Episode's summary
On this episode of Admin Access, Dominic and Evans unpack the simple rules every business lives or dies by, guided by a book Evans has been reading, and bring back the question the Twiga episode left open: why do startups really fail?Evans makes his case, citing that behind the market forces and the funding stories, most businesses come down to how much they sell, how much they spend on what they need to make it, and how much it costs to keep the business running. The goal is to grow sales while keeping the other two as low as possible. He argues that investment complicates this, because money pays for making and running a business, while sales have to come from customers. Every raise becomes a bet that customers will show up in the numbers investors imagined, and a startup valued on sales it has yet to make starts the race already behind, with its costs growing faster than its demand. They get into why cutting costs looks like failure to the outside world even when a company is simply becoming more…
On this episode of Admin Access, Dominic and Evans unpack the simple rules every business lives or dies by, guided by a book Evans has been reading, and bring back the question the Twiga episode left open: why do startups really fail?Evans makes his case, citing that behind the market forces and the funding stories, most businesses come down to how much they sell, how much they spend on what they need to make it, and how much it costs to keep the business running. The goal is to grow sales while keeping the other two as low as possible. He argues that investment complicates this, because money pays for making and running a business, while sales have to come from customers. Every raise becomes a bet that customers will show up in the numbers investors imagined, and a startup valued on sales it has yet to make starts the race already behind, with its costs growing faster than its demand. They get into why cutting costs looks like failure to the outside world even when a company is simply becoming more…
Episodes
The Rules No Business Can Escape
ListenedOn this episode of Admin Access, Dominic and Evans unpack the simple rules every business lives or dies by, guided by a book Evans has been reading, and bring back the question the Twiga episode left open: why do startups really fail?Evans makes his case, citing that behind the market forces and the funding stories, most businesses come down to how much they sell, how much they spend on what they need to make it, and how much it costs to keep the business running. The goal is to grow sales while keeping the other two as low as possible. He argues that investment complicates this, because money pays for making and running a business, while sales have to come from customers. Every raise becomes a bet that customers will show up in the numbers investors imagined, and a startup valued on sales it has yet to make starts the race already behind, with its costs growing faster than its demand. They get into why cutting costs looks like failure to the outside world even when a company is simply becoming more…
The $16B Refinery: Who Really Takes The Risk?
ListenedOn this episode of Admin Access, Dominic and Evans unpack Aliko Dangote’s $16 billion refinery in Lamu, where ground was broken on 30 September with Kenya’s president and several regional leaders in attendance. Dominic separates it from Dangote’s IPO, which relates to the existing Lagos refinery, and frames the Lamu project around three questions nobody has fully answered: whose oil, whose money, and what is in the contract.Dominic walks through a refinery planned for 700,000 barrels a day, alongside a 1,000 megawatt power plant sending half its output to the Kenyan grid. Evans asks why Kenya and not Tanga, and the pair dig into the crude supply problem: Turkana’s projected output, far larger than the operator’s first-phase figure, the missing pipeline to Lamu, Uganda’s crude tied to the pipeline to Tanga, and a rival refinery plan on the Tanzanian coast. With Kenya using about 116,000 barrels a day and the wider region roughly 450,000, Dominic argues the refinery is built for a market much larger than the…
Uber vs Africa: The Problem With Scaling Fast
ListenedOn this episode of Admin Access, Dominic and Evans dig into Uber's exit from Nigeria and Uganda, and what it means for two assumptions that have long gone unchallenged in tech: blitzscaling and Africa as the next big market. Dominic argues Uber's downfall in its largest African market comes down to one thing, they never had a defensible moat. They didn't own the drivers, the cars or the customers, which meant they could only ever compete on cost, funding their way to scale rather than owning it outright.The duo unpack what actually makes a moat work, network effects for Meta, ecosystem lock in for Apple and Google, and why Uber's software layer was never enough on its own. That leads into a wider debate on whether blitzscaling is dead or simply was never bulletproof without something defensible underneath it.From there, the conversation turns to the "Africa is the next big market" assumption, using AI adoption as a litmus test. Evans makes the case that population size and smartphone access don't…
Disruptor or Middleman? The Business Model That Broke Twiga Foods
ListenedOn this episode of Admin Access, Dominic and Evans unpack the collapse of Twiga Foods, the Kenyan agritech that raised over $185 million before splitting into two companies and landing in administration. Dominic makes his case for the episode: Twiga didn't die when it went into administration, it was already dead long before, administration just made it official.The pair trace Twiga's arc from its 2014 founding by ex-Coca-Cola exec Peter Njonjo, built on cutting out the brokers between smallholder farmers and mama mbogas, through its pivot into non-perishables, its own trucking fleet and depots, and eventually buying a 650-hectare farm that undercut its original thesis. Evans makes the case that Twiga never really disrupted Marikiti-style informal markets, it just tried to out-compete them, subsidised by venture money rather than by fixing the underlying margins.They get into the mechanics of venture funding itself, why a plateau reads as decline, why growth has to compound year on year, and why…
The Acquisition Game: What Makes a Startup Worth Buying?
ListenedOn this episode of Admin Access, Dominic and Evans run through a rapid-fire "Skill or Luck," rating five different startup scenarios and taking their own verdict on each.They start with whether raising money is skill or luck, with both agreeing it's skill , surviving investor due diligence, where every backer probes something different, from product to finances to vision, takes a rigor that can't be faked, even scammers need it.The conversation moves into getting acquired by big tech, where both again land on skill. Evans argues that standing out enough to be bought, in a market flooded with copycats, means either being genuinely exceptional or genuinely threatening, while Dominic pushes it further with acqui-hires specifically, arguing that when a company buys the people and not the business, that's skill in its purest form.It carries into layoffs, where the mood shifts. Evans calls it luck, arguing that mass layoffs are rarely personal but a blunt instrument driven by shifting business priorities, while…