something, not just someone who gives advice professionally? How many had the financial runway to iterate on their product instead of launching too early out of desperation?
If we measured those things, the picture would look different. And our priorities would shift.
Building the ground, not the building
This is the work I have committed my career to. At Mountain Hub, we do not just accept startups into a program and wish them well. We act as co-founders. We sit in the room for the hard decisions. We provide the services that founders need but cannot afford in the early days: product development, financial planning, legal guidance, and connections to capital.
Through iknite studio , we bring product design and venture-building expertise to startups and corporations alike. Because a good idea without a well-designed product is just a conversation.
Through CITSCM, we create a space each year where the entire ecosystem can gather, share what is working, and hold each other accountable for what is not.
None of this is glamorous work. You will not see it on the cover of a magazine. Building infrastructure never makes headlines the way a fundraising announcement does. But it is the work that makes everything else possible.
A different kind of ambition
I am not interested in Africa producing more startups. I am interested in Africa producing more startups that survive. That grows. That employs people. That solves problems so well that they become essential to the communities they serve.
And for that to happen, we need to stop celebrating launches and start investing in foundations.
We need more people building the boring, essential, unglamorous systems that allow founders to focus on what they do best. We need capital networks that are patient. Incubation models that go deep, not wide. Design thinking is applied before the first line of code, not after. And communities that hold together when the excitement fades, and the real work begins.
Mountains are not built from the peak down. They are built from the bedrock up. And if the bedrock is not solid, nothing that stands on it will last.
That is what I am building. And I believe it is what Africa needs most right now.
By Ayuk Etta
