Wafula J. Bramwel

Does Hardship Make Better Founders? The Inverted U In May a builder in Nigeria posted a short list on X: bad internet, power problems, low trust, limited capital. People still build anyway, they wrote, and that mindset produces dangerous founders. I hear a version of this in Kampala most weeks, often as a reply to this series. Hard places make hard founders. Take the hardship away and you take away the edge. The question deserves a proper answer, because if it were true, every article in this series would be arguing against the thing that makes African founders good. So I went through the research on hardship, constraint and enterprise. The answer is partly, and only up to a point. The research also says roughly where the point is. The shape of the curve In 2019, Acar, Tarakci and van Knippenberg published a cross-disciplinary review in the Journal of Management on creativity and innovation under constraints. Their model "suggests an inverted U-shaped effect of constraints on creativity and innovation following motivational, cognitive, and social mechanisms." With no constraint at all, people drift. With some, they focus and invent. With too much, the work starves. A meta-analysis of 76 lab studies by Byron, Khazanchi and Nazarian, in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2010, adds a second axis. Mild evaluative pressure, the kind a deadline or a demanding reviewer creates, helped creative performance. Heavy pressure hurt it. And one kind of pressure only ever hurt: "We found a linearly negative relationship between uncontrollability and creativity such that more uncontrollability decreased creative performance." That sentence matters for this series. A founder who chooses a tight budget to force focus is somewhere on the rising side of the curve. A founder whose grid fails without notice is dealing with uncontrollable pressure, and the studies find no rising side for that at all. In the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, 79.9% of firms in Uganda experienced electrical outages, against 5.8% in Germany. Nobody in Kampala chose those outages to sharpen their thinking. What a disaster does to a CEO The strongest support for the pushback comes from American boardrooms. Bernile, Bhagwat and Rau, in the Journal of Finance in 2017, looked at the CEOs of US public firms and what each had lived through early in life. CEOs who had experienced a fatal disaster without its most extreme consequences went on to run firms that behaved more aggressively. CEOs who had witnessed the extreme downside ran their firms more conservatively. So moderate early hardship does seem to raise appetite for risk, and the worst hardship lowers it. Same inverted U, measured somewhere else. The study is about risk-taking, which is one ingredient of building a company among many, and it says nothing about whether those CEOs built better firms. Psychology adds a careful version of the same idea. Tedeschi and Calhoun's work on post-traumatic growth, in Psychological Inquiry in 2004, describes positive change that comes out of the struggle with a severe life crisis. Their account is specific: the growth comes from the struggle together with support and the slow work of making sense of it. It does not arrive on its own, and it is no argument that the crisis was good. I accept this much of the pushback. Some founders who come through hard years come out with a tolerance for risk and ambiguity that founders from easier places lack. A Nigerian founder posted in August that the best engineers they had worked with were African, because those engineers had spent their lives solving impossible problems with limited resources. The same post finished the thought: give them the resources everyone else takes for granted, and watch what they build. Born, or exposed Some of the drive is inherited. Nicolaou and colleagues, in Management Science in 2008, studied 870 identical and 857 same-sex fraternal twin pairs in the UK and found that 48% of the variance in becoming self-employed was genetic, with little effect from family environment and upbringing. That cuts against both sides of this argument. Hardship did not plant the drive, and the drive turns up in every population. Whether that talent becomes invention depends heavily on exposure and money. Bell, Chetty and colleagues linked 1.2 million US inventors to tax records and published the results in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2019. Children born to parents in the top 1% of the income distribution were ten times as likely to become inventors as children from below the median, and the gap held among children with the same math scores early in school. Moving from an area at the 25th percentile for innovation exposure to one at the 75th raised the odds of inventing by 37%. If invention rates were equalized, the authors estimate, the United States would have four times as many inventors. They call the missing ones lost Einsteins. Finland shows the same pattern in a rich welfare state. Aghion and colleagues, in a 2017 working paper, found that parental income still predicts who becomes an inventor after controlling for IQ, which they read as talent being misallocated. In two of the most developed economies in the world, growing up poor does not produce more inventors. It produces fewer, and the loss can be counted. Carry that to Kampala and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable. If exposure and family money decide this much in the United States and Finland, where schools, power and internet mostly work, I would expect them to decide more where those are missing. The talent is here in the same proportion as anywhere else. What is scarce is the number of rooms where a teenager meets someone who has built something, and the margin a family needs before it can let her try. Heat, smoke and scarcity The physical environment pushes the same way. Park and colleagues, in AEJ: Economic Policy in 2020, found that in US schools without air conditioning, a school year 1°F hotter reduced that year's learning by 1%. Somanathan and colleagues, in the Journal of Political Economy in 2021, found that annual output in Indian factories falls by about 2% for every degree Celsius. Zhang, Chen and Zhang, in PNAS in 2018, found that long-term exposure to air pollution in China lowered scores on verbal and math tests. And as I wrote in the last article, money worry itself takes a measurable bite out of thinking. None of these constraints sharpens anyone. In the heat studies the fix was mundane: air conditioning in the classroom, climate control on the factory floor. Take the constraint away and people get their capacity back. When the constraint went away If hardship were the source of African enterprise, the clearest test would be to remove a hardship and watch enterprise shrink. Economists have run versions of that test in Africa, and in each study enterprise grew. M-Pesa launched commercially in Kenya in March 2007. Suri and Jack, in Science in 2016, found that mobile money lifted 194,000 Kenyan households, 2% of the country's households, out of poverty, and moved women from farming into business. A payment rail removed a constraint, and women started businesses. Dinkelman, in the American Economic Review in 2011, studied a mass rollout of rural electricity in South Africa and found that household electrification raised women's employment within five years, by releasing them from home production and enabling microenterprises. Hjort and Poulsen, in the same journal in 2019, followed the arrival of fast internet in 12 African countries and found higher employment, with firm-level data showing more firm entry, productivity and exporting. I have read only the abstracts of these two papers, so I can give you the direction of each effect and not its size. Cole, Elliott, Occhiali and Strobl, in the Journal of Development Economics in 2018, put a size on power. Across 14 Sub-Saharan African countries, they estimate that cutting outages to South Africa's level would raise firm sales by 85.1%, and by 117.4% for firms without a generator. Akintola Steve (@Akintola_steve), a Lagos backend engineer and founder of AuditGate, wrote in May that building fintech in Nigeria is technically harder than building it in Silicon Valley, because "our infrastructure punishes every shortcut in ways Stripe's sandbox never will." The studies above take his point one step further. Punishment teaches caution, and founders who learn it become careful builders. Enterprise grows when the punishment stops. The founders we never meet There is one more reason the pushback feels true. We only meet the founders who survived. In the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor's 2012 survey, 26% of Ugandan adults had discontinued a business in the previous year, against 4% in the United States. Uganda's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives reported in 2024 that for every new business established, another closes within a year, and that only about 8% of small enterprises have been around for 15 years or more. The founders who reach a panel or a podcast come from that 8%. The others went back to a job, or to the farm, or to nothing, and nobody interviews them about resilience. Erik Hersman (@whiteafrican), the Nairobi co-founder of Gridless and founder of iHub and Ushahidi, put it in a post in May: "Small business in Kenya is playing on hard mode." The people who win on hard mode are very good. Hard mode also ends far more games. Another Nigerian founder wrote in July that for years they wore the struggle as a badge of honor, because that was the story the ecosystem celebrated, and that they now think differently because they have become more honest. Hardship selects more than it trains. It leaves a few tough survivors and a story about them that hides the cost. So here is my answer to the pushback. Yes, hardship makes some founders tougher, in the way the inverted U predicts: a little pressure they can control, survived with support, builds something real. The constraints in this series sit far down the other side of the curve, and nobody gets to control them. African founders are tough. They would also be more productive, and far more numerous, with a grid that stays on. I should be clear about the limits. None of these studies is about Uganda. The inverted U comes mostly from lab experiments and a review. The CEO study measures risk appetite and stops there. I have not found a meta-analysis on childhood adversity and adult entrepreneurship, and it is possible one would complicate this picture. If it did, I would change my view. I also cannot say how many of the Ugandans who closed a business closed it because of power, data or rules, since GEM's top recorded reason in 2012 was simply that the business was not profitable. If you are building through constraints you did not choose and want to work out which ones are sharpening you and which are only costing you, book a strategy call: cal.com/pirwot/strategy-call Which constraint in your business has made you better, and which one has only ever cost you? 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